Overview
This guide covers the preparation and strategies to successfully board and capture a Quarg Skylark in Endless Sky. (Vanilla game, no mods.)
Preparation
So, you want a Quarg ship of your very own, do you?
It’s not a quest for the faint of heart.
In fact, it’s possibly the most difficult achievement in Endless Sky (as of 0.9.2).
You’ll need to prepare the perfect boarding ship, and even then, it may take hours of attempts to get lucky and board a Skylark you stand a chance of capturing… and even then, it’s a small chance.
But if you’re dedicated enough, you can have a Quarg ship to call your own.
First, to prepare your boarding ship!
There’s only one candidate: the Bactrian. With the highest crew complement available on any obtainable ship, plus oodles of cargo space that can be converted into extra bunks, the Bactrian is the only ship that can carry enough crew to successfully assault a Quarg vessel.
Even then, you’re going to have to make sacrifices. You need as many crew as you can manage to fit on your ship, which means there’s no room for conveniences like shield generators, weapons, or anything but the smallest engines.
For weapons, you need Nerve Gas. There’s no other option that will give you enough attack power to succeed. And remember, you need one for each crew member: extras do you no good without a man able to use it.
Here’s the Bactrian build I used. You’ll note there’s no Hyperdrive or Jump Drive: I sold it to make a tiny bit more room for engines! After all, you can’t board a ship if you can never reach it.
Yes, that means I had to hunt Quarg in a system with a planet that has an outfitter: I choose Greenwater, in the southeast of Hai space. Quarg come there regularly to trade from their ringworld to the south (Hevru Hai), and so are a regular feature of encounters in this system.
Importantly, they are also somewhat infrequent: making it less likely that more reinforcements will join the battle while you’re disabling your prey.
Of course, you also need a fleet of sufficient strength to disable the Quarg in the first place. By this point, I had already captured a strong fleet of Kor Sestor automaton warships, with five Kar Ik Vot 349’s, four of their second largest warship, the Tek Far 78 – Osk, and the Pug’s tier 3 unique ship, the Arfecta.
For good measure, I grabbed twenty Lightning Bugs from Greenwater’s shipyard: they mostly just helped distract the quarg and pelt them with ion cannon fire.
There’s many successful strategies for fighting quarg, and if you’re at the point that you want to try and capture one, you’re probably well capable of disabling them already!
So, now that you have your ship prepared, crammed full of soldiers ready to die at your command, and are poised to stalk your prey… it gets tedious.
Stalking your Prey
You’ll need to prepare your ambush.
If you’ve followed what I outlined in the first section of this guide, you’re now on Greenwater, the Hai world just north of a Quarg ringworld.
This is key: Greenwater is a friendly world that you’ll be able to land on after capturing a Quarg vessel, and since it contains an outfitter, allows you to trade out your Bactrian’s hyperdrive or Jump Drive for a little more engine power.
When you depart Greenwater, a fleet may spawn in the surrounding local space. Here, this could be human merchants, Hai, or Quarg.
Of course, you’re here for the Quarg.
Unfortunately, you can’t capture a Wardragon (the smaller, gold Quarg ship). Despite the small size, the Wardragon is better able to repel boarders: it has a larger minimum crew complement, and more defensive weaponry.
You’re here for the Skylark.
Of course, not just any Skylark will do: Most of them actually have too many crew to be possible to capture, even with the amount of soldiers on your Bactrian.
Quarg ships have powerful “Intrusion Countermeasures”, a hand to hand weapon that adds 80 defense each. Skylarks carry 120 of them.
You didn’t think it’d be easy, did you?
Here’s what this means:
You’ll need to leave the planet to see if a Skylark is around. If it isn’t, the fastest way to look for another is to reload your last save and try again. (You can do this quickly by pressing Esc, L, and then L again.)
Then, you target the Skylark and order your fleet to take it out. You’ll need to be quick, though: they like to try and escape. If too many are getting away, you may wish to go get additional reinforcements before you try again.
Then, you’ll need to board it: this is one of the hardest parts, as your Bactrian is all but defenseless, and will limp along at a slow pace. Sometimes, additional Quarg will jump in on top of you and destroy you in seconds.
There’s not much you can do about that, except to try again.
Eventually, you’ll board a Skylark, and that’s when you need to hope that you’re lucky.
A Quarg Skylark can have a complement of crew numbering anywhere from the very low 120’s to 210.
If it’s much above 130… the game will estimate you have a 0% chance of success. It may still be possible, but would require some pretty incredible luck.
So you’re looking for that 1 in 10 Quarg ship with under 130 crew. The lower it is, the significantly easier it will be for you to capture it.
Just keep trying. Hunt down more Quarg. Don’t give up
Eventually, you’ll get lucky, and find a target that looks like this:
There’s hope. It’s possible. It’s just going to take a lot of effort, and a lot of luck.
Stealing Your Prize
Eventually, you’re going to get lucky. That minute chance of success (anywhere from 0.2% to a little over 10%, depending on how small the crew complement on your target is) will be there, taunting you.
But then you’ll press the button and attack.
Luck won’t be with you. Your chance of success will plummet to 0.0%
You load your save, hunt for another Skylark, and board it. And again.
And again.
And again.
Eventually, you press that attack button, and that minute chance of success… goes up.
You were lucky in your first attack.
That’s the key.
Because the Skylark has 120 Intrusion Countermeasures, and slightly over 120 crewmembers, only 120 of their crew benefits from the defense multiplier provided by the countermeasures: which means that the first few losses (above 120) will hardly make a dent in their defense.
But if you get a lucky first hit in, and drop them by 20 or more crew, you’ll knock them well under the 120 mark, and suddenly, your chances go up.
After a few lucky attacks, your chances look more like this.
And then, this.
Congratulations. The Skylark is yours… almost.
You still need to escape with it. And since your Bactrian has no hyperdrive, that means you need to limp to Greenwater and land.
Press “G” to have your fleet swarm around you. If another Quarg warps in, they may block its’ attacks.
Hopefully that won’t prove to be necessary.
If all’s gone well, you now have one of the most impressive prize ships that the galaxy has ever seen.
Use it well, captain!
