FTL: Faster Than Light

• Hit as many systems in each sector as you can without risking your supply levels and hull - the scrap and items you get from doing so are what keep you ahead of the power curve.

• Upgrade your shields! The amount of survivability this confers is enormous and for the vanilla ship in particular, your starting weapons are quite good for a while.

• Look at your enemy's systems before you begin combat! Pause to do so if needed. If they have a teleporter, a cloaking system, a drone control etc., these are things you need to be aware of.

• Identify your enemy's drones, don't waste valuable missiles if they have a drone shooting them down. Mousing over a drone will tell you its function.

• Upgrade your sensors and doors. The sensor upgrade lets you see inside the enemy ship, while the doors upgrade forces boarders to attack closed doors while slowing down fire spread and oxygen loss through them.

• Check the map for merchants before spending your scrap on upgrades - You can see distress calls and merchants in every node you've ever been adjacent to. Try to hit merchants in a roundabout way so you have as much scrap as possible when you get there.

• Rejecting someone's surrender offer means fewer supplies but more raw scrap. If a losing enemy is offering a crew member, that's usually a good deal.

• Missiles are great for punching through enemy shields, but they're limited so don't waste them on small fry. On the flip side, keep enemy missile launchers disabled if at all possible.

• Wiping out an enemy crew tends to give better rewards than blowing them apart or accepting surrenders, but it takes a bit of preparation. You'll need to be able to board ships and win fights, set fleshy targets on fire, hit the crew with anti-bio weapons, or destroy their O2 generator and keep it broken long enough to suffocate them. Some ships, such as the final boss, can't be crew wiped.

• You can free up some power by turning off Medcenter when nobody needs to be healed.

• Open doors change oxygen levels faster than closed ones. Generally, keep an open flow from your O2 system to any part of your ship you want to have good air. If you're suffocating boarders try to keep them away from your oxygen system. Close doors on breaches if you're not currently fixing them. If you have to do repairs in a low oxygen area, close doors leading to other low oxygen areas and open doors leading to ones with better O2 levels.

• When you do get to the final boss fight, you'll need some means to avoid damage when it gets pissed off. If you have 3 or 4 shields, a powerful engine and competent pilot can help give you a good enough dodge rating to survive long enough to cripple its offense (assuming the RNG doesn't shit on you). But if you can get a stealth system, you can activate it just before a nasty volley hits and avoid it outright. Other than that, make it a top priority to destroy the nastier weapons systems.