FTL: Faster Than Light

General Advice

• Visit as many systems as your supplies and hull allow - the scrap and items from them keep you ahead of the power curve.

• Check the map for merchants before spending your scrap on upgrades, and visit them as late as you can to have as much available scrap as possible.

• Rejecting someone's surrender offer means fewer supplies but more raw scrap. Accepting a new crew member from a surrendering enemy is usually a good deal.

• 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.

Ship Management

• 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.

• 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 and slows down fire spread and oxygen loss through them.

• 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.

Winning Fights

• Look at your enemy's systems before you begin combat to see if they have a teleporter, a cloaking system, a drone control, etc.

• Missiles are great for punching through shields, but don't waste them on small fry. Keep enemy missile launchers disabled if at all possible.

• Mousing over a drone will tell you its function. Don't waste valuable missiles if an enemy has a drone shooting them down.

• When you do get to the final boss fight, you'll need some means to avoid damage. 3 or 4 shields, a powerful engine and a competent pilot may provide you with enough dodge rating to survive long enough to cripple its offense, but using a stealth system to avoid nasty volleys outright helps a lot. Other than that, prioritize destroing the more dangerous weapons systems first.