Let's Play FTL: Faster Than Light!

Welcome, friends, to my first Let's Play! It will be a tale of adventure, violence, and resource management in the dark reaches of space.

FTL is a "spaceship simulation real-time roguelike-like". You, or rather, I, play the disembodied consciousness of a spaceship traveling through dangerous regions of the universe in an attempt to deliver vital intel to the remnants of the leadership of the Federation, hopefully letting them rally and defeat the dastardly Rebels (yep, the Federation are our team and they're the underdogs). You jump between different "nodes" and deal with various situations, often resulting in ship-to-ship combat, in which you have to order your crew around, route energy to the right systems, and target your weaponry at key systems of the enemy's ship. It's fun, and tough!



First, I'll be playing though on Easy (read: normal) in the default ship, the Kestrel. If there's interest, I can do another run after that to show off other neat tricks, or Normal (read: hard) difficulty, or wacky alien ships.

Here's our ship:



The Kestrel is a nice "mario" ship, no real standout features but it's got the bases covered. It's got basic piloting, door control, life support, and internal sensors, a standard medbay, standard shield and maneuverability systems, and some good solid starter weapons: a three-shot laser and a shield-piercing missile.

It also has three human crewmembers. Humans are, as usual, the standard against which all other races are judged. They're all right if you don't have anything better suited to a particular job, but what you really want is a crew full of energy beings and space bugs. But okay, I'll work with what I've got. Crew members can operate certain systems and make them more effective, giving a boost to evasion or shield recharge rate or whatnot. To start with, I'll have one of these guys piloting the ship, one working the engines, and one calibrating the laser tubes.

That means I need names! We need names for:

• the ship
• the pilot
• the engine-fellow
• the gunner

So get to work!

Also: this game has a great soundtrack! I'll be posting links as I go along, but the whole thing is available on bandcamp.

As this is my first LP, please do let me know if I'm screwing anything up, or using the wrong image format, or whatever, or even if you just have some pointers. Thanks!

I'll be going over the ship's functions in more detail when the mission is underway, but let me know if you want me to explain anything in particular.

I'm really looking forward to this, Talking Tim! Let us go forth in a bold manner!

Whoot! I'm looking forward to the hilarity that is the hallmark of all roguelikes.

As for the names, let's call the ship "Red Dwarf", and the pilot can be Cat, the engine room guy Lister, and the gunner Rimmer. Kryten didn't come along until the third season anyway, so we have a name ready if we get a biomechanoid crewmember later on.

How do we not have a member named Talking Tim? That's a no-brainer. I vote Heart of Gold for the ship and Zaphod, Trillian, Ford, etc for crew, don't really care who does what.

Space bugs are nice, but I'd take a friend-Borg over an energy man any day of the week.

I support Hitchhiker's Guide to FTL.

Thanks! I expect there'll be enough horrible tragedies to satisfy you.

I'm afraid that we can't rename new crewmembers. Federation regulations say I can make people stay at their post in hard vacuum, but I have to call them whatever name they give me.

Frankly, I'm disappointed.

I got nothing against friendborgs, and I prefer them to humans, I just tend to have more use for extra energy than quick repairs.

Hitchhiker's is fine by me.

Got a Python interpreter handy?

Sounds good!

Sweet, thanks! Looks like we'll be using space-wizardry to bypass the naming problem.

Let's meet our crew, then.


This is the Kestrel Heart of Gold, a Federation ship on a mission of deadly import. Zaphod the single-headed human is our pilot, Trillian the human will be working the engines, and Ford the human will be in charge of weaponry.

Let me give you the tour. See those icons below our floorplan? Those are the systems and subsystems we have installed to start with. Each one occupies one room of the ship, and has green bars indicating what level it'll start at. Below that, we have panels for our crew, our weapons, our drones SYSTEM NOT INSTALLED, and our augmentations. We don't have any of those either, they're passive bonuses to the ship that can be really handy. Some ships start with special augmentations - the slug Vogon ship, for example, gets a slimy coating that automatically repairs hull breaches.

Back to those systems. The ship's reactor has a finite amount of energy, which you can redirect on the fly to the various systems. The green bars indicate how much energy the system can use - an upgraded but partially powered system acts like a lower-level system. "Subsystems" are like systems that don't need energy.

As you can see, each one has a place on the ship, which means that they can take damage if that part of the ship is hit. Additionally, you can have crewmembers work at certain systems by placing them in the appropriate room, which grants you a tidy little bonus. Let's check out what the Heart of Gold can do:

Piloting - This subsystem allows the ship to charge its FTL drive to jump between nodes, execute FTL jumps, and evade enemy weaponry. At this level it does nothing unless crewed, but later upgrades can allow you to use part of your evasion when your pilot's in the can. Pilots also give a bonus to evasion based on their personal skills. Zaphod has no training, but he can give us a 5% evasion bonus.

Doors - This extremely important uncrewed subsystem allow you to open and close the ship's doors, individually or all at once. Upgrades make the doors more difficult for fires and hostile aliens to pass through. Federation captains spend a whole year training on proper door use.

Sensors - Another uncrewed subsystem, this one lets us see all the rooms of our ship. Without it, we can only see rooms where we have a crewmember. Upgrades let us peek on other ships' shower submodules.

Medbay - The first proper system, as in, it won't work without power. When it's on, any of our crewmembers in it regenerates health quickly. We'll be leaving it off most of the time, but we wouldn't want to go on a mission like this without one! Any ship without one would surely be scrapped in the planning stages, seriously.

Oxygen - This system ensures that the ship is full of breathable airs instead of deadly vacuum. As such, it's usually wise to keep it running most of the time.

Shields - Ah, shields. A crucial part of the Heart of Gold's defensive suite. This system surrounds our ship with one regenerating space-barrier for each two levels of space-power it has. Some space-weapons can bypass it, though. Placing a crewmember here lets shields regenerate faster, which isn't usually all that helpful. Rumors abound of a "super-shield", but most disregard such talk as pie-in-the-sky frippery.

Engines - Infinite improbability, yadda yadda. The better your engines, the higher your baseline evasion and the faster your FTL drive recharges. At this level we have 10% evasion, which isn't great, but the untrained Trillian boosts that by 5%. Along with Zaphod's bonus, we've got nothing to worry about!

Weapons - This system lets you equip different weapons, limited by the system's level. Currently, we've got a 2-energy burst laser and a 1-energy missile, so we can equip both. Missiles can be dodged, but bypass all shields. Lasers are blocked by shields, but they disable a single shield each, regardless of the laser's power level. Early on, that means we could blast through low-level shields and still damage enemy ships with our triple laser, but with our missiles we can deliver a brutal one-two punch - a missile takes out the enemy shield system, which lets all the lasers hit the weapon system, leaving them helpless. Ford will be crewing this system, which'll make weapons charge up a little more quickly.

But really, weapons are for chumps. It's all about [REDACTED] and doors.

That's all for now, but I should be able to report on the first sector tomorrow.

You are truly a connoisseur of spacefaring nonsense.

Door upgrade is always the first thing I go for. Teleporters are sweet, but I invariably always fuck up and accidentally kill my bros.

Or when you've finally assembled a competent boarding party and teleport them over to the enemy ship. But then the enemy flees and takes your boarders with them leaving you unfit for your next battle.

Kalir knows what's up.

For some reason, enemy ships NEVER remotely open or close doors, and this is a HUGE advantage for the player.

I usually wait until I'm hitting spacebugs or mineral beings, but if I'm using a borg ship, definitely.

This always sucks. Did this in sector 7 once. Probably will do something even more stupid in this run, keep your fingers crossed!

Anyway, let's get started!

SECTOR 1 - MILKY WAY



- MilkyWay (Explore) -

With this brief briefing, our mission is underway in Sector 1. Note the helpful tip about solar flares. Certain nodes have hazards like that due to poor planning on the part of the civil engineers who placed the jump beacons. Suns are (usually) the worst, and hopefully we won't see many of them.



Here's what we look like, starting out. We've got an undamaged hull, 16 fuel, 8 missiles, 0 drones SYSTEM NOT INSTALLED, and 30 scrap (GP). Zaphod is already tapping away at the piloting console, while Trillian and Ford stand around awkwardly. Energy is being wasted on the medbay, the engines are at half power, and the weapons are all offline. Let's do some housekeeping.



Much better! Everyone is doing something useful, weapons are charging (though they'll have to start charging again at every new node), and we've bumped our evasion up to 20%. Feeling good about this. Time for the first FTL jump.



Here's the sector map. When our FTL drive is charged, it lets us jump from one node to another one nearby. We deal with stuff at the new node, hopefully gaining useful resources, then jump again, 'til we get to the EXIT node, where we can jump to the next sector. Meanwhile, every time we jump, the Vile Rebels encroach ever further, and we DON'T want to end up on a rebel-controlled node. So we've got to do as much exploring as we can before they get to the EXIT node. Got it?

That nebula in the bottom left looks inviting! Nebulas are very useful - the Rebels can only cover about half as much ground as usual if you're jumping from a nebula-filled node, which gives you more time to visit more nodes and collect more resources. They also have their own environmental hazards - all nebulas block sensors, so most rooms of your ship will go dark, and some nebulas also have ion storms, which halve the energy in your reactor. Ion storms can be tough to deal with early on, but enemy ships have to contend with them too, and at least you're not going to run into an asteroid belt or sun while hiding in a nebula.

Seriously, suns are the worst.



- MilkyWay (Battle) -


Okay, okay, let's not panic. Gotta keep the LP going.

All right, so we've jumped to a beacon with a sun. We had no warning, 'cause the Federation wouldn't shell out for fancy long-range sensors. Secretly this is because they're using them on their mysterious prototype ship, but I don't know that, you don't know that, and of course our highly flammable crew doesn't know that, so forget about it.

The way suns work is this: every so often, there'll be a flare, and part of the ship catches fire. Fires can burn crewmembers, damage the ship, and break systems. That's bad enough on its own, but we're fighting a stupid enemy ship at the same time. It's not going to be pleasant.

Speaking of which, check out the enemy ship on the right side there. This is pretty typical of the info we'll have on whatever we're fighting. We can see its hull strength, shield level, affiliation, and general system status. We can see where specific systems are in the ship, door status - important! - and what weapons are attached (kinda).

This enemy is a little unusual. Notice it has no life support system and no door system (!!). That's 'cause this is an AI ship, with no frail, meaty crew to hold it back. AI ships can repair their systems automatically, typically have high evasion, and feel no emotions.



Shields go up, weapons go out, the fight begins. This is how we'll be doing most of our fighting for now: we target our weapons at specific rooms on the enemy ship, then they fire when they're charged. Hits damage the hull as well as whatever system's in the room. We want to disable various systems to help with defense and offense, and we win once we reduce their hull to zero.



Here's the one-two punch I mentioned earlier - our Artemis missile bypasses their shields, and can damage the shield system itself, disabling them in time for our Burst Laser II to hit their weapon system with all three shots. Then, we can finish them off with the laser. Of course, missile weapons use up a missile from our finite stock for each shot, so we don't want to be overly reliant on them (this is why all properly designed ships have some alternative to missiles). With less time pressure, we can just blast through shields with the burst laser, but I don't want to chance it when dealing with a high-evasion enemy and solar flares.

Oh, also, you'll notice I'm paused a lot in these screenshots. That's true to life, the pause button is one of your best friends in FTL - you can give as many commands as you like when paused, which can really help in tight situations.



Almost forgot. Here's one of the nice things remote door control can do: I'm venting most of the ship's oxygen into space, except for where crewmembers are working, which will smother any fires that get started. Clearly the most efficient fire suppressant system available in the future.



Then, both of us shoot, and a solar flare starts a fire on my ship somewhere. I can't tell where, because the AI blasted away my shield with its laser, then screwed up my shield and sensor systems with its beam. Beam weapons are pretty cool - they can't miss, damage multiple rooms, and can sometimes partially pierce shields. Meanwhile, my plan worked perfectly, and the AI ship is a sitting duck with no shields and no weapons. I still can't dawdle, because the sun is still shining and the enemy can auto-repair, but a single volley of the burst laser should take it out if I don't miss. I won't fire the missile, but I'll let it charge in case one of the lasers does miss. I'll aim at the piloting system, because if I hit that then it won't be able to evade. So if my first shot hits, then I'm home free.







BOOYAH

Take that, you soulless machine! Go crying to your pathetic silicon gods!



I get a little scrap, some fuel, and a drone, but I'm not out of the proverbial fire yet. Normally, your FTL drive charges fully once you're out of combat, but I'm still dealing with the sun, so we've gotta wait. Notice in the bottom right corner we can see that the sensor and door systems are on fire. There shouldn't be any oxygen left there, so they should go out soon, but if the door system breaks our techies will have to repair it without air. So let's hope it doesn't break.



I manage to jump just before another flare. We've made it into the nebula, but we're in poor shape. Also I think those rooms south of Engines and Weaponry are on fire. We really should lay low, repair the ship, and heal.

SECTOR 1 - MILKY WAY



Then again, you only live once! Let's go searching blindly through the space-gas!



Oh good.

We still don't have any shields, these guys'll do a number on us unless we take charge of the situation quickly.



We exchange fire. They do some damage and take out our laser temporarily, and our missile misses, but the burst laser disables their weapons before going offline itself.



The weapons system can still support two power worth of weapons, so I switch back to the burst laser while Ford works on getting the system back to full strength.



They try to repair, but I have enough firepower to take out more systems and keeping the weapons system down...



...even while dealing with that fire that's still going on.



Sure enough, the fight is won.



I get some more scrap and resources, then retreat to this closet to vent the rest of the ship. Crewmembers can put out fires, but this is much more effective.



Eventually, the fires die down, I shut the doors, wait for a little oxygen to return, and start sending crew in to repair stuff. That pink tinge means oxygen is low, but above minimum Federation workplace regulation suggested levels.



Then Trillian and Ford take a breather in the medbay to heal their horrible burn wounds.



While the ship is replenishing its oxygen, let's take another look at our crew. Each crewmember has six different skills, and can level them up by using them. The first four are related to the crew-able ship systems - Ford, being fairly green, only gives a 10% charge speed boost to the weapon system. He's gained some experience with it, and eventually will level up and grant a better bonus when working at that station. Crew also have repair and fighting skills, and if they do enough repairing or hand-to-hand fighting they'll gain bonuses to their repair speed or damage.

Of course, this is the future, and we have trillions of dollars worth of high-tech equipment for murdering people at a distance. No one in their right mind would bother with anything so barbaric as punching each other to death.



Let's keep exploring this nebula!



Another AI ship.



This one has a basic laser and an ion weapon. Ion weapons do "ion damage", which temporarily partially or fully disables systems. It can disable the shield system just by hitting a shield, so...



... they manage to hit our medbay before we cripple them. No matter, this should be over soon.



PCHEWWW



I missed the first few of these, but this is typically what you'll see after destroying a ship.



We repair the medbay...



...then continue exploring the nebula. Still no sign of the Rebel fleet!

Enough of your snark, narrator. Mantis can be tough, but they focus on a tactic that isn't available to this particular ship, so we shouldn't have too much trouble.



Our usual tactic works well, though a missile gets past us and takes out our sensors. Boo hoo.



These are my hunting grounds.





One more node in the nebula. We can see the leading edge of the Rebel territory now. Anything in the "warning" region will be Rebel-controlled after the jump. Rebel-controlled sectors have tough fights with terrible rewards, so we definitely want to avoid them.



Ooh, spooky! Shall we inspect the haunted, storm-blasted wreckage?



... nah.

Honestly, some of these events just aren't worth it. You can lose a crewmember at random, and I'd rather not chance it right now.







A couple twists here. First, this ship is still trying to kill us, but it's also trying to jump away. That works pretty much as it does for us - and specifically, it'll charge slower or not at all if I damage the piloting or engine systems. Usually it's faster to take out piloting.

The other twist is that this ship has a drone system. This means it can launch autonomous robots that do any of a number of different things - shoot down incoming missiles, repair damaged systems, whatever. This one has a beam drone, that periodically fires a weak beam weapon at our ship. Luckily, my shield will stop that beam entirely, and they only have a one-shot laser, so if I take out weapons OR drones, they won't be able to hurt us.



Whoops. That ion storm earlier drained our reactor power, and it looks like I forgot to put life support back on. Sorry guys!



I focus on piloting and weapons, but they manage to get a shot in. The shields are down long enough for the beam drone to hit and start a fire. "Thanks, doors!" TM



PCHAWWW



If they had gotten away, the Rebel fleet would have advanced a lot on our next jump, but they didn't, so they won't.





This node's pretty quiet, just a discount gas station. I pick some up, I shouldn't have to worry about fuel for quite a while now.





This node's just empty. These aren't great nodes, but they'd be good spots to repair or put out fires or whatever.

We got off to a bit of a rough start, but I think we're doing okay now. See what I mean about suns, though? They damage your ship, crew, and systems mid-battle, and all you can do is jump away, which usually plunges you into another battle while your ship's still on fire. Hopefully we won't see any more for a while.

The timing's really tricky, but it's possible to get around the Basic Laser hit. If you manually disable your shielding and power it back up at the right time, you can let the Ion Blast shot through while still catching the Basic Laser with your shield. This tactic is especially good against ships with attack drones, where getting your shields ioned is almost as bad as playing a Stealth ship.

Be careful trying this against ships with the Ion Blast/Heavy Laser I combo, though. Though the Ion Blast charges faster the Heavy Laser shot travels quicker, and will hit your shield first in the initial volley.

That's a common and profitable enough event that I usually like to upgrade piloting before doing nebula exploration, so I can get the blue option.

Neat! I'll have to try that out.

I love nebulas, but I rarely upgrade piloting, I am probably a bad person and should do that.

This is so dangerous if you expose the door controls to hard vacuum when you do it! It the door control had taken a hit you may have ended up either loosing right here, or needing to sacrifice a crew member or two on a suscide mission to repair them. Doubly so if the med bay is also open to space.

True, it could be a pretty sucky situation. I'd think three humans could repair a system without dying, though (as in, swap in the third while the first two go for air, if necessary).

So here we are, fighting a suicidal mantis ship in the light of a flaring sun.



I manage to disable them without much fuss, then they hail me in the middle of a volley of laser fire, offering to surrender.

All right, to the death then. I think the drive may charge slightly faster without enemies around? In any case they won't last long.



See?

Also I had a shield-room fire and vented the ship again, 'cause I'm a loose cannon captain on the edge with nothing to lose.







I jump JUST before another solar flare... but it catches me anyway.

I don't feel like fighting a slave trader with some mystery fires on my ship, so I buy a mystery slave box. Out pops O. Williams Arthur Dent, the mantis! I "free him to join my crew". He's perfectly free to refuse, of course. Door's right over there.



Mantis are one of the two top-tier species in physical combat. They suck at repairing things, but they move quickly and deal tons of damage. For now, I'll stick him in the shield room.



A space-wizard helps out by destroying Williams's mind and imprinting an alternate personality onto him. He's now Arthur.





I jump to a distress beacon. Someone's calling for help, which could mean any number of things.



Sure, why not! There isn't any downside to saying I'll help.



And I get a little reward just for claiming to be a good samaritan. I may or may not actually help them out, depending.

As an aside, whichever "next sector" we end up going to happens to contain their destination. Convenient!

Nothing else is going on here, so...





Cool, a store! Sometimes they have junk, but some stuff is incredibly helpful and can only be found in stores.



Nothing mind-blowing, but some cool weapons:



My current laser is the Burst Laser Mark II. The III is pretty cool, but I could shoot 6 lasers in 12 seconds with a pair of Mark IIs. The Small Bomb is really useful, it bypasses shields and defense drones and disables systems without damaging hulls, so that [REDACTED].

Ultimately I decide to pick up a second Mark II, though the Small Bomb is tempting. Six lasers can bust through shields and wipe out whatever system I aim them at, so I'm pretty much set for weaponry for now. I'll get some Bombs at a later point. I mostly need them for secret reasons.

Some pleasant color, but it comes down to fighting another mantis. Now, uh, I don't actually have a weapon system strong enough to use all those lasers yet, so I'm sticking with the old plan for now.







And that goes fine!

Now, about that weapon system...



Here's the upgrade screen. Most of our scrap will be going towards improving our various systems. We can get more shields, higher evasion / FTL recharge, quicker oxygen replenishment, more weapon energy, a stronger medbay, autopilot, sensors to peep on enemy ships, stronger doors, or more reactor energy to power that stuff.

The key priorities early on are shields and engines to avoid damage, as well as stronger doors. A second layer of shields is pretty cheap and can neutralize a whole swath of early threats, while higher evasion helps mitigate a wider variety of weapons without making you outright immune to anything. Better doors are good for penning in fires and enemy combatants, plus, upgraded doors lets you take a hit without losing remote door control, which as we have heard can be devastating.

Of course, you usually want to keep some cash on hand so you can buy key upgrades in stores if the opportunity arises. There isn't time to dawdle around, revisiting old beacons!

I'm not getting any of that stuff, just adding an extra rank to weapons so I can equip both lasers. I can't afford to upgrade the reactor, so I'll steal the energy from life support. Battles shouldn't last long enough for it to be an issue. I'll probably concentrate on all that other defensive stuff for a while now, though, the weapons system will be fine at level 4 for ages.







Finally, we hop to the exit beacon! It'll let us do a long-range jump to a completely different sector, taking us one step closer to our end goal.

But first...



Of course I'm going to investigate!



Brightly colored, horse-like animals?


??

Well, yes, in fact! Anyone who pledged $500 or more to the kickstarter for FTL got to request a custom event. One made a station beset by space plague, one made a tense moral choice involving a distraught fugitive. And one, as you can see, made a planet of My Little Ponies. In the game's data files, the event is actually called "DONOR_PONY".

As much as it might sound like a good idea to steal some ponies to sell on the black market, it really, really isn't.

Let's try to communicate with them.



...huh.



Okay then.





Well, that's all of Sector 1. We can go two ways from here - a Mantis Controlled Sector, full of hostile space bugs, or an Uncharted Nebula, with plenty of creepy space gas. The Mantis Controlled Sector will have slightly more hostile ships, the Uncharted Nebula will give us more time to screw around, though nebulas in Nebula Sectors are less effective than normal at slowing the Rebel fleet.

Okay, Tim, which is it? Mantis, or Nebula?

In a normal playthrough I'd say the Nebula, but frankly those are usually full of empty nothing which is NOT QUALITY LP MATERIAL

Thus, go to Mantis space and get your doors upgraded as soon as possible.

Nebula!

Nothing mind-blowing? It's the return of O.Williams!

This is going in my willcoon FTL fan fiction for sure

I like nebulas. Not really clear what all that business about "the impending rebel fleet" is about, but hey! Nebulas rock!

It's almost always better to go with the second option. Perhaps the fires would have caused too many problems, but with slaver ships you almost always get a surrender option that gives you a free crew member without the scrap cost (except for any extra repairs, of course).

Mantis!

Truly, a fate worst than death.

Go to the mantis galaxy and upgrade your doors and introduce them to the wonders of hard vacuum and find a pony wait you already did that.

!!! He's some sort of shambling automaton now! This is a mystery that can only be solved in eagerly awaited fanfiction

Yeah, I probably made the wrong call on this one in the heat of the moment. For reasons I remembered this as an event where you'd think they'd do that, but they just go silently to their graves.

That's three for Mantis and two for Nebula so far. It's a divisive issue, but piecemeal majority vote is always the best way to navigate through the hostile depths of space.

If I end up in a nebula this playthrough I can just add lots of existential dread, it'll be fine

I'm sure there are plenty of pony mods out there already if your SPACE PONY LUST is not yet slaked.

only a WEAK or sensible captain would avoid MANTIS SPACE