FTL Ship Analysis: Crystal Cruisers

The Crystal Cruisers are the first set of ships that cannot be unlocked via the central chain of 'win with this ship to unlock another ship that will unlock another ship when it wins and so on'. Their equivalent to this is instead beating the game with the A and B layouts of every other ship, aside the Lanius Cruisers. (Because they didn't exist prior to advanced edition, while the Crystal Cruisers did exist already) This... is a pretty tall order given how un-viable some of these ships are.

Their alternative unlock is possibly more realistic to do, honestly, which is depressing given that it's the single worst quest in the game. To unlock the Crystal Cruiser A, you have to find the Hidden Crystal Worlds, and then you have to go to a Quest-marked beacon. At that point, you unlock it. Sounds simple, right?

Ha. Ha ha.

I wish.

The intended process, and the only way to do it without advanced edition content, is that first you find a Stasis Pod Augment from an event. This can only happen in a portion of all Sectors: Pirate-controlled Sectors, Engi Sectors, and Rock Sectors. Furthermore, when the event happens? If you don't have Rock Plating then 2/3rds of the time the event will just do damage to you and not give you the Stasis Pod. 

The second step is to get a specific event involving Zoltan scientists while you're still lugging around the Stasis Pod. This event can only occur in Engi and Zoltan Sectors, though there's no additional RNG screwery involved. Said event will let you cash in the Stasis Pod, giving you a Crystal crewmember with a specific name and triggering a Quest beacon...

... in step three, which can only occur in a Rock Homeworld Sector. Not a Rock Controlled Sector. Homeworld in specific. Also, if your Crystal crewmember dies before you get to the Quest marker? Sorry, you can't actually go to the Hidden Crystal Worlds.

So first of all, you need a fairly specific chain of Sectors to have any possibility of this happening. It is possible to get it in just two Sectors by having an Engi Sector that gives you the Stasis Pod and then you run into the Zoltan scientists in that same Sector, but much more likely is that you'll need a Rock, Engi, or Pirate Sector occurring before a Zoltan Sector that is, itself, occurring before a Rock Homeworld Sector.

Now, the game does ensure that Homeworld Sectors can't show up early. You'll never run into the Rock Homeworld as your second Sector, find step three's spot, and scream when you then find the Stasis Chamber and Zoltan scientists in the following Sectors. I mean, you can have that exact chain of events happen, it just can't start in Sector 2, but this is slightly biased in your favor.

However, the game doesn't let you see Sectors ahead of time. Sectors just get broadly divided into green, red, or purple as far as your overall map. Knowing all these quest requirements tells you that purple Sectors are useless, the second step will always require a green Sector, and the third step will always require a red Sector, but that's not very helpful. The first step can be either color, and while a green Sector is usually going to be Engi or Zoltan, it can also just be a generic 'civilian' Sector. Red is even less helpful, since it can be Rock Controlled, Mantis of either kind, a Rebel Sector, or even Abandoned if you have advanced edition content on, and all of those will be useless for the third step.

Furthermore, the 'Homeworlds come late' thing is the only thing resembling a sanity check. The game is perfectly happy to organize Sectors in basically any way outside of that and the other rules of 'Sector 1 is always a special Civilian Sector while Sector 8 is always The Last Stand'.

In fact, in spite of what you might intuitively expect, the game is perfectly willing to not even generate a given Homeworld Sector. You can absolutely get a run where there was no Rock Homeworld, you never had a chance of hitting the Hidden Crystal Worlds, and you have absolutely no way of knowing this unless things happen to line up so you see every red Sector and so realize when you get to the final red Sector(s) that none of them were the Rock Homeworld Sector. Oh, was that entire run dedicated to trying to unlock the Hidden Crystal Worlds? Too bad! You're not getting that hour or two of your life back!

And of course it's always possible you'll actually manage to reach the Hidden Crystal Worlds and then die before you reach the Quest beacon. Because why not add an extra layer of RNG nonsense, I guess.

I'm all for this kind of optional challenge run thing in roguelike-y games. I quite like Spelunky's base optional quest, for example. But the Hidden Crystal Worlds quest is A: atrocious and B: too mandatory given it's meant to be the primary way you unlock the Crystal Cruisers and is also an Achievement one should endeavor to do in hopes of unlocking the Rock Cruiser B. I've seen more egregiously-designed challenge run things in terms of 'pray the RNG cooperates', but every such case I've seen also made the payoff pretty much purely bragging rights; FTL having substantial content behind this roulette is gratuitously obnoxious.

Advanced edition makes this slightly less horrible. The Rock Cruiser C comes with a Crystal crewmember, and while having a Crystal crewmember won't mark the beacon that can take you to the Hidden Crystal Worlds with a Quest marker, it will let you go there if you happen to stumble upon the event anyway. That substantially reduces the RNG, letting you focus on simply maximizing your red Sectors and always going to the Rock Homeworld if possible and then scouring its Beacons, avoiding Stores and distress Beacons to maximize your odds. You'll still probably take several runs to finally have it happen as, again, the Rock Homeworld isn't even guaranteed to generate and even if you arrive there's no guarantee the event is in the Sector and even if it is in the Sector you can always fail to find it, but it's more on the order of 'a dozen or two dozen runs', not 'literally hundreds of runs'.

Though frankly if there are players who just hacked their game to unlock the Crystal Cruiser A, I completely understand. This is breathtakingly awful design that should never have seen the light of day, and it deserves no respect.

Rubbing salt in the wound is the fact that the devs clearly think of the Hidden Crystal Worlds as a fabulous reward, with super-cheap weapons that superficially look better than more expensive equivalents sitting in the Stores, and in actuality they're mostly pretty bad, as I've covered before. Crystal crewmembers are pretty mediocre too, for that matter...

Also note that even with advanced edition the alternate unlock of 'win with a bunch of ships' is still very specifically 'win with the A and B variants'. It's not 'win with 16 different ships'. As ship quality is wildly uneven, this is a pretty frustrating extra screw-you, forcing you to achieve victory with ships that are designed to die dozens of times in the first Sector. If you could use Lanius and C variant ships to fulfill the requirement, unlocking the Crystal Cruisers via ship victories would be rough, but not too awful. As-is, it's probably faster and less painful to fish for the Hidden Crystal Worlds with the Rock Cruiser C than to win with every relevant A and B variant.

As for what you get out of this monumental investment of time...

Crystal Cruiser A: Bravais





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Crystal Burst I+Heavy Crystal I

Maximum of 4 weapons, 2 different Drones.

Starts with the Crystal Vengeance Augment.

Room total: 19

The Crystal Cruiser A actually has one of the smoother starts in the game, but in exchange requires a fair amount of strategic luck to not be doomed to failure.

For the first couple of Sectors, virtually every ship you encounter will have exactly one Shield bubble; during this portion of the run, your Crystal weapons will trivialize a lot of fights, letting you knock out Weapons without bothering to pop Shields first, or knock out Piloting or Engines to stop an attempted escape. The somewhat slow charge time on Crystal weapons means you'll be at slightly greater risk of getting unlucky with early missile or bomb weapons where a ship with faster charge times might've done damage to Weapons before a missile or bomb could be launched, but this will only rarely be a problem.

Additionally, the Crystal crew makes you mildly resistant to boarders, since they'll reliably and safely win 1v1 against eg Humans. You can even be aggressive about draining oxygen in self-defense, since Crystal crew members are less affected by asphyxiation, though you shouldn't be too cavalier about it -it's easy to overlook that someone is suffocating to death in the chaos of battle, and Crystals are slightly slow-moving, making it easy to send one running and they die before they get to a room with adequate oxygen.

The Crystal Cruiser A also has a decent layout for suffocating enemies, with external venting on each side and right in the middle. An early Door Control Subsystem upgrade -or an early crewmember you assign to the Door Control- can give you a decent rate of enemies teleporting in and then suffocating as they try to bash their way to your Systems, or at least getting softened up before you crew has to finish them. Notably, the Medical Bay is easy to vent, and boarders are often willing to beeline for it even though it's a non-essential System. As such, early boarding events are actually unlikely to be a serious problem, even if combined with a ship battle.

Once you start encountering ships with 2 Shield bubbles, if you haven't gotten lucky with eg a Power-cheap weapon being looted, you'll have to start actually managing battles a bit, holding off on firing the Heavy Crystal I until the Crystal Burst I has fired both its projectiles so it pops the first Shield bubble. These usually won't be a big problem, as you just need to slightly damage the enemy Shields System to return to freely firing at whatever is most urgent, aside needing to keep Shields damaged, but it does delay your initial volley some, and if the ship decides to flee it's frustratingly likely you won't be able to stop it unless you preemptively knocked out Piloting or Engines. A ship with two Shield bubbles and a Defense Drone can be a bit of a problem, but so long as their offense isn't too much and they don't try to run, you can still pretty reliably take them out.

At the point you're encountering ships with 3 Shield bubbles, though, you better have acquired additional offenses or Hacking or alternate Weapons or boarding access or something. The Crystal Cruiser A's starting kit is technically able to take out such ships, but such ships invariably have enough evasion you expect to miss a shot most volleys, and if any shot misses you're not getting anything past the Shields, while your volleys are far too slow to even keep the pressure up and get damage in with a later volley while Shields are regenerating. If your defenses are able to handle the enemy's offenses indefinitely, you can still win such fights... but it'll be very slow, and if the enemy decides to run it's extremely unlikely you'll be able to stop them. You have to get very lucky with breaches and/or stuns triggering, alongside the AI happening to make decisions like abandoning Piloting to repair whatever you're targeting, or be specifically dealing with a pure Mantis crew so they can't repair anywhere close to your damage output, letting you snowball.

4 Shield bubbles is literally impossible, and even having just one extra weapon is unlikely to let you win. Honestly, by the time 4 Shield bubbles are common, you should probably be selling your Crystal weapons in favor of lasers or flak if at all possible -preferably do it before you start encountering ships with 3 Shield bubbles regularly. Once 3 and especially 4 Shield bubbles are common, Crystal weapons are essentially bad versions of lasers, susceptible to Defense Drones and with a worse charge time and no possibility of inflicting fires.

Also, you should always sell your Crystal Vengeance Augment at the very first Store you stop at if you're trying to win. The 40 Scrap you get out of selling it is far more useful than an effect that only triggers when you suffer Hull damage, only has a 10% chance of triggering anyway, and is just a shot at maybe damaging the enemy ship if it does trigger.

You might notice I'm saying the Crystal Cruiser A should sell everything about it that can be sold. You might also notice this is not a typical recommendation I make.

Yeah, the Crystal Cruiser A is awful in the long haul. That's why I say strategic luck is unusually important to it: most ships have some portion of their starting kit be viably useful into the endgame, even if you'll need more than just the initial kit to be able to beat the game. The Crystal Cruiser A's entire starting kit just needs to go.

Making things worse is that what's intended as an advantage -the fact that Crystal Weapons have abnormally low Scrap costs- actually further hampers the Crystal Cruiser A, as selling off its initial Weapons is worth... 20 Scrap total. Yeah. It's very easy to technically spot everything you need for a successful run, but never manage to scrape together enough Scrap for the purchases in question because you still need to invest in ship upgrades and selling your existing weapons is really unlikely to close the gap on paying for what you need.

sigh

One thing to keep in mind is that your Crystal crew makes a Crew Teleporter more worth considering purchasing. While Crystals aren't actually exceptional fighters in a straightforward sense the way Manti and to a lesser extent Rockmen are, their ability to lock a room lets them limit how many enemies they have to fight (making it safer to board ships with a large crew) and has the crucial functionality of preventing enemies from fleeing to the Medical Bay, escaping one of the main flaws of a boarding-based strategy. It also gives you the option of actually using boarding as a targeted way to trash specific Systems, since locking the room will prevent other enemies from interrupting your attack on the System. This can, for example, be used as a way to knock Shields down far enough your weaponry can get the rest of the job done. Lastly, Crystals being resistant to asphyxiation and slightly above-average in HP makes it actually viable to board Autoships without specifically needing a fully upgraded Crew Teleporter, which can make a big difference in your ability to swiftly and safely take out an Autoship.

If you're playing with advanced edition content on, Hacking is also unusually appealing, due to the normally-a-disadvantage quality of your Crystal weapons being possible for a Defense Drone I to intercept. This can allow you to slip a Hacking Drone in past a Defense Drone at no additional resource expenditure by distracting the Defense Drone with your Crystal weaponry. Hacking is even decently synergistic with Crystal weapons, where you can Hack the Shields and it doesn't even need to drain them to below 1 Shield bubble for you to start doing damage, potentially letting you put off upgrading Hacking for longer than a different ship might.

90 or 75 Scrap can be a little difficult to scrape together safely in the mid-early portion of the game the Crystal Cruiser A most excels in, but if you can manage it, either of them can substantially patch the Crystal Cruiser A's worst flaws.

Sweet Revenge
Finish off a ship with Crystal Vengeance's shard.

You are never going to actually achieve this organically as part of a regular run, even if you don't take my advice to aggressively sell Crystal Vengeance.

What you should do is start a run, find a ship you can knock down to exactly one HP, do that, and then lower your Shields and wait until them shooting you triggers Crystal Vengeance. 

Bizarrely, accepting a surrender that was triggered by a Crystal Vengeance hit will, in fact, earn this Achievement. Deliberately triggering this is far more of a pain than just finishing off a ship and you're unlikely to specifically catch that you triggered the surrender dialogue with Crystal Vengeance, but I suppose there's probably at least one player who actually got Sweet Revenge this way through sheer blind luck.

This is, to be honest, a terrible Achievement that shouldn't have existed, but at least it's relatively painless to acquire if you don't mind deliberately trashing a run on acquiring it.


No Escape
Trap 4 enemy crew in a single room. This can be done with a Crystal crewmember's power, or with a Lockdown Bomb.

This is pretty easy to do. You don't even need a Crew Teleporter or Lockdown Bomb: mid-to-late boarding events generally spawn 4-5 enemy crew unless they generated Mantis crew, so just bait them into a big room, activate the power, and there you go, you've earned it.

It requires a bit of luck to get, whether via boarding events, lucking into a Lockdown Bomb, or managing to buy a Crew Teleporter, but this is very much the easiest Achievement of these three to pull off organically in a serious run.

Also, it even counts internal Drones and your own mind-controlled crew. So for example you can get it if a boarding event generates three crew when you're up against a ship with Mind Control. It's seriously a pretty generous Achievement.


Clash of the Titans
Completely destroy 10 ships that are Rockman designs in a single run.

why

Strictly speaking, you can influence the odds on this one. Rock Sectors are much more likely to throw Rock ships at you, after all.

In practice, though, this is all down to luck, and it's long odds at that, even considering that pirate versions of Rock ships are counted. I rarely encounter 10 or more Rock-design ships across an entire run, even if I count cases that aren't fights!

Furthermore, it very specifically has to be complete destruction. You accept their surrender? Doesn't count. They successfully flee? Doesn't count. You board them and kill their entire crew? Doesn't count.

So even if you do encounter 10+ ship of Rockman design and fight them, that doesn't necessarily mean you'll get Clash of the Titans.

In addition to the gameplay design being terrible, this is just narratively confusing. Like yeah Achievements aren't 'real' in an in-universe sense, but they often get connected to thematics even if that makes for terrible gameplay, like how the Kestrel has an Achievement for pulling off species diversity. So... why is it the Crystal Cruiser has an Achievement for being a bloodthirsty maniac that murders your species' closest kin and smashes their designs? The game doesn't ever suggest that, say, Rockmen broke off from the Crystal people over irreconcilable ideological differences ages ago.

So... why does this Achievement exist?...

On the plus side, the first two Achievements are relatively easy to get, so it's not that hard to unlock the...

Crystal Cruiser B: Carnelian





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Starts with no weapons.

Maximum of 4 weapons, 2 different Drones.

Starts with the Crystal Vengeance Augment.

Room total: 16

I don't get this ship.

Okay, sure, a boarding-based Crystal ship makes broad sense. Crystal crewmembers have the unique ability to lock enemies in or out of a room, letting you drop into a room and smash it before crew can defend it, or trap an enemy who is close to dead before they can run for the Medical Bay. As a bonus, Crystal crewmembers are resistant to asphyxiation and so aren't completely helpless when faced with an early Autoship.

But... why does it have Cloak? What value is that supposed to add to your pure boarding strategy? And why is it the Stealth Cruisers have to give up Shields for this privilege, but the Crystal Cruiser B doesn't? What's going on here???

Also, why is this one of the rare ships with a large Crew Teleporter? You start with the standard crew complement of three people and so can't even take full advantage to start, and Crystals are completely the wrong crew type for this precisely thanks to their room-locking ability. There are multiple other boarding ships that desperately wish they had an extra-large Crew Teleporter so they can overwhelm enemy crew with sheer numbers, but let's give the extra-large Crew Teleporter to the one crew set that absolutely, 100% does not need it? What?? Why???

Furthermore, why is it unarmed? The Crystal Cruiser A only shows off two Crystal weapons. There's two others, and with how ridiculously rare it is to encounter the Hidden Crystal Worlds most players will basically never have a chance to actually see these other Crystal weapons at all!

What's especially bizarre is that there's no C version of the Crystal Cruiser, unlike literally every other ship set that was present prior to advanced edition. Indeed, it would've made a lot more sense for the B to have been an alternate shooting-based ship and the C a suicidal boarder, but I can gloss over that part per se. My actual issue is that providing a C would've been the perfect opportunity to show off the other two Crystal weapons.

So naturally they don't do that, and when they give the Rock Cruiser C a Crystal-y setup including a Crystal weapon, it's nothing new. Huh?

So... yeah. This ship confuses me deeply.

As for its actual performance...

... it's terrible.

Like every pure-boarding ship, it's initially helpless against Zoltan ships. (No, Crystal Vengeance isn't a way to work around them. The expected result is that you will die almost twice before you get through a single Supershield) Similarly, it's deeply unhappy to be encountering Autoships, though it's at least technically able to kill them without losing crew by knocking them down to one hit point via System damage and then letting the Autoship shoot until Crystal Vengeance finishes it off... but that's really, really not worth it, so it only really matters to the extent that you can trash an Autoship's weaponry and so reduce or even entirely avoid damage before you Jump.

When fighting something you can deal with, it's often not really any better than other pure boarding ships. Many enemy ships have no Medical Bay or Cloning Bay, and Cloning Bays can often be destroyed successfully without needing to lock the room, as the AI doesn't heavily prioritize defending them. So against a lot of ships it... lets you do some damage to a System before you get to killing crew? I guess?

It does actually have above-average performance against ships with a Medical Bay, and that does matter, particularly when it comes to fighting the Rebel Flagship -you know, ignoring that this ship is terrible at reaching The Last Stand- but it all comes down to luck whether that's a real advantage or not. If you pick up a missile or (crew-injuring) bomb before you encounter your first Medical Bay-equipped ship... that resolves Medical Bays just fine on its own, rendering Lockdown much less relevant.

The one thing the Crystal Cruiser B has as a real edge over other boarding ships is that it can handle Lanius ships reasonably well, since Crystals are tough and take half damage from oxygen deprivation. Which requires happening to hit an Abandoned Sector in a run, which is a rare event, and can almost always be avoided if you wish. (It is possible to have two Abandoned Sectors spawn adjacent to each other in a run, though it's very, very rare) So. Yay?

Oh, and even more so than with the Crystal Cruiser A, you should just sell Crystal Vengeance as fast as possible. It's not merely terrible-yet-expensive, it may actually get your crew killed unexpectedly if you hold onto it! And you ideally will get a weapon of some sort early so you can actually finish off Autoships, which an injection of 40 Scrap helps a lot with that.

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Next time, we cover the Lanius Cruisers. Not that they're harder to unlock or anything -they're actually one of the easiest unlocks in the game- but they're not part of the core chain and they're advanced edition content, so they literally came later.

See you then.