FTL Analysis: Species
Human
45All experience requirements are reduced by 10%, rounding favorably.
Found very commonly in Civilian, Rebel, Pirate, Nebula Sectors of any kind, Abandoned Sectors, and The Last Stand, and uncommonly in Engi, Zoltan, Rockman, and Mantis Sectors. They can always be found in any Sector. (Except Crystal Homeworlds)
There's technically two additional graphics beyond this, but they're virtually indistinguishable from the right-most icons. As in, I can't tell the difference even when scrutinizing them side-by-side, up-close. So I saw no point in including them; it effectively just means the rightmost graphics show up more than the others, in-game. Also note that Humans are unique for having gender representation in their graphics. (Well, one could posit that different colors in one or another of the species are tied to gender, but the game itself never suggests this)
Note that the experience advantage was added by the advanced edition update, though this only matters if you somehow have the game with no update whatsoever as even if you do a run with advanced content turned off Humans will still have this advantage.
The experience advantage itself is a bit uneven due to the small experience values used for most skills. For Shields, it's an exactly 10% reduction in experience requirement, and thus a roughly 11% improvement in how fast Humans gain Shields skill. For Piloting and Engines, they're instead going from 15 to 13 experience required per rank, which is a roughly 15% reduction in experience requirements. For Repair skill they go from 18 to 16, which is a roughly 12% reduction in experience requirements. For melee combat, they're going from 8 to 7, which is a 12.5% reduction in experience requirements. Lastly, for Weapons they're going from 65 to 58, which is very slightly better than a 10% reduction in experience requirements.
In practice, most of this is not very important. Engi are far and away better at repairs, Manti, Rockmen, Lanius, and Crystals are much better at melee combat, while the small edge in Shields, Piloting, and Engines are generally drowned out by other considerations. For one thing, crew are only actually credited experience in Piloting, Shields, Engines, and Weapons if they're actually currently manning the station, with firefighting, combat, and repairs all overruling manning the station. Thus, if your pilot keeps having their station take damage, get set on fire, and get breached, an Engi will very possibly gain more Piloting experience than a Human pilot in practice due to getting back to manning their station sooner. Or if boarders keep interfering, a Rockman or Mantis will be more likely to fend off a boarder and resume working immediately. (As opposed to retreating to the Medical Bay)
As an advantage, it's also made dubious by the fact that crew you hire or acquire from events can be pre-experienced, in which case they always start at an exact experience level in any given skill, letting you skip experience requirements. This means you can easily end up with event-generated or Store-bought non-Humans who have a maxed-out skill without needing to actually go through the experience grinding process.
Not helping is that Humans are, aside the experience thing, 100% inferior to Slugs and overall most species are more advantage than disadvantage, and furthermore there is exactly one Human blue event option, which will at best either result in a Mantis crewmember or a single Engines upgrade. Notably, having Mind Control also provides a blue option for the event, which provides Scrap and some amount of missile ammo and/or Drone Parts. Thus, it's not terribly important to have a Human on board for event purposes.
All that said, Humans are tied with Slugs as the cheapest of crewmembers to hire, and their lack of useful skills or blue event options makes them an excellent choice for taking on dangerous jobs that might get the crewmember killed, particularly if your ship has a large crew complement. Too bad events don't give you any control over who takes risks; stuff like the alien spiders event would be much less aggravating if you could choose to risk your lackluster Human crew instead of your valuable any-other-species crew.
There's technically two additional graphics beyond this, but they're virtually indistinguishable from the right-most icons. As in, I can't tell the difference even when scrutinizing them side-by-side, up-close. So I saw no point in including them; it effectively just means the rightmost graphics show up more than the others, in-game. Also note that Humans are unique for having gender representation in their graphics. (Well, one could posit that different colors in one or another of the species are tied to gender, but the game itself never suggests this)
Note that the experience advantage was added by the advanced edition update, though this only matters if you somehow have the game with no update whatsoever as even if you do a run with advanced content turned off Humans will still have this advantage.
The experience advantage itself is a bit uneven due to the small experience values used for most skills. For Shields, it's an exactly 10% reduction in experience requirement, and thus a roughly 11% improvement in how fast Humans gain Shields skill. For Piloting and Engines, they're instead going from 15 to 13 experience required per rank, which is a roughly 15% reduction in experience requirements. For Repair skill they go from 18 to 16, which is a roughly 12% reduction in experience requirements. For melee combat, they're going from 8 to 7, which is a 12.5% reduction in experience requirements. Lastly, for Weapons they're going from 65 to 58, which is very slightly better than a 10% reduction in experience requirements.
In practice, most of this is not very important. Engi are far and away better at repairs, Manti, Rockmen, Lanius, and Crystals are much better at melee combat, while the small edge in Shields, Piloting, and Engines are generally drowned out by other considerations. For one thing, crew are only actually credited experience in Piloting, Shields, Engines, and Weapons if they're actually currently manning the station, with firefighting, combat, and repairs all overruling manning the station. Thus, if your pilot keeps having their station take damage, get set on fire, and get breached, an Engi will very possibly gain more Piloting experience than a Human pilot in practice due to getting back to manning their station sooner. Or if boarders keep interfering, a Rockman or Mantis will be more likely to fend off a boarder and resume working immediately. (As opposed to retreating to the Medical Bay)
As an advantage, it's also made dubious by the fact that crew you hire or acquire from events can be pre-experienced, in which case they always start at an exact experience level in any given skill, letting you skip experience requirements. This means you can easily end up with event-generated or Store-bought non-Humans who have a maxed-out skill without needing to actually go through the experience grinding process.
Not helping is that Humans are, aside the experience thing, 100% inferior to Slugs and overall most species are more advantage than disadvantage, and furthermore there is exactly one Human blue event option, which will at best either result in a Mantis crewmember or a single Engines upgrade. Notably, having Mind Control also provides a blue option for the event, which provides Scrap and some amount of missile ammo and/or Drone Parts. Thus, it's not terribly important to have a Human on board for event purposes.
All that said, Humans are tied with Slugs as the cheapest of crewmembers to hire, and their lack of useful skills or blue event options makes them an excellent choice for taking on dangerous jobs that might get the crewmember killed, particularly if your ship has a large crew complement. Too bad events don't give you any control over who takes risks; stuff like the alien spiders event would be much less aggravating if you could choose to risk your lackluster Human crew instead of your valuable any-other-species crew.
Unfortunately, Humans are also the single most common crewmember to get from events and to be offered in Stores, so in spite of Humans being lackluster it's pretty rare for a run to have no Humans by the end, even if you're playing a ship that doesn't start with any Humans. Most runs will get at least one free one foisted on them, and it's easy to end up needing a crewmember so desperately you settle for a Human because it's what's available at a Store, not because they're any good.
To be fair, 'boring lame humans' is a common problem in many games where species is a mechanically relevant concept. It's a problem I've always been baffled by, especially how ludicrously widespread it is, but if FTL had successfully evaded the problem that would be far more surprising. In FTL's case, it's mostly frustratingly artificial how events don't give you control over who takes risks even though in-universe your crew should have such control; Humans being comparatively disposable would be a lot more notable a quality if this wasn't so.
Engi
50Repairs twice as fast as base, but does half as much damage per tick in melee.
Engi are common in Engi Sectors, uncommon in Civilian, Rebel, Abandoned, Slug, and Pirate Sectors, as well as the Last Stand, and are rare in Zoltan, Mantis, and Uncharted Nebula Sectors. They cannot be acquired at all in Rockman Sectors.
Engi are unique for not having any variation in their graphics at all.
Engi are unique for not having any variation in their graphics at all.
As repair competency also covers firefighting and breach-closing, Engi are great at both those duties as well, it should be emphasized.
Overall, it's great for a ship to have 2-4 Engi aboard to handle repair duties, firefighting, etc, but if your ship is actually dominated by Engi then you risk struggling to fend off boarders or offensive internal Drones. This isn't precisely a reason to avoid taking Engi -you only need a few good fighters for anti-boarding competency- but it's something to keep in mind if eg you already have 4 Engi and no other crew and are considering your options for hiring. A different species is probably better at that point.
Engi are also a species whose value is in part influenced by your overall skill level. As your skill rises, you tend to take less damage, and so Engi become less useful because you don't need repairs as constantly. Indeed, a run that's regularly taking enough hits to strongly appreciate an Engi-heavy crew is a run that's probably going to game over without even reaching the final Sector. Don't get too enamored of them from your early play; it's easy to think they're The Best Species when you're first learning the game, but while they're not actively bad like Humans are, they're nowhere near as amazing as they'll first seem.
Overall, Engi are straightforward and... a bit boring, design-wise. Not a lot to say about them. They function well enough, anyway.
Engi have 8 blue options, which are able to occur under a wide variety of conditions and generally provide bonus Scrap and possibly other benefits. This is another reason they're one of the more generally valuable species to have in your crew, and it's worth considering hiring one early if you can scrape together the Scrap to pay for them, as odds are decent they'll literally pay for theirself via a blue option. Quite possibly several times, in fact.
Slug
45Immune to mind control, and having a Slug in your crew means you always know the position, species, and activities of all enemy crew on either ship. Furthermore, Slugs will fully reveal rooms adjacent to whatever room they're standing in, both when boarding enemy ships while you have inadequate Sensors or in your own ship if Sensors are down. (Such as because you're in a nebula)
Slugs are common in Slug Sectors, uncommon in Uncharted Nebula Sectors, and rare in Zoltan and Abandoned Sectors. They can never be acquired in Civilian, Engi, Mantis, Pirate, Rebel, or Rockman Sectors, nor the Last Stand.
Slugs are one of the rarest species in the game; even in Slug-controlled Sectors and Slug Homeworlds, they're tied with Humans for how commonly you get them; there's no Sector type where they're the most common species. Indeed, Slug Sectors are surprisingly diverse, with Slugs and Humans only moderately more common than Engi, Zoltan, Mantis, and Rockmen crew, in spite of the writing perpetually depicting Slugs as huge jerks to all non-Slugs. I'll be coming back to this topic a bit later, though; back to gameplay.
Note that prior to the advanced edition update, Slug telepathy was just a red dot that told you little other than positions and numbers, and Mind Control didn't exist. By extension, if you play with advanced content disabled their immunity to mind control is irrelevant. Though like the Human experience advantage, their telepathy doesn't revert to the red dot if you disable advanced edition content; you'd have to outright have your version not include the advanced edition update at all to see this.
Anyway, Slugs are and always have been the single biggest reason why Humans are unappealing, since the experience thing is the only advantage Humans have over Slugs. Other species have actual trade-offs in their statlines and whatnot. Not Slugs. Slugs are just better, especially before the advanced edition update gave Humans the experience advantage.
No, blue options don't help with this issue. Humans have one okay blue option that doesn't occur very often. Slugs have 11 blue options. Most of them are found primarily or exclusively in Slug-controlled Sectors or Slug Homeworld Sectors, but there's a few that can occur anywhere as well as one for Zoltan Sectors and one for Rockmen Sectors. Furthermore, having a Slug in your crew already makes it a lot more tolerable to be going through a nebula, partially or completely taking the place of certain Sensors functions -you can target Mind Control on enemies that you see only via Slug telepathy, for example. As such, the blue option bias toward Slug nebula Sectors isn't really a strike against the utility of them. Notably, several of these events are risky to interact with or have no good answer by default... and then a Slug either eliminates the risk or turns it into a guaranteed reward. It's seriously worth considering hiring a Slug if you don't already have one; they're very likely to literally pay for theirself.
Mind, more than one Slug is somewhat limited in value unless literally your entire crew is Slugs. (To make Mind Control totally useless against you) Not completely useless, but the only advantage of theirs that 'stacks' is the part where they provide sight on adjacent rooms in nebula. One Slug is great. Slugs beyond that is generally a bit redundant.
Still better than hiring Humans, though. Slugs aren't even more expensive to hire!
Zoltan
60Has only 70 HP. Provides a special unit of Power to whatever System the Zoltan is standing in the room of, which cannot be locked down or knocked out by Ion effects. Explodes on death, dealing 15 damage to all enemies in the room, with no damage done to allies.
Zoltan are common in Zoltan Sectors, uncommon in Slug Sectors, and rare in Civilian, Pirate, Rebel, Rockman, Abandoned, Engi, and Uncharted Nebula Sectors as well as the Last Stand. They can never be acquired in Mantis Sectors.
Note that the self-destruct effect was added by the advanced edition update, but is another effect that still applies even if you play with advanced edition content turned off. Though it's really dependent on advanced edition content to be a particularly useful quality, unlike the other cases of this.
Anyway, Zoltan are surprisingly bad. Missing 30 HP is shockingly broadly painful, making Zoltan poor boarders, seriously vulnerable to boarding (A Zoltan master fighter expects to lose against a completely inexperienced Human, let alone the actually good boarders), bad at fighting fires, bad at closing hull breaches, and alarmingly prone to vanishing in a puff in the middle of intense firefights. Normal damage weapons do 15 crew damage for each normal point of damage: a Breach Missile that sets a fire on impact will remove 60 of their 70 HP on impact and then they may burn to death before they can even escape the room, even if you instantly pause and tell them to run! The only situation in which a Zoltan's bad HP isn't a problem is when you're completely, utterly dominating the enemy such that there's zero danger to your ship and by extension crew.
In exchange for this miserable set of issues, they basically double as a Reactor purchase, but better, and cheaper if you compare hiring a Zoltan to hiring a Human and purchasing a Reactor upgrade. 'Better' because Zoltan-provided power is unaffected by Ion Storms and Ion weapons; if you are early in a run with a Zoltan-heavy crew, an Ion Storm may actually cripple the enemy ship more than your own ship, and it's possible to forcibly ensure a constant Shield bubble by having two Zoltan hang out in the Shield room together, or two bubbles if you're willing and able to cram four Zoltan in there. Indeed, this will make your ship absurdly resistant to Ion weaponry; the game doesn't have any kind of sanity check to say that Ion weaponry grounds out into other Systems in these circumstances, or anything like that. If you get this going when you only have two Shield Bubbles anyway, you'll be almost immune to Ion effects.
Unfortunately, Zoltan-provided Power is simply not a great payoff for putting up with how serious a flaw their lowered HP is, in part due to the lowered HP. A Human gunner can shrug off a couple lasers to the face and keep manning their System without being in serious danger. A Zoltan gunner who sticks around at that point could have a Heavy Laser I hit, set the room on fire, and then they die before they can flee the room. This means you're regularly going to be choosing between having your Zoltan stick things out to keep providing their Power, gambling they don't get killed, or playing it safe with their life but having to give up Power somewhere to make this work.
Zoltan-provided Power is also frustratingly janky in how it interacts with the game remembering your prior Power situation. It's not unusual to have a couple Zoltan run into an unpowered Medical Bay, and then the game auto-assigns 2 regular bars of Power to the Medical Bay once the Zoltan have returned to their stations. Between combats, this is an irritating nuisance. In the middle of combat, when you've got a lot to keep track of and are liable to overlook the game doing something other than what you intended/expected, this can be run-ending.
There is, admittedly, a mildly exploitive thing you can do with Systems that have a cooldown. (ie Crew Teleporters, Mind Control, Hacking, and Cloaking) Normally those Systems tie up whatever Power was in them when they were activated until they've finished cooling down, with the exception of returning Power if they take damage that forces their maximum Power capacity below their current Power capacity. However, if a Zoltan enters such a System when it's cooling down and at its maximum capacity, they will instantly force out a unit of Power, and it won't be forced back in if they then leave. Do note that if you try to pull this trick before they start cooling down that it will actually interrupt whatever they were doing; it's only a useful trick once they're done and on cooldown.
Still, that's a bit... minor, even if you're okay with using what's pretty clearly an exploit.
Note that the self-destruct effect was added by the advanced edition update, but is another effect that still applies even if you play with advanced edition content turned off. Though it's really dependent on advanced edition content to be a particularly useful quality, unlike the other cases of this.
Anyway, Zoltan are surprisingly bad. Missing 30 HP is shockingly broadly painful, making Zoltan poor boarders, seriously vulnerable to boarding (A Zoltan master fighter expects to lose against a completely inexperienced Human, let alone the actually good boarders), bad at fighting fires, bad at closing hull breaches, and alarmingly prone to vanishing in a puff in the middle of intense firefights. Normal damage weapons do 15 crew damage for each normal point of damage: a Breach Missile that sets a fire on impact will remove 60 of their 70 HP on impact and then they may burn to death before they can even escape the room, even if you instantly pause and tell them to run! The only situation in which a Zoltan's bad HP isn't a problem is when you're completely, utterly dominating the enemy such that there's zero danger to your ship and by extension crew.
In exchange for this miserable set of issues, they basically double as a Reactor purchase, but better, and cheaper if you compare hiring a Zoltan to hiring a Human and purchasing a Reactor upgrade. 'Better' because Zoltan-provided power is unaffected by Ion Storms and Ion weapons; if you are early in a run with a Zoltan-heavy crew, an Ion Storm may actually cripple the enemy ship more than your own ship, and it's possible to forcibly ensure a constant Shield bubble by having two Zoltan hang out in the Shield room together, or two bubbles if you're willing and able to cram four Zoltan in there. Indeed, this will make your ship absurdly resistant to Ion weaponry; the game doesn't have any kind of sanity check to say that Ion weaponry grounds out into other Systems in these circumstances, or anything like that. If you get this going when you only have two Shield Bubbles anyway, you'll be almost immune to Ion effects.
Unfortunately, Zoltan-provided Power is simply not a great payoff for putting up with how serious a flaw their lowered HP is, in part due to the lowered HP. A Human gunner can shrug off a couple lasers to the face and keep manning their System without being in serious danger. A Zoltan gunner who sticks around at that point could have a Heavy Laser I hit, set the room on fire, and then they die before they can flee the room. This means you're regularly going to be choosing between having your Zoltan stick things out to keep providing their Power, gambling they don't get killed, or playing it safe with their life but having to give up Power somewhere to make this work.
Zoltan-provided Power is also frustratingly janky in how it interacts with the game remembering your prior Power situation. It's not unusual to have a couple Zoltan run into an unpowered Medical Bay, and then the game auto-assigns 2 regular bars of Power to the Medical Bay once the Zoltan have returned to their stations. Between combats, this is an irritating nuisance. In the middle of combat, when you've got a lot to keep track of and are liable to overlook the game doing something other than what you intended/expected, this can be run-ending.
There is, admittedly, a mildly exploitive thing you can do with Systems that have a cooldown. (ie Crew Teleporters, Mind Control, Hacking, and Cloaking) Normally those Systems tie up whatever Power was in them when they were activated until they've finished cooling down, with the exception of returning Power if they take damage that forces their maximum Power capacity below their current Power capacity. However, if a Zoltan enters such a System when it's cooling down and at its maximum capacity, they will instantly force out a unit of Power, and it won't be forced back in if they then leave. Do note that if you try to pull this trick before they start cooling down that it will actually interrupt whatever they were doing; it's only a useful trick once they're done and on cooldown.
Still, that's a bit... minor, even if you're okay with using what's pretty clearly an exploit.
All that said, Zoltan are somewhat the inverse of Engi, in that they look particularly bad when you're still learning the game and regularly taking lots of damage, and become more appealing as your personal skill level rises. They're also the species that most benefits from a Cloning Bay over a Medical Bay, so they hold up better with advanced edition content enabled. Their poor HP is a very dangerous flaw and their interaction with Power mechanics is janky and is always problematic, but for a learning player they're easily the worst species by a wide margin (Even worse than Humans!), where for an experienced player they're merely flawed. (Probably a better choice than a Human, for one)
Though it doesn't help their appeal that Zoltans have exactly 2 blue options. One can only occur in Zoltan Sectors, and doesn't provide a particularly great outcome. The other can occur anywhere, but upgrading your Sensors to 2 also provides a blue option of exactly equal value, when upgrading Sensors to 2 is fairly cheap and useful to basically any ship doing basically anything. (Unless you're deliberately hugging nebula a lot with a Slug crew member)
Though it doesn't help their appeal that Zoltans have exactly 2 blue options. One can only occur in Zoltan Sectors, and doesn't provide a particularly great outcome. The other can occur anywhere, but upgrading your Sensors to 2 also provides a blue option of exactly equal value, when upgrading Sensors to 2 is fairly cheap and useful to basically any ship doing basically anything. (Unless you're deliberately hugging nebula a lot with a Slug crew member)
Don't be grabbing a Zoltan crew member on the idea of fishing for blue options, is what I'm saying.
Rockman
55
Has 150 HP, takes no damage from fires, puts out fires 67% faster than normal, but moves at 50% normal speed.
Rockman
55Has 150 HP, takes no damage from fires, puts out fires 67% faster than normal, but moves at 50% normal speed.
Rockmen are common in Rockman Sectors, uncommon in Civilian, Rebel, Pirate, Slug, and Abandoned Sectors as well as the Last Stand, and rare in Zoltan, Mantis, and Uncharted Nebula Sectors. They can never be found in Engi Sectors.
Rockmen are particularly common in Rockman Sectors, as only two other species are even allowed in them. In conjunction with only Engi Sectors actually forbidding Rockmen, the vast majority of runs are very likely to get a Rockman at some point, especially since they're very solid crew no matter what you're doing, so they're easy to justify purchasing.
Rockmen are great at putting out fires, but their awful speed means they're poor at responding to fires. It's a dubious idea to have 'designated firefighter' Rockmen. What you should do is assign them to locations you want to ensure aren't overcome by fire. Systems you either don't want to vent, such as the Pilot seat, or you can't realistically vent due to your ship's design (Again: the Pilot seat is a common example), are great Systems to assign a Rockman to.
If you do try to have a Rockman act as a responsive firefighter, such as because your crew is full and you have nothing better for them to do, you need to make sure they're centrally located, able to get to any location of concern as fast as possible. This means putting them close to Systems or Subsystems that aren't readily vented or that are undesirable to vent. One of the better possibilities to assign them to is the Door Control Subsystem, since if it gets knocked out and set on fire you can't vent it, and trying to vent it when it's going to be knocked out by fire is risking ending up with the doors stuck open and you trying to fix it while taking damage from the lack of oxygen. Depending on ship layout and your general situation, that can be a run-ender, such as if your Medical Bay ends up knocked out and is beyond the Door Control Subsystem.
Rockmen also make for great boarders, much more so than you might intuitively expect. Their poor movement speed isn't a meaningful disadvantage if you're just teleporting them atop your preferred target anyway (Which you are, of course, since that's the only way to board), while their greater HP means they'll beat out most possible enemies. They're especially great if your Medical Bay is directly adjacent to your Teleporter, making their poor speed almost completely irrelevant. Particularly unique is that their immunity to fire means they can be combined with fire-producing weapons like the Fire Beam without worrying about killing your own crew, where normally starting fires while boarding can get your people killed.
Rockmen are great at putting out fires, but their awful speed means they're poor at responding to fires. It's a dubious idea to have 'designated firefighter' Rockmen. What you should do is assign them to locations you want to ensure aren't overcome by fire. Systems you either don't want to vent, such as the Pilot seat, or you can't realistically vent due to your ship's design (Again: the Pilot seat is a common example), are great Systems to assign a Rockman to.
If you do try to have a Rockman act as a responsive firefighter, such as because your crew is full and you have nothing better for them to do, you need to make sure they're centrally located, able to get to any location of concern as fast as possible. This means putting them close to Systems or Subsystems that aren't readily vented or that are undesirable to vent. One of the better possibilities to assign them to is the Door Control Subsystem, since if it gets knocked out and set on fire you can't vent it, and trying to vent it when it's going to be knocked out by fire is risking ending up with the doors stuck open and you trying to fix it while taking damage from the lack of oxygen. Depending on ship layout and your general situation, that can be a run-ender, such as if your Medical Bay ends up knocked out and is beyond the Door Control Subsystem.
Rockmen also make for great boarders, much more so than you might intuitively expect. Their poor movement speed isn't a meaningful disadvantage if you're just teleporting them atop your preferred target anyway (Which you are, of course, since that's the only way to board), while their greater HP means they'll beat out most possible enemies. They're especially great if your Medical Bay is directly adjacent to your Teleporter, making their poor speed almost completely irrelevant. Particularly unique is that their immunity to fire means they can be combined with fire-producing weapons like the Fire Beam without worrying about killing your own crew, where normally starting fires while boarding can get your people killed.
Rockmen are honestly the single most solid species in the game. Their low speed is less of a disadvantage than you might expect, as there's surprisingly few duties where response time is key, whereas their high HP not only helps them in crew combat but also makes them better able to keep working through damage, sticking to their station where a different species would be forced to flee to the Medical Bay to avoid dying, and makes them better at repairing breaches or otherwise repairing in no-oxygen conditions because it takes longer for them to die and so they can work longer. Being immune to fires means they don't have to worry about almost putting out a fire only to be forced to retreat for healing and so giving it a chance to spread, which is a concern even with Engi.
If you're unsure what to pick from a Store, Rockmen are generally going to be a safe bet. There's no such thing as too many Rockmen.
Rockmen are even a great species to have just to fish for blue event options! There's two events in particular that are both extremely common and where you get a great reward for having a Rockman handle the situation, but the six total events -even considering one is restricted to the Hidden Crystal Worlds- means they're reasonably prone to paying off somehow or another.
Mantis
55
Moves 20% faster than normal, deals 50% more damage in melee, but performs all Repair-related duties at 50% normal speed.
Rockmen are even a great species to have just to fish for blue event options! There's two events in particular that are both extremely common and where you get a great reward for having a Rockman handle the situation, but the six total events -even considering one is restricted to the Hidden Crystal Worlds- means they're reasonably prone to paying off somehow or another.
Mantis
55Moves 20% faster than normal, deals 50% more damage in melee, but performs all Repair-related duties at 50% normal speed.
Manti are common in Mantis Sectors, uncommon in Civilian, Rebel, Pirate, Slug, and Abandoned Sectors as well as the Last Stand, rare in Zoltan and Uncharted Nebula Sectors. They can never be found in Engi or Rockman Sectors.
A Mantis might seem like a good firefighter from their ability to respond rapidly, but standard-repair-speed crew already tend to have fires grow faster than they can put them out if you send just one, and firefighting uses repair speed: a lone Mantis is nearly worthless at firefighting, and even a pair isn't very good. At most they can slow the spread while other crew rush over to actually resolve the issue.
What Mantis actually excel at is, of course, crew combat, both boarding enemy ships and fending off enemy boarders. They're by far the best species at the latter, with their enhanced speed ensuring they'll get to wherever the boarders are quickly while their damage advantage lets them win most fights; Rockmen and Lanius are both unusually adept fighters and are arguably better at fending off boarders that dropped right into their own room (Especially Lanius), but overall Mantis are the clear winner at fending off boarders.
A Mantis might seem like a good firefighter from their ability to respond rapidly, but standard-repair-speed crew already tend to have fires grow faster than they can put them out if you send just one, and firefighting uses repair speed: a lone Mantis is nearly worthless at firefighting, and even a pair isn't very good. At most they can slow the spread while other crew rush over to actually resolve the issue.
What Mantis actually excel at is, of course, crew combat, both boarding enemy ships and fending off enemy boarders. They're by far the best species at the latter, with their enhanced speed ensuring they'll get to wherever the boarders are quickly while their damage advantage lets them win most fights; Rockmen and Lanius are both unusually adept fighters and are arguably better at fending off boarders that dropped right into their own room (Especially Lanius), but overall Mantis are the clear winner at fending off boarders.
Offensively is more debatable. A Mantis doing 50% more damage has similar implications to a Rockman having 50% more HP as far as what fights they'll win, and the movement speed difference is of low importance given they're teleporting directly in. It still matters for moving between the Crew Teleporter and the Medical Bay or Cloning Bay, so if your ship has those spaced far apart Mantis are more appealing, but many player ships have them adjacent or only slightly further apart. Similarly, if you can drop in at least two Lanius, they actually pull ahead of a Mantis offensive through their oxygen-draining effect, which is really notable if you're using a Healing Burst to maintain the pressure -or the Lanius can be dropped into a room that's already been breached. And Crystals have their own advantages...
Still, Mantis attackers do damage fastest. That matters when, for example, arranging to temporarily lock crew in a room to try to kill them before they can run to the Medical Bay. So if your ship has such a strategy, they're a very important option to keep in mind.
On the other hand, Rockmen, Lanius, and Crystal crew are all better for assaulting ships with no oxygen -and while Lanius ships don't show up outside Abandoned Sectors, Autoships can show up anywhere. A level 1 Crew Teleporter can have those three species attack without necessarily dying before the teleport cools down. For a Mantis, that's a suicide mission, only acceptable if you have a Cloning Bay. So that's another case Mantis lose in...
Due to the nature of their skewing, Mantis are not ideal to have manning Systems at all. It can be useful to have them manning your Door Control or Sensors, as both Subsystems are decent choices to man with tertiary crew you're willing to have abandon their station on a moment's notice, but for the primary (Sub)Systems that have experience associated with them, you'll ideally have crew dedicated to those posts permanently, only haring off elsewhere in dire emergencies, and Mantis are at their most useful when responding to boarders or boarding enemy ships.
Unfortunately, Mantis are hampered in general by having crew combat be the only thing they're good at and then being tuned so they're not actually the clear winner there. Their high movement speed could've made them a useful general-response unit, but then they're terrible at responding to anything except boarding actions due to their core Repair ability being crippled. I started out having a really high opinion of Mantis, but at this point I feel they're one of the worst species. Among other points, they tend to lose their luster as a run progresses; as you gain crew, a rapid response unit gets less important (Because it's more likely you'll already have adequate crew in the area to fend off boarders), as your Door Control gets upgraded that also reduces the value of a rapid response unit (Because if your Rockmen can reach the boarders' current target before they cut through the door, the Mantis speed doesn't really matter and the Door Control being upgraded makes venting your ship ever more effective a response to boarders), and even the tuning of melee combat experience mechanics works against them! (A Mantis with maximum melee combat ability doesn't really get anything out of it; they don't tip over to the point of winning against two Human/Slug crew, for example. Meanwhile, an experienced Human or Slug crew is just as reliable as a Mantis about winning a 1v1 with hostile Human or Slug crew, and crew combat mechanics make almost every realistic fight condition a 1v1 for these purposes)
Mantis really needed the game to either more clearly favor them as the apex of crew combat, or they needed to have some other advantage to their name. It's debatable whether they're really worth taking over even Humans given what a sacrifice it is to have halved ability to close breaches, fight fires, and repair (Sub)Systems. They're probably better than Zoltan were before advanced edition hit, but in the current state I'd genuinely argue they're the worst species in the game by a modest margin. (Especially to start with your ship biased toward)
Mantis ships are, it should be noted, generally very threatening as boarder ships, but surprisingly vulnerable to boarding themselves. While Mantis crewmembers fight fiercely, their inability to repair the Medical Bay or Cloning Bay in a timely manner means you can often arrange to knock it out and then cut down the crew by cycling back to your own Medical Bay without worrying about them getting their Medical Bay or Cloning Bay back online while you're gone. This comes with the qualifier that Mantis ships often have an Engi aboard, but that qualifier itself comes with a qualifier: the AI is dumb and perfectly happy to teleport the Engi aboard your ship while assigning Manti to repair duty. Whoops.
In terms of blue options, Manti aren't particularly great crew members. There's only four events for them in the code, with one of them not actually properly implemented. So only three events that actually matter to a player. One of them is also largely inferior to having a Human handle the situation, one is an event for unlocking the Mantis Cruiser but you can just win with the Zoltan Cruiser to do that and the rewards within a run for doing the event aren't all that great, and the final one is actually pretty great... but only occurs in Slug-controlled Sectors, which are generally dubious to enter if you don't also have a Slug in your crew.
Don't hire a Mantis on the idea of blue option fishing.
Lanius
50Immune to suffocation, and in fact drains oxygen from any room they're standing in somewhat faster than a Level 1 Oxygen subsystem can provide it. Moves at 85% normal speed.
Lanius are common in Abandoned Sectors. They can never be acquired in any other Sectors. By extension, they're unavailable if advanced edition content is disabled.
Note that just like Slugs, Lanius are merely tied with Humans for commonality as far as random rewards and Store offerings when they're available at all, making them rarer than you might expect even if you get into an Abandoned Sector.
Lanius are a weird species. Above and beyond the obvious mechanical weirdness of being anti-oxygen instead of oxygen-dependent like everyone else, they're also the only species where an argument can be made that a mono-species setup is better than mixed-species; an all-Lanius crew can simply leave Oxygen turned off to free up Power, free up Scrap (From not needing to upgrade Oxygen to protect it), gets free firefighting and free protection against most boarders, and can essentially ignore breaches, or at least consistently put them off during hazardous situations if they're not blocking an essential (Sub)System. Adding in even a single non-Lanius forces you to sacrifice those advantages, and no species is singlehandedly valuable enough to make up for that loss.
(A slight caveat: advanced edition adding Mind Control and giving Slugs immunity to it means an all-Slug crew renders enemy Mind Control useless, with this benefit being lost if even one crewmember isn't a Slug. This is, however, more advanced edition content, and also the payoff is much smaller; an all-Lanius crew is much more notable as a concept)
Whereas normally you want to mix species. There can be benefits to being weighted toward a species, such as 4 Mantis or 4 Rockmen or 4 Lanius being excellent if your ship has a 2x2 Crew Teleporter, but a boarding-focused ship still wants other species; Engi can help make up for not having as much crew aboard the ship to respond to repair needs, Lanius are useful for dealing with breaches, Zoltan can make the ship much less prone to taking damage by making Shields shrug off Ion effects to some extent, a Slug in your crew lets you reliably plot your boarding action even in nebula, a Crystal can dramatically spike your boarding action's effectiveness...
It's interesting that Lanius are a notable divergence in this regard.
Lanius are a weird species. Above and beyond the obvious mechanical weirdness of being anti-oxygen instead of oxygen-dependent like everyone else, they're also the only species where an argument can be made that a mono-species setup is better than mixed-species; an all-Lanius crew can simply leave Oxygen turned off to free up Power, free up Scrap (From not needing to upgrade Oxygen to protect it), gets free firefighting and free protection against most boarders, and can essentially ignore breaches, or at least consistently put them off during hazardous situations if they're not blocking an essential (Sub)System. Adding in even a single non-Lanius forces you to sacrifice those advantages, and no species is singlehandedly valuable enough to make up for that loss.
(A slight caveat: advanced edition adding Mind Control and giving Slugs immunity to it means an all-Slug crew renders enemy Mind Control useless, with this benefit being lost if even one crewmember isn't a Slug. This is, however, more advanced edition content, and also the payoff is much smaller; an all-Lanius crew is much more notable as a concept)
Whereas normally you want to mix species. There can be benefits to being weighted toward a species, such as 4 Mantis or 4 Rockmen or 4 Lanius being excellent if your ship has a 2x2 Crew Teleporter, but a boarding-focused ship still wants other species; Engi can help make up for not having as much crew aboard the ship to respond to repair needs, Lanius are useful for dealing with breaches, Zoltan can make the ship much less prone to taking damage by making Shields shrug off Ion effects to some extent, a Slug in your crew lets you reliably plot your boarding action even in nebula, a Crystal can dramatically spike your boarding action's effectiveness...
It's interesting that Lanius are a notable divergence in this regard.
It's too bad their absurd rarity makes this more an interesting thought exercise than a mechanically meaningful divergence. I get the general thought process with Lanius handling, but wish it was more realistic to 'all-in' on them. Even just having a player ship start with 4 Lanius would make this kind of thing meaningfully relevant. Alas, FTL's approach to player ships is... confused, let's go with.
In raw count, Lanius look like a pretty great option for blue option fishing, having 11 total blue event options... but 9 of those events can only occur in Abandoned Sectors. One of the other two is restricted to Civilian Sectors and isn't a good deal unless you want to be rid of your Lanius anyway, and the other is uncommon though the rewards are decent enough. On the other hand, you can only hire Lanius in Abandoned Sectors, so unless you're playing a ship that actually starts with them being able to hire them means you've got at least a theoretical shot at them paying off. So basically if you get a Store early in an Abandoned Sector that's offering a Lanius crewmember, you should consider hiring them for blue option fishing purposes, whereas if you only get a Store offering a Lanius late in an Abandoned Sector, you might want to skip them if you're not wanting their tactical advantages, or if purchasing them would be in place of something else important.
Crystal
60Has 125 HP, moves at 80% normal speed, takes 50% damage from suffocation, puts out fires at 83% normal speed, and has a Lockdown power that seals the room they're standing in for 12 seconds with a 50 second cooldown in total starting from activation. (ie a 38 second cooldown relative to finishing) Such a sealed room is completely impossible for crew to enter or exit aside teleportation.
Only part of standard crew pool in Crystal Homeworlds, where they are the only crew in the pool.
Crystals are a bit difficult to talk about as far as comparing them to other crew, because they're ludicrously limited in your ability to get a hold of them: you can see them in Stores, but only in the Hidden Crystal Worlds, which is an entire involved quest to get to and is readily sabotaged by uncooperative RNG. More accessible but still horribly limited is the possibility of, as part of working toward the Crystal Worlds, getting a free Crystal from finding the Stasis Pod Augment and turning it in via a Zoltan event; this still makes crew comparisons a bit difficult to make, because that's not 'do I want a Crystal crew member or a Mantis?' or the like, but rather is 'did I even get an opportunity at the Stasis Pod? Is it riskless for my ship to go for it if I do find it, and if it's not riskless am I okay with risking damage for it anyway? Once I have the Stasis Pod, am I ever in a position of considering kicking it out for an immediately useful Augment?'
On top of the other ways they underwhelm, Crystals have exactly three blue options. One of these is just for accessing the Hidden Crystal Worlds, while the other two only occur in the Hidden Crystal Worlds. Thus, the blue-option potential for Crystals is essentially irrelevant, especially given what a pain it is to get a hold of them. In practice, this means the Crystal members of the Rock Cruiser C, Crystal Cruiser A, and Crystal Cruiser B will contribute even less than you might expect, as most runs in those ships will never get to trigger a blue option with them at all.
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Crystals are a bit difficult to talk about as far as comparing them to other crew, because they're ludicrously limited in your ability to get a hold of them: you can see them in Stores, but only in the Hidden Crystal Worlds, which is an entire involved quest to get to and is readily sabotaged by uncooperative RNG. More accessible but still horribly limited is the possibility of, as part of working toward the Crystal Worlds, getting a free Crystal from finding the Stasis Pod Augment and turning it in via a Zoltan event; this still makes crew comparisons a bit difficult to make, because that's not 'do I want a Crystal crew member or a Mantis?' or the like, but rather is 'did I even get an opportunity at the Stasis Pod? Is it riskless for my ship to go for it if I do find it, and if it's not riskless am I okay with risking damage for it anyway? Once I have the Stasis Pod, am I ever in a position of considering kicking it out for an immediately useful Augment?'
The third way to have a Crystal crewmember is to pick the Rock Cruiser C, Crystal Cruiser A, or Crystal Cruiser B, which is a sufficiently limited list the value of Crystal crew members is heavily tied up in the specifics of those ships, once again making it dubious to draw direct comparisons to other crew members. Not even getting into the fun-factor issue that a real player is unlikely to kick out a Crystal, simply because they are so limited in availability. Novelty value and all.
It's only if you go past crew cap so you have to kick someone out that a direct comparison starts being meaningful.
Even so...
Okay, first of all, for being such a rare, special, limited-access, super-cool-reward crew... Crystals are actually pretty underwhelming if you're not using them specifically as a boarder, and if you are using them as a boarder they're still surprisingly narrow in impressing. They are uniquely useful in most boarding events, admittedly... Let's start with that whole thing.
First of all, it should be pointed out that only one of the three ships that starts with Crystals actually has a Crew Teleporter. Right away, this hurts the boarding utility of Lockdown, because only one ship can reliably get to taking advantage right away. (The Crystal Cruiser B) And it's a pure boarding ship that lacks a Cloning Bay, so Autoships initially can't be taken out without losing crew! As such, unless you obsessively play the Crystal Cruiser B in particular, the majority of the time you where have a Crystal, Lockdown's utility ends up pretty narrow.
Second, that defensive boarding action point: I specified that Lockdown is uniquely useful for boarding events, because for enemies with a Crew Teleporter or Boarding Drone, Lockdown can technically put in work but it's limited to being a stalling tool. With a boarding event, you can potentially Lockdown a room enemies are trying to break into while trying to suffocate them from behind: they won't understand that they're not able to break into the room, and so just stand there and die. An enemy ship with a Crew Teleporter, however, will almost certainly just teleport them away when they're on the brink of death; this isn't useless, but it's a bit underwhelming, and often having Rockmen ready to fend off boarders would have a similar or better result. (Drones won't be teleported back, of course, but they also don't suffocate or try to retreat, limiting Lockdown's utility)
So third is where Crystals actually become noteworthy: offensive boarding actions. Lockdown lets you teleport to an undefended System and trash it in peace, teleport to a lone crewmember and kill them without their friends showing up and without them running for the Medical Bay, and against certain ship designs you may even be able to eg teleport into a corridor, Lockdown it, and set on fire the area beyond it to give fires a chance to flourish in the enemy ship without firefighting snuffing them.
Against enemy ships with Medical Bays and/or large crews, Crystals are uniquely valuable, avoiding your boarders being overwhelmed and killed, letting you force kills on enemy crew that would otherwise just flee to the Medical Bay, and actually reliably use boarding as a way to do System damage instead of wasting time exchanging blows with unkillable crew until you have to teleport back to avoid dying.
Against enemy ships without Medical Bays or, to a lesser extent, Cloning Bays? Crystals are much more limited in their effectiveness. Manti and Rockmen are both better boarders if the enemy can't run off to heal. Even ships with very large crews invariably have 2-tile rooms, so you can force the enemy to fight in conditions favorable to you by teleporting crew into such rooms, avoiding being dogpiled, making the forced isolation of Lockdown much more limited. (The AI always charges boarders, even if the boarders are idling in an empty room) Lockdown is still useful for letting you eg disable Weapons so the enemy can't keep hitting you with missiles while you kill their crew, but often just sending Manti would work as well or better simply because they do damage so fast.
Wrapping back to Crystal functionality as a non-boarder... again, they're underwhelming. Lockdown, rather bizarrely, does not prevent fires from spreading, and it doesn't seal a room for oxygen purposes. Their slow speed and inexplicably poor rate of firefighting makes them terrible at responding to damage -Rockmen are even slower, but being immune to fire and so much faster at putting out flames means they're still the best firefighters in the game. Crystals do have a modest HP advantage over the baseline, making them better able to persist in dangerous conditions and able to reliably fend off neutral-strength boarders like Slugs and Humans, but... to a large extent, Crystals are honestly one of the worst crewmembers in the game if they aren't specifically defending against event boarding or participating in offensive boarding. They're slightly better-suited to dealing with breaches that happen in their room in particular... but Engi are better at that job and at responsive repairs of any kind.
Yes, Crystals are arguably worse than even Humans if boarding isn't factored.
This lends itself strongly to comparing them to Rockmen and Manti, the other boarding-focused species, and Crystals largely tend to come off poorly in the collective comparison. Compared to a Mantis, they're not crippled at repairs, but they're worse at winning fights, worse at doing System damage quickly, far worse at responding to enemy boarding actions, and if you have a Medical Bay (You probably do) Manti speed often effectively makes up for the HP difference, letting them run off to heal and get back to the fighting far faster than a Crystal. They only really excel over a Mantis when fighting ships with a Medical Bay.
Compared to Rockmen, Crystals are slightly more responsive, but are worse at winning fights (And in a defensive boarding action Lockdown doesn't really let you isolate enemies -they'll all pile up against the same door and enter the room simultaneously), and far worse at responding to fires, as well as worse at working in dangerous conditions due to their lower HP. They only clearly pull ahead of Rockmen on the topic of responding to breaches, where they're faster and can work for longer in vacuum.
Between the two? A ship of Rockmen mixed with Manti is overall better than a Crystal-heavy ship. (Not that you'll ever have a Crystal-heavy ship, mind, but it's an illustrative comparison regardless) A single Crystal can be very nice for a boarding-focused ship, but any beyond that are generally going to be worse than adding some other crew type.
So like I said: Crystals are surprisingly underwhelming for how special the game treats them as being.
On top of the other ways they underwhelm, Crystals have exactly three blue options. One of these is just for accessing the Hidden Crystal Worlds, while the other two only occur in the Hidden Crystal Worlds. Thus, the blue-option potential for Crystals is essentially irrelevant, especially given what a pain it is to get a hold of them. In practice, this means the Crystal members of the Rock Cruiser C, Crystal Cruiser A, and Crystal Cruiser B will contribute even less than you might expect, as most runs in those ships will never get to trigger a blue option with them at all.
Seriously, why isn't there a blue option for wowing people with your example of a lost species, or using their Lockdown power to solve an event, or solve a problem in a low-oxygen environment? Even just lazily pasting in a clone of Rockman blue options would both make sense in several cases and make Crystals more useful.
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One of the more bizarre, frustrating, outright offensive bits of FTL is that of its narrative/setting.
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One of the more bizarre, frustrating, outright offensive bits of FTL is that of its narrative/setting.
In a strict 'core plot' sense, FTL has very little to work with; you get a blurb at the beginning explaining your mission, and then the plot goes away until you reach the final Sector, where you get a slightly longer blurb, and that's it. In that sense, it's like a lot of older games with barebones plots where there's little point trying to delve into the story because there's so little visible that any given bit could mean basically anything.
Unlike such classic games, FTL nonetheless has quite a lot of worldbuilding present, through the assorted random (And not-so-random) events. There's not much to the central narrative, but there's plenty of narrative substance regardless.
This is important, because FTL's core narrative, in spite of being so threadbare contradiction would usually be basically impossible, runs heavily into problems when trying to connect it to the writing everywhere else.
Thing is, it's pretty obvious that FTL is intending for the broad framework of the setting to be, essentially, Star Trek, particularly Star Trek: The Next Generation. Your government is the 'Federation', Star Trek references litter the game (Many of the Achievements are direct Star Trek references, and not just the ones even a player personally unfamiliar with Star Trek is liable to recognize through cultural osmosis), the Federation-aligned player ships (The Kestrel and Federation Cruisers) are particularly prone to having species-diverse crews, and various bits make it clear the Federation is in fact meant to be a government in which all species are welcomed.
Conversely, a detail that's somewhat easy to overlook is that Rebel ships are uniformly populated entirely by Human crew: there are no Rebel Rockmen or Zoltan or whoever, anywhere in the entire game.
Taken altogether, it's pretty obvious the intended undertone to the core plot is that you're championing the cause of diversity in the face of a species-ist faction of Humans.
Unfortunately, the narrative fails. It fails hard.
First, let's immediately note that these 'rebels' have such overwhelming numbers they can blanket Sector after Sector with an essentially unlimited stream of ships, have somehow developed and constructed in secret the largest and most powerful ship in the game, given it a uniquely sophisticated AI, developed multiple powerful weapons just for it, and so on. Let's further note that the game positions the Federation loyalists as the underdog; you're alone and will basically never encounter friendly Federation ships before the final Sector, and if you don't personally beat the Rebel Flagship it will inevitably destroy the Federation's last base and the 'rebels' automatically win.
Taken altogether, this paints a very problematic picture. The 'rebels' aren't some violent minority that's largely disagreed with by the average Federation citizen; instead, apparently only a tiny fraction of the Federation are loyal to the current government, with the overwhelming majority of the Federation so thoroughly unhappy with their current government that a violent coup has far, far more people fighting for it than against it. This does not paint a flattering picture of the Federation, suggesting that the Federation government has been mismanaging its territories very badly, very widely, for a fairly long period of time, and probably blowing off the concerns of its citizens such that they widely believe things can't improve so long as the current ruling body is in charge.
There's a reason stories that want an infinite tide of doom generally make it an invading army from across the ocean or similar, and not a rebel force from inside the protagonist nation's borders; the former is able to plausibly argue that the infinite tide of enemies is purely because the invaders are bad and not at all due to anything our heroes did horribly wrong. The latter has a much, much harder time making such an argument, and any attempted approach will basically invariably come across like propaganda attempting to convince the audience that the literal or metaphorical peasantry ought to put up with any amount of abuse from the literal or metaphorical nobility.
This is bad, but an excusable sort of bad; FTL's gameplay places specific demands on the experience and said gameplay is genuinely unusual enough that it's understandable the full ramifications of it were not understood ahead of time. These are exactly the kinds of conditions that regularly produce strangeness, where the narrative runs into serious problems if you try to reconcile the gameplay with it, without the more purely narrative components necessarily doing anything wrong themselves. I'm a bit exasperated the devs didn't go for the established sensible route of the infinite tides of doom being invaders from a previously-unheard-of locale, but so long as we don't get a Faster Than Light 2 that repeats this exact bit... whatever.
Unfortunately, this connects directly into a problem I can't be sympathetic to:
FTL's own writing is really, really racist.
Among other problems it has, but the racism is constant, blatant, severe.
When just reading the little blurbs that species get as summaries in-game, there's nothing offensive going on. The Mantis summary, for example, tells us that the Mantis species have a disregard for individual lives, which led naturally into being a 'vicious' warrior race; put another way, the summary is suggesting that the Mantis species is eusocial, and that their eusociality has given them a particularly fearless approach to combat, which jives with their mechanics and can in fact be compared to real-life eusocial insects like ants, who are indeed very aggressive in defense of the nest and all.
Events, however, default heavily to presenting the Mantis as an Always Chaotic Evil species that wanders around murdering people, placing their body parts as trophies on the outside of their ships, and otherwise reveling in stereotypes of murderous savages for no actual reason. One particular event is especially breathtaking in its awfulness, in which you meet an explicitly female Mantis captain and the game emphasizes that she must be especially vicious to have reached her position, where what the game is insinuating is that Mantis captains are almost uniformly male; this is a pretty clear attempt to indicate the Mantis culture is misogynistic on top of all its other lack-of-virtue, and it's an attempt that's biologically illiterate -eusocial species on Earth default heavily to the population being 99-100% female, with males only broken out when it's time for new queens- and is further worsened by the writing for events conspicuously failing to clearly imply female authority figures being non-notable is true anywhere in FTL's universe. You can meet a Zoltan wise man, among other examples of Zoltan in positions of power being identified as male, while no Zoltan is ever presented as female. Indeed, in general female pronouns basically don't exist in FTL's text; the overwhelming majority of pronoun usage is either gender-neutral/ambiguous, or is explicitly male. FTL attempting to convince you Mantis society is misogynistic is thus a pretty depressing moment of the writing completely lacking self-awareness.
Contrasting with how Mantis events are written, when you get into a fight with a Zoltan or Engi ship the game almost always feels the need to insist that there's a tragic misunderstanding, or that you are genuinely somehow at fault (One event where a Zoltan ship demands you hand over a crewmember on the basis of criminal charges will, if you agree to do so, have narration about how they 'always seemed shifty anyway', suggesting that you were in fact harboring an actual criminal), or that the Zoltan or Engi crew are sick or otherwise not making rational decisions (What kind of diseases would an 'energy being' contract, anyway?), or that the Zoltan attack was somehow a 'test' and you passed. (Never mind that they will, in fact, murder you dead as part of this supposed 'test') You never encounter corrupt Zoltan space cops demanding protection money ("Protection" as in "pay us or we blow you up"), or get into a fight of any kind with Engi where they're written as meaningfully 'in the wrong'.
Indeed, in general the game's handling of its Zoltan space cops is ignorant at best. You can get events outside Zoltan space where you encounter a Mantis or Rockman ship and if you don't pick a fight with it a Zoltan ship will warp in right as they leave, inform you that those were criminal scum, and declare that, essentially, you're aiding and abetting so it's time to blow you up. The narration does not attempt to suggest that these Zoltan are overstepping their bounds or otherwise being unreasonable: it's presented as if they are within their rights to be here and it's just terribly unfortunate you happened to be nice to some Actual Factual Bad People without realizing they were bad people.
Imagine for a moment that some Canadians went to New York, robbed a bank, then fled over the border, and an NYPD cruiser full of cops proceeded to chase them hundreds of miles across the border without bothering to so much as let the Canadian authorities know what was going on. And then the cruiser of cops came upon some tourists from another country waving goodbye to the bank robbers, and the NYPD cops screamed "AIDING AND ABETTING!" and proceeded to try to gun down the tourists.
(It's a slightly strained metaphor, given the 'tourists' in this case are an armed unit of soldiers on a mission, but frankly that just wraps back to how busted the general narrative framework of FTL is)
If your intuitive reading of that situation is that this is a completely reasonable course of action nobody except the dead tourists would have an issue with, then... I'm hoping you're a literal child who lives under a rock? Because no, there is absolutely no way this would be anything except a complete disaster, and more specifically the cops would get a lot of backlash.
But no, FTL treats the Zoltan like they're a universally legitimate authority source, where it's okay for them to enforce their laws in foreign territory and be judge, jury, and executioner for uninvolved strangers. (Not even getting into how thin this justification for attacking you is...)
Notably, there's a few events that touch on the idea of the Rockmen having laws and law enforcement, and these are universally written as if Rockmen law enforcement is possibly just making up laws to get you in trouble, and otherwise treating Rock laws as not worthy of respect, even in their home territories. This is not, say, a setting trying to write the Zoltan as the only people even trying to enforce some kind of rule of law in the universe; no, the narrative is just bluntly, openly speciesist, where the writing treats one species and its culture and its laws as more valid than a different species.
Nor is this just the law thing. Rockman combat encounters overlap heavily with Mantis combat encounters in terms of the writing, where the narrative is perfectly happy to just have a random Rock ship attack you for the lulz and otherwise make it clear the player shouldn't feel bad about blowing them up the way you're always supposed to feel bad about blowing up a Zoltan or Engi ship.
Aside Lanius and Humans (And I'll come back to each of them in a minute), every species get crammed into this framework: the Zoltan and Engi are The Good Species Who Never Intentionally Do A Bad, while the Mantis, Rockmen, and Slugs are written as The Bad Species Where A Member Being Not Awful In The Five Minutes You Interact With Them Is A Surprising Event.
That's an intensely racist framework, in case I need to explicitly spell it out.
Oh yeah, Slugs being A Bad Species. I didn't get into them sooner, because the racism in how they're handled is more complicated to describe. Not that they're any less one-note than how Rockmen, Manti, Engi, and Zoltan are written, but those four I could, if I wanted, easily boil them down to one-sentence summaries that are 90% or so accurate. With Slugs I'm not sure how I'd summarize it without being so vague it doesn't really mean anything.
So first of all, Slugs get the highest concentration of what I'm going to call dishonorable tactics. There's an event where a Slug teleports aboard your ship with no warning and offers to sell you stuff, and sometimes this will result in an actual Store opening, but it can also turn out to be a trap where the 'merchant' is... a distraction? I'm honestly not sure what the thought process is supposed to be here, but point is it has good odds of being a trick where you get attacked. There's events for Slugs hacking your Oxygen (That existed before Hacking existed, and by extension no Hacking System will be present even with advanced edition content enabled...) so your crew are in danger of suffocating to death before they can fend off or escape from the enemy ship. There's multiple events where a Slug pretends to be making nice with you and this is somehow a trick or trap.
Second of all, Slugs are just generally treated as... sigh... metaphorically slimy, even outside combat situations. There are some events outside of Slug-related ones that involve people behaving sketchily or the like, but the Slugs have the greatest concentration in terms of variety and I'd argue their events take it farther than non-Slug ones to boot. For example, there's an event where a Slug offers to sell you something ambiguous for Scrap; in the first place, this is a sight-unseen purchase, which is already very sketchy, but there is in fact a non-trivial chance the Slug just scams you, taking your Scrap without giving anything in return. And then insulting you for falling for the scam.
On top of the skewing of circumstances, the very narration -which it should be noted as presented as your thoughts- has a flagrantly skewed perspective. You get Zoltan attacks where your narration invents excuses for how the Zoltan must not have been willfully malicious, Slug events where nothing bad happens and your narration still thinks something in the vein of 'never trust a Slug', one event involving a Mantis where it invokes the 'not even once' line if you decide to not risk losing crew to this stupid event (Why does opening a stasis pod involve your crew huddling up around it, aside that the event wants to kill one of your crew? Why aren't we opening this with a robot arm for loading cargo, or something?), and so on and so forth, where the game is directly making you, the player character, bluntly a racist individual, as if obviously all players will be fine with and agree with these extremely offensive thoughts. This isn't me reading too much into how things got distributed: the game really is just being explicitly bigoted.
Reminder: the ambiguous player character is meant to be a heroic captain loyal to the ideals of the apparently-pro-diversity Federation... and the writing is perfectly happy to make them racist. If we take this seriously from an in-universe standpoint, it worsens the 'wow is the Federation populated heavily by racists' problem by showing us that even the faction fighting against Team Bigots are still bigoted in exactly the same way. From an out-of-universe standpoint, there's no room to argue it's in-character appropriate to have this bigotry: if the game indeed intends the heavily-implied 'you're fighting against racism' plot, it should default to keeping your character not-bigoted, so the narrative is clearly about heroically beating back bigotry. This is, at best, sloppy and dumb writing. More likely? Actual racism underlies the writing, where explicitly bigoted thoughts seem so normal to the people behind FTL this didn't register at all.
Then there's the general state of the galaxy, where the game actively divides the Sectors by species, and then the event writing presents literally every species as insular, hostile to outsiders, and as having clear ethnic states; the writing makes it clear there's one Human government, one Zoltan government, one Rockman government... only the Engi and Lanius escape this, with the Engi being treated as hanger-ons to the Human Federation/Nameless Zoltan Government, which itself comes back to the broader racist aspect of very clearly organizing the species as 'the good species' (The Human/Zoltan/Engi loose alliance) and 'the bad species'. (Everyone else, except maybe the Crystals) You don't enter a 'Rock-Controlled Sector' and find this means the local government started out as a Rockman colony but seceded and aligned themselves with Slug colonists also in the area, or anything like that -and no, this isn't because the game keeps its details light and avoids worldbuilding. The game could absolutely have organized itself on different lines -even if it stuck to the species organization for gameplay reasons it could've made Sectors have two common species picked at random and named at the Sector Jump step, as one of many possible solutions- and indeed has oddities like 'Engi-Controlled Sectors' not actually showing any signs of the Engi being in control of the Sector.
A more low-key part of all this racism is that, rather bizarrely, the narrative pretty much never touches on actual biological differences between the species, while nonetheless pressing Fundaments Of Biology arguments to explain the sociopolitical dynamics we see. That is, we get told the Mantis are 'naturally warlike', and similar sentiments about Rockmen, but we don't hear about what Rockmen eat (Rocks? The same kind of stuff humans eat? Vegetation exclusively??), we don't actually hear anything about the biological underpinnings of the Mantis social model and in fact what we see of their social models is pretty difficult to reconcile with the implication that they're eusocial (Where are the hives or nests? Why do we never hear about queens in the eusocial animal sense? What is their family structure like?), Zoltan being 'energy beings' who can literally stand around in a room and radiate enough electricity to keep the lights on is never touched on outside raw gameplay (There's not even a blue option to have a Zoltan act as a battery in an event!) and instead we just get generic scifi tropes about 'energy beings'. (The Zoltan 'wise men' who can do openly supernatural stuff because Reasons, for example) This is part of why I do keep calling it racism and not, say, speciesism: because the writing really does approach these assorted Aliens In Space as being even less different from each other than the full diversity of human societies on actual Earth. This isn't one of those scifi stories cautioning that maybe we'll meet actual starfaring aliens and then they murder us all for inscrutable alien reasons. The 'aliens' are written as less alien than Star Trek aliens -who largely started life as obvious, deliberate expies of real human stuff. (eg the Klingons were originally very bluntly 'American concerns about the Soviet Union'; all the warrior culture and so on stuff only came later)
The Lanius are the only species that largely escapes all this openly bigoted nonsense, and it should be pointed out they were added by the advanced edition update, whose content had a different writer.
There is thus a temptation to foist off responsibility for the extremely unpleasant undertones to the writing onto the (first) writer, but it's a temptation I'm reluctant to give into. Even aside the obvious issue that the rest of the team okayed and implemented these really obviously racist bits of writing, the fundaments of gameplay are already questionable: what the general framework of the game suggests is that the Federation you fight for is the dominant power of the region, and is anti-racist, made up of every species (Except Lanius, who are introduced in a later patch and clearly in part being handled such that disabling advanced edition content produces a still-coherent whole, necessitating them not being part of the Federation), with the hostile Rebels being implicitly presented as Human supremacists and Very Evil, indirectly suggesting that Federation loyalists are opposed to such a view philosophically and thus presumably anti-racist...
... but then the depiction of the galaxy is species-segregated, where Sectors are defined first and foremost by which species is the dominant one. Notably, the game makes zero effort to suggest preferred conditions playing a part in this: it would be so easy to indicate each species has different climatological ideals such that you see things like an aquatic species being the dominant population of worlds whose surface is 99% ocean while said species naturally shun dryer worlds. Yet the game only sort-of suggests such with Slugs, and it's a pretty bizarre explanation: what kind of situation would even allow for the Slugs to develop adaptations only useful for a space-faring species operating in nebula? If their homeworld is ensconced in a nebula... that doesn't actually explain anything unless they've been a starfaring species for much longer than the game attempts to suggest!
The homeworld Sectors are understandable enough -I'd expect where a population first evolves to tend to be dominated by that population unless something concerning is happening like their species being conquered by an aggressively colonial people who vastly outnumber them- but this is very much the default framing of the game. Even 'Civilian Sectors' are really just 'Human-Controlled Sectors', even though they don't conform to the naming scheme. (Alongside Rebel-Controlled Sectors and the Rebel Stronghold also being Human-Controlled Sectors given the Rebels are 100% Human, with the Rebel Stronghold effectively taking the 'Human Homeworld Sector' slot) Regular Nebula Sectors and Pirate Sectors are the only Sector types that aren't operating on a species-segregated approach to defining the universe.
If, as seems likely, this gameplay mechanic stuff was decided separate from the writer... that's starting from an intensely racist mental model and to some fundamental extent is funneling any writing inside the framework in a racist direction, as the only reasonable explanations for such being so universal are to either assume the government itself deliberately organizes Sectors along racial lines or to, as the game actually went with, assume most species are intensely xenophobic such that the universe organically organizes primarily along racial lines.
Similarly, enemy ships cleave to this on a raw gameplay level: ship faction is defined on the species level (A ship is an Engi ship, or a Zoltan ship, or a Rockman ship, etc) and then the crews default to racial homogeny: only Pirate ships (Which pull at random from the Sector definition of accessible species) and Mantis ships cross racial lines. (Specifically, Mantis ships are allowed to have a handful of Engi to make up for the horrible Repair ability of Mantis crew) Even though we're told the Engi are longtime friends of the Federation and close to the Zoltan, you'll never actually see Humans or Zoltan alongside Engi unless it's a Pirate ship or you, the player, mixing crew!
Pirates themselves are, of course, depicted as morally repugnant, among other points being the only group that gives us slavers, and the game defaults to them being a guilt-free target for murder. So literally the only faction that actually cleaves to an ideal of unity across species is also depicted as uniformly disgusting and deserving of death.
I really doubt these kinds of decisions were made by the writer in specific. And there's no good reason to be doing this: these species are not, in fact, designed to produce distinct fighting styles as opponents such that non-mixed crews is somehow advantageous to the design. I've played games that work that way: FTL is not such a one.
...
What I find perhaps most baffling about all this racist nonsense is that I have never seen anyone anywhere allude to it as a thing at all, suggesting most players either don't notice it or don't see an issue with it. I'm used to a certain level of racism, misogyny, and so on making it into pop culture without people explicitly mentioning it because these are widespread in pop culture and a given case's examples are comparatively minor and/or subtle; I'm used to going in and sighing a few times at a bad scene or a cringe-y twist or whatever, even in games and so on that are widely praised and in fact even in cases where I do think the thing in question is otherwise pretty good.
FTL goes well past that territory, though, into the realm that I usually see get actual backlash, but... it didn't? For some reason? I find it especially bizarre given how heavy the game is on using Star Trek as a tonal foundation; one of Star Trek's positive distinctions is being a TV series that pushed back pretty hard against racism and so on. I'd have expected to be hearing about Star Trek fans getting offended by FTL using Star Trek as a foundation and yet having intense racism and so on, but nope. In fact, part of why I was interested in FTL is that I repeatedly saw self-identified Star Trek fans praising FTL and drawing positive comparisons to Star Trek!
I wish I could say that this aspect of FTL was not carried forward to Into The Breach, but even though in some sense it's accurate to say so, the reasons why aren't really 'they clearly improved on this topic'. Into The Breach just fundamentally gives itself much less opportunity to express racist sentiments; your four factions only get directly represented by one CEO and secondarily by your generic pilots, with the CEOs mostly getting one intro dialogue bit plus single-sentence briefings for individual missions. And correlated to racism is xenophobia, which Into The Breach's handling of the Vek has strong shades of; it's too easy to imagine that Into The Breach is coming from the same core place as FTL and just putting itself into a framework that somewhat cloaks the racism and whatnot, rather than having worked to uproot the bigoted thoughts.
This, more than anything, leaves me with mixed feelings about any possibility of an FTL 2: on the one hand, I'd really like to see a more put-together version of FTL that refines out a lot of FTL's most bizarre and problematic design decisions and brings out the real potential of the core framework.
On the other hand, I find it worryingly likely an FTL 2 would more or less exactly recreate these issues I'm talking about, and I personally would rather exist in a world where FTL 2 never comes to be than exist in a world where FTL 2 comes along, is exactly as openly bigoted as FTL, and garners massive and nigh-universal praise exactly as FTL did.
It's a depressingly plausible thought.
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Next time, we move on to player ships, starting with the literal first set; the Kestrel Cruisers.
See you then.
You're quite right to point this out, it's rather uncomfortable how much hate FTL professes against certain species. In particular, I was *really* bothered by how the Slugs constantly get portrayed as shifty scum, with a few "token good" Slugs rarely coming to the fore. One shudders to think what sort of beliefs the FTL team has to permit such foulness upfront.
ReplyDeleteThe Slugs are definitely the most blatant, yeah, where I remain confused that I never saw anyone comment on the writing around the Slugs in this regard before I got to the game myself.
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