FTL Analysis: Limited Access Augments
These Augments can only be acquired through events and/or by starting with them.
Note that none of them are Advanced Edition content, which is a bit surprising given most of these Augments are species-associated and Advanced Edition added a new species and gave them a Cruiser set. You'd think there'd be a Lanius-distinctive Augment, but nope. The Emergency Respirators are associated with Lanius by the game, but they can be bought and looted from regular randomness, so no, they don't actually fit to this category. It's odd.
Engi Medi-bot Dispersal
So long as a Medical Bay is installed and currently powered, all your crew currently aboard your ship heal for 1.67 HP a second if not currently inside the Medical Bay.
Can be acquired from an event, and the Engi Cruiser A starts with it.
60This doesn't work with a Cloning Bay, and its healing isn't affected by the tier of Medical Bay. 1.67 HP a second is pretty much exactly 1/4th the healing an unupgraded Medical Bay provides, for reference.
This isn't enough to let you completely shrug off fires, boarders, or oxygen deprivation, but it's enough to make them all substantially less of an issue. Instead of crew running into a fire or breach and having to duck out partway through for healing, they can finish the job with a respectable amount of HP and keep on healing once they're done. Similarly, you can largely shrug off incidental hits to manned Systems as far as crew damage goes; if the AI is hitting a System sufficiently regularly sufficiently quickly to overcome the healing, your actual concern is usually going to be running out of Hull, not the crewmember dying, given the AI's random targeting.
This thus is pretty widely valuable, helping in basically any fight that isn't a massive stomp in your favor. That's helpful, tending to cut off death spirals before they start; instead of being forced to flee a fire before finishing putting it out, your crew are much more likely to stick it out and prevent it from doing real damage that would've in turn led to other problems. (eg if the fire was going to hit your Shields System, and so would've opened the way for further damage)
You should basically never sell it if you acquire it/start with it... unless you have a Cloning Bay or intend to buy one, I guess.
Note that this provides two blue options, and is the best choice out of all blue options that apply for both events. Both events can also occur in a wide variety of Sectors, making it fairly likely to crop up. As such, it's actually worth considering holding onto it even if you swap in a Cloning Bay so it stops working -you'll get more Scrap out of either of the blue options than you would out of selling it, and the blue options function even if you lack a Medical Bay such that they shouldn't function!
Note that any hostile Engi ship equipped with a Medical Bay will have Engi Medibot Dispersal, making it extremely difficult to achieve a crewkill if you're not prepared to smash the Medical Bay. As these ships are of course crewed by Engi, it tends to be pretty difficult to make such a smashing stick! It's often easier to just blow up an Engi ship rather than go for the crewkill.
Drone Reactor Booster
All ship-board Drones move 25% faster.
Can be acquired from an event, and the Engi Cruiser B starts with it.
50Note that Drones move as fast as Rockmen by default. This thus brings ship-board Drones up to 62.5% of typical crew speed ie still horribly slow.
This isn't worthless, but the effect is very minor. You're probably better off selling it if you get it from an event. The Engi Cruiser B may wish to hold onto it until it has enough regular crew to not be horribly dependent on its Drones... or it may wish to sell the Augment early to help cover hiring real crew.
I'm honestly not sure why this doesn't straight-up double internal Drone speed. Internal Drones have so many fundamental, severe flaws that getting their speed in line with standard crew would still leave them pretty dubious. It certainly wouldn't make them gamebreakers.
Zoltan Shield
Start every fight with a Supershield. This Supershield completely prevents crew teleportation, Mind Control, and Hacking Drones from targeting your ship until the Supershield goes down, and the Supershield intercepts all weapons fire, even bombs. The Supershield has 5 HP, taking full damage from most weapons, with Ion weapons doing doubled damage and most beam weapons hitting twice for their regular damage. The Supershield cannot be restored in combat, except by the Shield Overcharger Drone.
Can be acquired from an event, and all three Zoltan Cruisers start with it.
80
Bombs-wise, if it doesn't do Ion damage or System damage it will explode to no effect outside the targeted ship. (ie Fire Bombs, Crystal Lockdown Bombs, Healing Bursts, and Repair Bursts should not be launched at a Supershield unless you have a Zoltan Shield Bypass) The Ion Bomb does double damage, just like regular Ion weapons, where other bombs will do damage to the Supershield equal to their System damage.
Note that the Supershield does absolutely nothing about solar flares doing Hull damage, nor do they prevent fires from being started by them, and in fact if you have no regular Shield bubble but a Supershield is up the solar flare will affect you as if you had no Shielding at all. (ie 1-2 Hull damage instead of 0-1, and more fires started) Conversely, Pulsars normally will hit non-Shield Systems even as they Ionize Shields, but if a Pulsar hits a Supershield this will prevent any Systems from being Ionized.
Also, as I touched on last post, the Zoltan Supershield is, obnoxiously, absolutely no protection against boarding events, and indeed offers no blue options whatsoever. An event involves asteroids doing Hull damage, System damage, and starting fires? Supershield does nothing to protect you. Blow up a weapons platform and the game decides the explosion hits your ship? Supershield does nothing to protect you. Boarders are supposed to teleport aboard your ship? Game lies and claims they 'must have a supershield bypass unit', and spawns the full boarder complement anyway.
I'd be disappointed if there was no acknowledgment whatsoever, but willing to shrug it off as being a big, complex game, where it's difficult to keep everything straight and completely avoid logical contradictions, but then the game consistently inserts that stupid bit of text about bypass units. They noticed this bit of nonsense and made a widespread effort to account for it, but instead of that effort being to make the Supershield have a logical, useful benefit consistent with its combat mechanics, it was to grind the player's nose in how nonsensical it is for the event to go through anyway.
This is especially frustrating since the Zoltan Supershield is, in player hands, frustratingly underwhelming. At the beginning of the game, it will usually survive a full volley of the enemy's weaponry, which may or may not be a useful delay, but as far as blocking boarders and Mind Control and all it's never going to be a long enough delay to make it feasible to completely prevent them from using these effects. Past the beginning of the game... it very slightly reduces your average Hull damage over the course of a run and slightly tilts things away from rapid catastrophic bad luck having a chance to happen.
Zoltan Shield
Start every fight with a Supershield. This Supershield completely prevents crew teleportation, Mind Control, and Hacking Drones from targeting your ship until the Supershield goes down, and the Supershield intercepts all weapons fire, even bombs. The Supershield has 5 HP, taking full damage from most weapons, with Ion weapons doing doubled damage and most beam weapons hitting twice for their regular damage. The Supershield cannot be restored in combat, except by the Shield Overcharger Drone.
Can be acquired from an event, and all three Zoltan Cruisers start with it.
80Bombs-wise, if it doesn't do Ion damage or System damage it will explode to no effect outside the targeted ship. (ie Fire Bombs, Crystal Lockdown Bombs, Healing Bursts, and Repair Bursts should not be launched at a Supershield unless you have a Zoltan Shield Bypass) The Ion Bomb does double damage, just like regular Ion weapons, where other bombs will do damage to the Supershield equal to their System damage.
Note that the Supershield does absolutely nothing about solar flares doing Hull damage, nor do they prevent fires from being started by them, and in fact if you have no regular Shield bubble but a Supershield is up the solar flare will affect you as if you had no Shielding at all. (ie 1-2 Hull damage instead of 0-1, and more fires started) Conversely, Pulsars normally will hit non-Shield Systems even as they Ionize Shields, but if a Pulsar hits a Supershield this will prevent any Systems from being Ionized.
Also, as I touched on last post, the Zoltan Supershield is, obnoxiously, absolutely no protection against boarding events, and indeed offers no blue options whatsoever. An event involves asteroids doing Hull damage, System damage, and starting fires? Supershield does nothing to protect you. Blow up a weapons platform and the game decides the explosion hits your ship? Supershield does nothing to protect you. Boarders are supposed to teleport aboard your ship? Game lies and claims they 'must have a supershield bypass unit', and spawns the full boarder complement anyway.
I'd be disappointed if there was no acknowledgment whatsoever, but willing to shrug it off as being a big, complex game, where it's difficult to keep everything straight and completely avoid logical contradictions, but then the game consistently inserts that stupid bit of text about bypass units. They noticed this bit of nonsense and made a widespread effort to account for it, but instead of that effort being to make the Supershield have a logical, useful benefit consistent with its combat mechanics, it was to grind the player's nose in how nonsensical it is for the event to go through anyway.
This is especially frustrating since the Zoltan Supershield is, in player hands, frustratingly underwhelming. At the beginning of the game, it will usually survive a full volley of the enemy's weaponry, which may or may not be a useful delay, but as far as blocking boarders and Mind Control and all it's never going to be a long enough delay to make it feasible to completely prevent them from using these effects. Past the beginning of the game... it very slightly reduces your average Hull damage over the course of a run and slightly tilts things away from rapid catastrophic bad luck having a chance to happen.
Enemy ships simply have their firepower rise too much, too fast, and unlike the player AI ships aren't designed so that having Hacking or a Crew Teleporter or Mind Control means sacrifices are being made; the player buying such a System may be concretely choosing between installing an additional weapon -or swapping out for a better one, such as replacing a Burst Laser I with a Burst Laser II- vs installing one of these Systems that Supershields blocks completely. The AI just throws these things in for free; the only way an enemy ship can be meaningfully screwed over by the player having a Supershield is if it's equipped with multiple bombs that can't hurt Supershields... when the AI doesn't equip duplicate weapons, there are exactly 4 bombs that can't damage Supershields, and the AI is only allowed to equip 2 of the bombs in that subset, meaning the absolute best-case scenario is that they have both a Fire Bomb and a Crystal Lockdown Bomb...
... except that's actually a lie, because no ship class has both of those in its allowed list of weapons. You'll only ever see a ship waste a single weapon slot on a weapon that can't affect your Zoltan Supershield.
In conjunction with events completely disrespecting Zoltan Supershields, they're severely limited in their effectiveness. I wouldn't quite say you should sell it off -occasionally absorbing a missile hit or the like does mean it saves you repair costs, which can add up to more Scrap value than you'd gain from selling it- but it's appalling that the Supershield is so bad I've legitimately given serious thought to the possibility that this might be a valid argument.
If you happen to get a hold of the Weapon Pre-Igniter simultaneous to having a Zoltan Shield, it actually suddenly turns into a pretty decent Augment. You'll be able to knock out Weapons to prevent them from immediately busting through the Supershield, or hit their Crew Teleporter if they've got one so they don't get the chance to board your ship because the Supershield is in the way, or do such serious damage their crew is too focused on repairs to board you, or knock out Mind Control before it gets an opportunity to mess with you, or knock out Hacking so they don't get to launch the Hacking Drone, etc. Among other points, knocking out Weapons and ending up with a missile as the only actively charging weapon suddenly isn't you being mocked, as the Supershield will catch the missile and you have time to do more damage and all.
But without the Weapon Pre-Igniter, this is a shockingly underwhelming Augment.
In and of itself this isn't a problem, but it's extremely obvious the game is proceeding on the assumption that the Supershield is amazingly useful, as if it's one of the best Augments in the game or something. Its Scrap value of 80 is the default highest cost, with only the Weapon Pre-Igniter having a higher Scrap value, and one playable Zoltan Cruiser is actually expected to get by with no initial Shield bubble at all, on the idea of the Supershield providing the necessary protection. If it just straight-up killed boarding events, its combat utility would be lackluster but I'd see where they were coming from. As-is, it's one of the more blatant examples of the devs just plain not understanding their own game.
It's particularly baffling that the Advanced Edition update did literally nothing to address its numerous inadequacies. You'd think they'd have picked up a clue by then.
... except that's actually a lie, because no ship class has both of those in its allowed list of weapons. You'll only ever see a ship waste a single weapon slot on a weapon that can't affect your Zoltan Supershield.
In conjunction with events completely disrespecting Zoltan Supershields, they're severely limited in their effectiveness. I wouldn't quite say you should sell it off -occasionally absorbing a missile hit or the like does mean it saves you repair costs, which can add up to more Scrap value than you'd gain from selling it- but it's appalling that the Supershield is so bad I've legitimately given serious thought to the possibility that this might be a valid argument.
If you happen to get a hold of the Weapon Pre-Igniter simultaneous to having a Zoltan Shield, it actually suddenly turns into a pretty decent Augment. You'll be able to knock out Weapons to prevent them from immediately busting through the Supershield, or hit their Crew Teleporter if they've got one so they don't get the chance to board your ship because the Supershield is in the way, or do such serious damage their crew is too focused on repairs to board you, or knock out Mind Control before it gets an opportunity to mess with you, or knock out Hacking so they don't get to launch the Hacking Drone, etc. Among other points, knocking out Weapons and ending up with a missile as the only actively charging weapon suddenly isn't you being mocked, as the Supershield will catch the missile and you have time to do more damage and all.
But without the Weapon Pre-Igniter, this is a shockingly underwhelming Augment.
In and of itself this isn't a problem, but it's extremely obvious the game is proceeding on the assumption that the Supershield is amazingly useful, as if it's one of the best Augments in the game or something. Its Scrap value of 80 is the default highest cost, with only the Weapon Pre-Igniter having a higher Scrap value, and one playable Zoltan Cruiser is actually expected to get by with no initial Shield bubble at all, on the idea of the Supershield providing the necessary protection. If it just straight-up killed boarding events, its combat utility would be lackluster but I'd see where they were coming from. As-is, it's one of the more blatant examples of the devs just plain not understanding their own game.
It's particularly baffling that the Advanced Edition update did literally nothing to address its numerous inadequacies. You'd think they'd have picked up a clue by then.
This is another Augment (blatantly) used by the AI, with all Zoltan ships being equipped with it, whether in pirate form or not. The third stage of the Flagship also gets a Supershield, though its Supershield is special, having a higher max HP and with the Flagship able to re-spawn it during the fight, so the Flagship isn't really an example of the AI using this Augment.
In any event, it's much more useful on enemy ships than on your ship, as the game is tuned so that you usually need to strike hard and fast to disable key Systems if you want to avoid taking catastrophic damage, so being delayed by a full volley is a serious problem. Similarly, the player ships that start out focused on boarding often have such limited non-boarding offense to start with that they either can't break a Supershield, or have to wait a long time before they can launch boarders, where absolutely no enemy ship that has a Crew Teleporter has less than 2 weapons, ever. Thus, enemy Supershields can force the player to run, thanks to having absolutely no ability to get through them, where the player having a Supershield is only a brief delay of enemy boarders.
There's also the consideration of the missile-interception mechanic. A player Supershield intercepting a missile is mildly nice, since that would've been Hull damage, but it's only a minor, temporary inconvenience to the AI's ability to blow you up. An enemy Supershield blocking your own missiles can screw over a strategy that normally uses a missile to damage Shields enough to clear the way for other weapons, especially if your other weapons all charge slower than the missile, forcing you to choose between wasting one or more missile ammunition (Which costs you into future fights, remember!) on breaking the Supershield or letting it horribly delay you doing real damage to save that ammo.
These are not remotely equivalent tradeoffs.
Mantis Pheromones
All (non-Drone) crew move 25% faster, even aboard the enemy ship.
Can be acquired from an event, and all three Mantis Cruisers start with it.
50This is cute, but not particularly great, particularly since usually if you have it your crew defaults to being Mantis-heavy. If it affected all speeds, including attack speed, it would be pretty fantastic. As-is, between how narrow its effect is and which ships that have it by default... you should strongly consider selling it anytime that would push you over the Scrap necessary to buy something of significance at a Store, such as a Zoltan Shield Bypass, as in practice the primary gain of significance it provides is that your non-Mantis crew will get to breaches, fires, and damaged Systems faster. And if you're successfully using boarding strategies, this stuff won't happen very often at all!
A big part of the problem is that boarding actions actually place little emphasis on crew speed. You usually teleport exactly where you want to go, and then either the enemy ship has a Door Control Subsystem and the primary speed factor is doors delaying your crew, in which case often it's faster to teleport them back to your ship and then back onto the enemy ship, or (far more often) they don't have a Door Control Subsystem and you maybe care about speed but probably not because enemy ships are usually small. There's only a handful of enemy ships that are reasonably large such that movement speed can be a factor of significance.
Its defensive value is greater, but the Mantis Cruisers are all focused on offensive boarding, and the Mantis Cruisers are all pretty decent at using venting to fend off boarders anyway, making it less important to be able to quickly respond with crew. It can be nice for some other ship to get it from the event that provides it... which has the problem that said event is finicky...
... this is seriously just a bafflingly bad Augment, honestly.
Bizarrely, no enemy ship uses this, even though you might expect it to be widespread on Mantis ships.
Slug Repair Gel
Breaches automatically close over time.
Can be acquired from an event, and all three Slug Cruisers start with it.
60One of the best innate Augments by a wide margin, and particularly useful to the Slug Cruisers due to them all lacking Sensors. While breaches can't get worse over time the way fires can, they can still get crew killed if eg you ignore a breach in combat as not an urgent problem, and then end up having to run someone through the room once its oxygen is depleted, and this leads to them dying while fighting boarders or getting hit by weapons fire or whatever.
Among other points, Slug Repair Gel makes enemy Boarding Drones and Ion Intruders much less threatening; normally a Boarding Drone hitting a System means you can only fight it briefly before having to retreat for healing (Or dying, if using a Cloning Bay), often letting it continue to run rampant while you're waiting for your crew to be ready. Ion Intruders are slightly less consistently problematic due to wandering and not attacking crew, but it's easy to make a judgment error and end up with crew in a breached room dying because the Ion Intruder stunned them for longer than you realized would happen, or you guessed it right but then enemy weapons fire threw in some extra damage. Either way, these Drones can be a pain and a serious threat to your crew normally, but Slug Repair Gel closes breaches fast enough that a room will zero out on oxygen only very briefly if no crew help close it.
But even when not dealing with those Drones, Slug Repair Gel is nice to have, preventing myriad problems without you having to even know they exist.
At the same time, it's not so essential that selling it is liable to be a mistake, letting you cash it in if you happen to end up just short of buying something really good, without worrying too much that it might end up getting the run killed to give up the Augment. A 30 Scrap injection when needed is pretty useful!
One of the best-designed Augments, oddly enough.
Enemy Slug ships will have this Augment, though unusually pirate versions will not. As the player has either little cause or little opportunity to use options that very reliably cause breaches, this isn't super-important in practice, but it does mean that if your ship is unusually weighted toward causing breaches (eg you've ended up with 2 Hull Smasher IIs and a Breach Missile as your best loadout) you may wish to avoid Slug-controlled Sectors more than usual, as you'll have a non-obvious but notable performance loss against Slug ships since their crew won't be tied up by breaches for as long.
Rock Plating
Anytime an attack would do Hull damage, there is a 15% chance for the Hull damage to be negated. If a System or Subsystem was hit, that System or Subsystem will take damage as normal; only the Hull damage in specific is negated. Similarly, crew will still take crew damage.
Can be from from an event, and all three Rock Cruisers start with it.
80
You should never sell Rock Plating unless absolutely desperate. Canceling out 15% of all Hull damage can easily hit the Scrap value of selling Rock Plating (If it prevents 10 damage in the late game, there you go), not even touching on the possibility of it preventing a run wipe.
A few things to keep in mind; first of all, Rock Plating can prevent Hull damage regardless of source. This means not just that it can prevent Hull damage from weapons, but also the Hull damage from a System being finished off by crew combat or fire damage, the Hull damage a solar flare can cause, the Hull damage an ASB can cause, and anything else I might be forgetting. The only caveat is that it doesn't protect from events directly inflicting Hull damage...
... and that caveat comes with the caveat that there are multiple events where Rock Plating either invisibly, passively prevents the event from having a Hull damage outcome, or where having Rock Plating means you can select a blue option to 100% reliably avoid Hull damage.
The next point to note is that its 15% chance to prevent Hull damage provides a greater average longevity boost than you might intuitively expect, since a Hull point saved by it can be re-saved by it; while it won't happen very often, it's completely possible to be down to one Hull, and survive multiple hits in a row thanks to Rock Plating. Thus, it provides something closer to a 20% boost in average durability, rather than the 15% you might intuitively expect.
Third, it doesn't roll per point, it rolls per source. Thus, if it triggers on a Breach Missile, that's 4 damage you didn't take. As such, how far it extends your durability actually depends on where the rolls happen, with significant potential for it to swing upward simply by being allocated on individually powerful hits. Let's say you take 5 hits, one of which is a Breach Missile and the other four are Burst Laser hits; if the Rock Plating triggers on a Burst Laser hit, it cancels 1/8th of the damage you should've taken. (Or 12.5%, if you want a comparison to its trigger chance) If it triggers on the Breach Missile, it cancels half the damage you should've taken. (Notice that in this example a 'bad' placement is very slightly below the damage reduction its trigger chance suggests, where a 'good' placement is hugely above what its trigger chance suggests; this generalizes, such that it's strictly incorrect but accurate enough to say the chance to trigger is more like a floor on how much damage you expect to have canceled)
Rock Plating is by far the best of the Augments a ship can start with, and seriously you should never sell it unless absolutely desperate.
Rock Plating is another Augment enemy ships actually use, with all Rock ships equipped with it, even if they're pirate versions. Surprisingly, this usually isn't a big deal, tending to only slightly delay a ship's destruction; if you're playing right, you're often doing stuff like smashing their Weapons System anyway, where being delayed in killing them doesn't offer an opportunity for them to get damage in on you. It's generally only a problem if paired up with eg solar flares, where the fight stalling can be an actual problem for you.
Indeed, running into pirate Rock ships can be a nice little boon, as Rock Plating triggering may allow you to achieve a crewkill with a kit that is normally incapable of pulling this off because the ship will explode before the crew all die, such as a lasers+missiles offense.
Non-pirate Rock ships almost never provide this opportunity because they'll be manned entirely by Rockmen, so unless Rock Plating triggers a lot the enemy crew's combination of 50% more HP and immunity to fire damage will usually trump Rock Plating's Hull-extending effect as far as the balance of crew damage vs Hull damage on conventional weapons. But with pirate ships, particularly if you have decent Sensors, it can crop up surprisingly readily.
It can be a bit of an annoying time-waster for it to show up on enemy ships, admittedly, but as far as raw 'player-as-game-agent' goes it's rarely a problem.
Rock Plating strictly only provides blue options for three events. None of them are great, but Rock Plating is good enough that this isn't a big deal. The first is removing the possibility of taking damage in step 1 of the Hidden Crystal Worlds chain. Another is starting a fight with the enemy Engine's disabled, which is pretty nice. The third is an assured reward at no risk -it's arguably not the best option for this event, as the Crew Teleporter can get you free crew or a higher payout (But it can randomly give you a lower payout), and using a Repair Drone or Defense Drone will give you either a Quest marker or a free weapon in addition to Scrap... but that latter case inexplicably involves your ship taking damage... so the Rock Plating is the most stable blue option for this event, which is valuable in its own right.
Titanium System Casing
Anytime an attack would inflict System damage, there is a 15% chance for the System or Subsystem to take no damage from the attack. Hull and crew damage will still be inflicted, where applicable.
Can be acquired from an event, and the Stealth Cruiser A starts with it.
80
This is clearly conceptually equivalent to Rock Plating, but is vastly inferior in practice. Canceling System damage can be a lifesaver, but you can't count on it, not even in an 'on average, it will definitely help in a meaningful way' sort of manner. For one thing, it doesn't even have the Rock Plating Hail Mary insane luck potential; Rock Plating can, in fact, let you survive 30 hits in a row on 1 Hull. It probably won't happen, but it's certainly possible to eg survive three hits in a row and then win the fight. Titanium System Casing can, sure, preserve a System indefinitely if you get really lucky -oh wait, your entire ship exploded, making the System's survival useless. Nor does Titanium System Casing ever provide any blue options.
Enemy Slug ships will have this Augment, though unusually pirate versions will not. As the player has either little cause or little opportunity to use options that very reliably cause breaches, this isn't super-important in practice, but it does mean that if your ship is unusually weighted toward causing breaches (eg you've ended up with 2 Hull Smasher IIs and a Breach Missile as your best loadout) you may wish to avoid Slug-controlled Sectors more than usual, as you'll have a non-obvious but notable performance loss against Slug ships since their crew won't be tied up by breaches for as long.
Rock Plating
Anytime an attack would do Hull damage, there is a 15% chance for the Hull damage to be negated. If a System or Subsystem was hit, that System or Subsystem will take damage as normal; only the Hull damage in specific is negated. Similarly, crew will still take crew damage.
Can be from from an event, and all three Rock Cruisers start with it.
80You should never sell Rock Plating unless absolutely desperate. Canceling out 15% of all Hull damage can easily hit the Scrap value of selling Rock Plating (If it prevents 10 damage in the late game, there you go), not even touching on the possibility of it preventing a run wipe.
A few things to keep in mind; first of all, Rock Plating can prevent Hull damage regardless of source. This means not just that it can prevent Hull damage from weapons, but also the Hull damage from a System being finished off by crew combat or fire damage, the Hull damage a solar flare can cause, the Hull damage an ASB can cause, and anything else I might be forgetting. The only caveat is that it doesn't protect from events directly inflicting Hull damage...
... and that caveat comes with the caveat that there are multiple events where Rock Plating either invisibly, passively prevents the event from having a Hull damage outcome, or where having Rock Plating means you can select a blue option to 100% reliably avoid Hull damage.
The next point to note is that its 15% chance to prevent Hull damage provides a greater average longevity boost than you might intuitively expect, since a Hull point saved by it can be re-saved by it; while it won't happen very often, it's completely possible to be down to one Hull, and survive multiple hits in a row thanks to Rock Plating. Thus, it provides something closer to a 20% boost in average durability, rather than the 15% you might intuitively expect.
Third, it doesn't roll per point, it rolls per source. Thus, if it triggers on a Breach Missile, that's 4 damage you didn't take. As such, how far it extends your durability actually depends on where the rolls happen, with significant potential for it to swing upward simply by being allocated on individually powerful hits. Let's say you take 5 hits, one of which is a Breach Missile and the other four are Burst Laser hits; if the Rock Plating triggers on a Burst Laser hit, it cancels 1/8th of the damage you should've taken. (Or 12.5%, if you want a comparison to its trigger chance) If it triggers on the Breach Missile, it cancels half the damage you should've taken. (Notice that in this example a 'bad' placement is very slightly below the damage reduction its trigger chance suggests, where a 'good' placement is hugely above what its trigger chance suggests; this generalizes, such that it's strictly incorrect but accurate enough to say the chance to trigger is more like a floor on how much damage you expect to have canceled)
Rock Plating is by far the best of the Augments a ship can start with, and seriously you should never sell it unless absolutely desperate.
Rock Plating is another Augment enemy ships actually use, with all Rock ships equipped with it, even if they're pirate versions. Surprisingly, this usually isn't a big deal, tending to only slightly delay a ship's destruction; if you're playing right, you're often doing stuff like smashing their Weapons System anyway, where being delayed in killing them doesn't offer an opportunity for them to get damage in on you. It's generally only a problem if paired up with eg solar flares, where the fight stalling can be an actual problem for you.
Indeed, running into pirate Rock ships can be a nice little boon, as Rock Plating triggering may allow you to achieve a crewkill with a kit that is normally incapable of pulling this off because the ship will explode before the crew all die, such as a lasers+missiles offense.
Non-pirate Rock ships almost never provide this opportunity because they'll be manned entirely by Rockmen, so unless Rock Plating triggers a lot the enemy crew's combination of 50% more HP and immunity to fire damage will usually trump Rock Plating's Hull-extending effect as far as the balance of crew damage vs Hull damage on conventional weapons. But with pirate ships, particularly if you have decent Sensors, it can crop up surprisingly readily.
It can be a bit of an annoying time-waster for it to show up on enemy ships, admittedly, but as far as raw 'player-as-game-agent' goes it's rarely a problem.
Rock Plating strictly only provides blue options for three events. None of them are great, but Rock Plating is good enough that this isn't a big deal. The first is removing the possibility of taking damage in step 1 of the Hidden Crystal Worlds chain. Another is starting a fight with the enemy Engine's disabled, which is pretty nice. The third is an assured reward at no risk -it's arguably not the best option for this event, as the Crew Teleporter can get you free crew or a higher payout (But it can randomly give you a lower payout), and using a Repair Drone or Defense Drone will give you either a Quest marker or a free weapon in addition to Scrap... but that latter case inexplicably involves your ship taking damage... so the Rock Plating is the most stable blue option for this event, which is valuable in its own right.
Titanium System Casing
Anytime an attack would inflict System damage, there is a 15% chance for the System or Subsystem to take no damage from the attack. Hull and crew damage will still be inflicted, where applicable.
Can be acquired from an event, and the Stealth Cruiser A starts with it.
80This is clearly conceptually equivalent to Rock Plating, but is vastly inferior in practice. Canceling System damage can be a lifesaver, but you can't count on it, not even in an 'on average, it will definitely help in a meaningful way' sort of manner. For one thing, it doesn't even have the Rock Plating Hail Mary insane luck potential; Rock Plating can, in fact, let you survive 30 hits in a row on 1 Hull. It probably won't happen, but it's certainly possible to eg survive three hits in a row and then win the fight. Titanium System Casing can, sure, preserve a System indefinitely if you get really lucky -oh wait, your entire ship exploded, making the System's survival useless. Nor does Titanium System Casing ever provide any blue options.
It also suffers from the fact that System impairment isn't restricted to System damage; Ion effects don't care about Titanium System Casing, for example, nor does Hacking. As far as I can tell it also offers zero protection against fires and crew doing System damage -it doesn't seem to slow their damage by 15% or anything like that.
Titanium System Casing would've been pretty solid if it did something like add an ablative layer of System HP to all Systems and Subsystems. Then you could count on essential Systems functioning through at least one stray hit. Mind, it would still have the issue that if you're forced to run over and firefight or close breaches when System damage happens then System damage being prevented per se is instantly less valuable, but being able to count on it would be great, and indeed the functional value could be outright framed as a specific Scrap value beyond what the Titanium System Casing's own Scrap cost is. (In the sense that upgrading all your Systems and Subsystems one tier to give them an HP buffer would cost dozens to hundreds of Scrap)
As-is, though?...
You shouldn't necessarily sell it at the very first Store when running the Stealth Cruiser A, but you should probably do so if you get it from the event, and you should probably sell it pretty early with the Stealth Cruiser A, such as if selling it will let you purchase Shields. The 40 Scrap it sells for is far more useful than the Augment itself.
Crystal Vengeance
Anytime your ship takes damage, there is a 10% chance for your ship to automatically fire a missile at the enemy ship, completely bypassing regular Shield bubbles. This missile does 1 Normal damage and has a 10% chance to breach the room it hits.
Can be acquired from an event, and both Crystal Cruisers start with it.
80
Junk. Sell it.
Seriously, why does this exist?
And no, it doesn't provide any blue options. I'm dead serious about it being junk.
I think enemy Crystal ships will, in fact, be equipped with Crystal Vengeance, but I'm not 100% sure. The wider internet doesn't seem to care about the topic, and with what a tremendous pain it is to hit the Hidden Crystal Worlds it's not terribly easy to test. I've personally fought literally one Crystal ship in all my runs; that it didn't trigger in that one fight is not indicative.
Titanium System Casing would've been pretty solid if it did something like add an ablative layer of System HP to all Systems and Subsystems. Then you could count on essential Systems functioning through at least one stray hit. Mind, it would still have the issue that if you're forced to run over and firefight or close breaches when System damage happens then System damage being prevented per se is instantly less valuable, but being able to count on it would be great, and indeed the functional value could be outright framed as a specific Scrap value beyond what the Titanium System Casing's own Scrap cost is. (In the sense that upgrading all your Systems and Subsystems one tier to give them an HP buffer would cost dozens to hundreds of Scrap)
As-is, though?...
You shouldn't necessarily sell it at the very first Store when running the Stealth Cruiser A, but you should probably do so if you get it from the event, and you should probably sell it pretty early with the Stealth Cruiser A, such as if selling it will let you purchase Shields. The 40 Scrap it sells for is far more useful than the Augment itself.
Crystal Vengeance
Anytime your ship takes damage, there is a 10% chance for your ship to automatically fire a missile at the enemy ship, completely bypassing regular Shield bubbles. This missile does 1 Normal damage and has a 10% chance to breach the room it hits.
Can be acquired from an event, and both Crystal Cruisers start with it.
80Junk. Sell it.
Seriously, why does this exist?
And no, it doesn't provide any blue options. I'm dead serious about it being junk.
I think enemy Crystal ships will, in fact, be equipped with Crystal Vengeance, but I'm not 100% sure. The wider internet doesn't seem to care about the topic, and with what a tremendous pain it is to hit the Hidden Crystal Worlds it's not terribly easy to test. I've personally fought literally one Crystal ship in all my runs; that it didn't trigger in that one fight is not indicative.
Oh, and as an additional bit of frustration, even though conceptually this is the same type of projectile as the laser-style Crystal weapons, where those can penetrate exactly one Shield layer this thing's projectile goes right through all Shield layers like a missile weapon. And yeah, sure, Crystal Vengeance would be even more horrendously bad if it could be blocked by Shields, but that would be fixed by making the Crystal weapons bypass Shields. Or by replacing the Crystal Vengeance with a completely different Augment that actually does something of worth.
It's difficult to defend the Crystal Vengeance bringing in these kinds of conceptual problems when its gameplay design is so unbearably bad.
Damaged Stasis Pod
Does nothing on its own.
30
This can be expended in an event to gain a Crystal crewmember, who can then potentially open the way to the Hidden Crystal Worlds. Beyond that, it's junk, and its event always lets you choose between it or a weapon and some Scrap; you should, in a run that's trying to win, probably just go for the weapon and Scrap. Though that in part has to do with how lackluster Crystal crewmembers are, which is for a later post.
Damaged Stasis Pod
Does nothing on its own.
30This can be expended in an event to gain a Crystal crewmember, who can then potentially open the way to the Hidden Crystal Worlds. Beyond that, it's junk, and its event always lets you choose between it or a weapon and some Scrap; you should, in a run that's trying to win, probably just go for the weapon and Scrap. Though that in part has to do with how lackluster Crystal crewmembers are, which is for a later post.
Said blue event usage is, unsurprisingly, the only blue option offered by Damaged Stasis Pod.
And yes it's not part of the initial kit of any player ships. I've put it in this section because it doesn't go into the larger Augment pool: you can't find it in a Store or have a generic Augment-generating event give it to you. Where else would I put it?
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Next time, we move on to crew, starting with an overview of crew mechanics.
See you then.
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