The PC game FTL: Faster Than Light has dozens of different augmentations that improve your ship in various ways. Many of these augmentations offer unique benefits that can’t be gained through any other means. The main advantage of augmentations is that they don’t cost energy, though you are limited to only three at once. FTL augmentations improve your FTL capabilities and even interfere with enemy FTL capabilities. These augmentations are very focused, but generally helpful and many will help your earn more resources than they cost. The following guide to FTL augmentations in FTL: Faster Than Light will help you determine which augmentations are best for your needs.
Adv. FTL Navigation (60 Scrap) – Adv FTL Navigation completely changes the way you play the game. Once you have this augmentation, you want to make a beeline towards the exit beacon and then continue to explore areas beyond it. You can safely explore just about anywhere on the map and then instantly move back to any previously explored beacon with just a single jump. This is particularly useful for exploring dead ends and exploring large beacon fields that are sometimes beyond the exit beacon. The one danger to using this is that you can’t explore a beacon that the rebel fleet has captured or a beacon where you left behind an undefeated enemy ship. Still, combined with fast engines or Distraction Bouys, this potentially lets you explore almost the entire map of a sector, which is a great way to earn resources.
FTL Recharge Booster (50 Scrap) – The main benefit of the FTL Recharge Booster is that it helps you escape dangerous sectors more quickly, since it increases the recharge speed of your FTL by 25%. Improving your engines gives you an identical benefit, as well as extra evasion, but you have to improve your reactor as well. Up to level 4 engines, the engines are the better deal. After that, it depends on whether you need evasion more or need to save scrap more. You can equip multiple on your ship at once. All of that extra speed should pay off in allowing you to explore more of each sector. If you get this for free from an event, never sell it until you have a chance to get a third better augmentation.
FTL Jammer (30 Scrap) – At a cost of just 30 scrap, the FTL Jammer is almost certain to pay for itself at least once during most games. It doubles the time that enemy ships take to charge FTL. This will usually allow you to prevent at least one ship from escaping which should easily earn you at least 30 scrap. If you have a weapon set up that can easily prevent escape, this isn’t worth it. But if you are primarily reliant on lasers, the extra time is particularly helpful and this is cheap enough that you won’t really notice the cost even if you never get good use out of it.
Distraction Bouys (55 Scrap) – Effectively, Distraction Bouys give you one extra jump in every sector before the rebels catch up with your ship. One extra jump per system tends to give you about a 25 to 30 extra scrap per sector. This augmentation should easily pay for itself in three sectors. It is completely worthless in the final sector of the game, so try to sell it in sector 7, assuming you can find a store.
