FTL: Advanced Edition News Update – Clone Bays, Hacking And More

FTL developer Subset Games has announced a wealth of new features coming with the free “advanced edition” update.

Late last year, Subset Games, the developer of the incredibly addictive FTL: Faster Than Light roguelike space sim, announced that the game was making its way to tablets, alongside an absolutely free advanced edition update for all current and future owners of the game. The developer has been quite for a while, but has now shed a bit more light on some of the new systems, subsystems, and features we can look forward to in the coming update.

The three new systems announced were the Clone Bay, Hacking and Mind Control, while the Backup Battery was announced as a new subystem.

The Clone Bay replaces your Med Bay, and rather than healing up your troops, it simply clones them when they fall in battle. It should become a quick favorite of those who favor using the teleporter to beam into an enemy ship, rather than fighting with external ship weapons.

The Hacking system allows you you to launch a hacking drone that attaches to a chosen system on the enemy vessel. As a passive effect, that system’s doors will be blocked (delaying enemy crew) and you’ll be granted detailed vision of that system. You’ll also then be able to initiate a hacking pulse which affects each system slightly differently, such as draining an enemy’s shields, or depleting an enemy’s weapon charge.

The Mind Control system temporarily turns a single enemy into an ally. Upgrading the system will increase the duration of the control as well as providing a health and combat boost to your new minion. The caveat of mind control is you need vision of an enemy to use it, and the telepathic “Slug” race is immune.

And finally, the Backup Battery is a new subsystem that when used, temporarily provides your ship with an additional four bars of battery.

Some other minor tweaks that Subset announced was some visual upgrades to quests, as well as the addition of a “Hard” difficulty level.

Subset still doesn’t have a solid date for when they think the update and the iPad version will be ready, but will be sure to let us know when they do.

Source: FTL Blog