FTL: Faster Than Light Wiki
Register
Advertisement
FTL: Faster Than Light Wiki
A fire on the ship

Fires on a ship can occur when it is hit by weapons (lasers, missiles, bombs, and beams - and only by those that have chances to start fires), asteroids (which can either cause a breach, or fires, or no additional effect), or due to solar flares. Some random events can also start fires.

Many weapons and drones can start fires, but some of them have much higher chances, especially: Fire Beam (80%, per tile), Anti-Ship Fire Drone (90%, per tile), and Fire Bomb (100%, 1-2 fires in a target room). Fire beams can be blocked by a regular shield barrier (1 is enough) or Zoltan Shield, while a Fire Bomb can be dodged. Fire beams deal damage to Zoltan Shield (1+1 damage by Fire Beam, 1 damage by fire drone), but a Fire Bomb has no effect on it.

Fires spread from tile to tile and can spread between rooms. The speed of fire spreading is randomised. Fires can quickly get out of control, especially in a four-tile room. (for more details, see Fire spread)

Fires slowly damage crew and systems in the room: 2.128 damage per second for each fire in a room to non-immune crew, 0.08 system damage per second for each fire in a room (same as a single boarder). Fires also consume oxygen (0.96% per second for each fire in a room) and produce distinguishable sound, which gets louder with more fires. When fires completely burn down a system, they also deal 1 point of hull damage. Rock Plating and Titanium System Casing do not protect hull and systems from fire damage.

Rock crew and crew/boarding drones are immune to fire damage.

Dealing with fires[]

  • Send crewmembers in to extinguish the flames. Most races extinguish fire based on their repair skill, so Engi are the fastest fire-fighters. Rock crew have a hidden 67% bonus to fire-fighting, as well as immunity to fire damage. Lanius may be helpful when venting a room, but they will still take damage from fires. Crystal crew have a hidden 17% penalty to fire-fighting. All crew in a room fight the same fire if there are multiple and it takes almost 10.5 seconds for a Human to put out a fire. Fires are considered to have a different "health bar" when fought this way, actually unaffected by venting and never replenishing, which is 100 and a human deals 9.6 damage to it per second.  [ this bullet needs copyedit based on the new data from Crew putting out fires, specifically taking into account the formula and multipliers ]
  • Vent the rooms that are currently on fire or pre-vent rooms which would be difficult to quickly vent or problematic to deal with fires if they occur. Venting is faster with multiple opened airlocks, and also faster if you turn the O2 system off; breaches and Lanius will add to the venting speed. The farther the rooms are from the airlocks, the longer it takes to vent them. Fires begin to "die out" once oxygen in the room drops below 10%.
    • How long it takes for a fire or fires to die out is determined by a timer, ranging from 5 to 14 seconds. The timer is affected by the number of adjacent fires (including those in adjacent tiles of nearby rooms not separated by walls, i.e. only the door tiles count) and is governed by the formula: (5 - <number of adjacent fires>) * 0.48. So, no adjacent fires will result in a fire being burned out as quick as in 2.08 seconds or as long as in 5.83 seconds, and 4 adjacent fires will result in prolonging the burning out of a fire to a maximum of 29.17 seconds. (for more details, see Fire oxygen starvation)
  • Upgraded doors greatly slow the spread of fires between rooms. However, fires spread even faster if doors are open or hacked; but if they are disabled or the system is not installed, fires spread at the same speed as with a level 1 door. Doors level 3-4 don't slow down the fires spreading between rooms more than level 2.
  • Repair drones, when powered, will automatically head towards a room on fire to put out the flames. Repair drones take no damage from fires, suffocation and have efficiency of an Engi.
  • Fire Suppression (Advanced Edition content) augmentation automatically puts out fires onboard the ship at speed of a Crystal.
  • It is possible to prevent hull damage, caused due burning down of a system, by destroying the system with a Small Bomb or a Breach Bomb. Repair Bomb doesn't put out fires, so repairing a burned down system with active fires may result in more hull damage.

Fires and enemy AI[]

Enemies behave quite predictably when fires occur on their ship:

  • They will never disable oxygen to fight fires and level 2 or 3 oxygen replenishes it faster than 4 fires can drain it.
  • Enemy treats fire as a high-priority task, and will generally send two crew members to fight it. However, repairing Shields is more important for enemy crew AI (System Repair Drone behaves slightly different) than putting out fires in any other room (or dealing with boarders) and at least 1 crewmember is assigned to repairing Shields (while there are other tasks to perform, i.e. boarders, breaches, fires, etc).
  • Enemy ships are unable to use venting to deal with fires.
  • If a 2x2 room is completely filled with fire (all four tiles have a flame on them), enemy crew will give up and leave the room (except for Rockmen). However, if this room is also breached, then any kind of enemy crew will leave the room till the fires die out (the same applies to a 2x1 room).
  • Weakened crew - at 20% health and below - will flee from fires, if not immune. They will also not come to an operational Medbay on fire if not immune, despite it being capable of healing the crew more than the fire damaging them.


Weapons' and Drones' % chance to start fire[]

Lasers Missiles Drones Beams Bombs
Basic Laser
Basic Laser
10 Leto Missiles
Artemis, Pegasus Missiles LetoAndSwarmMissile
10 Combat Drone Mark I
Drone combat on (cropped)
10 Mini Beam
Minibeam
10 Small Bomb
S. Bomb
10
Dual Lasers / Burst Laser I
Burst Laser I
10 Artemis Missiles
Artemis, Pegasus Missiles ArtemisAndPegasusMissile
10 Combat Drone Mark II
Drone combat2 on (cropped)
10 Artillery Beam
Artillery Beam (90 degree)
10 Fire Bomb
Firebomb
100
Burst Laser II
Burst Laser II
10 Swarm Missiles
Swarm LetoAndSwarmMissile
10 Anti-Ship Beam Drone I
Drone beam on (cropped)
10 Fire Beam
Fire Beam
80
Chain Laser
Chain Laser Weapon 2-1
10 Hull Missile
Hermes, Breach, Hull Missiles HullMissile
10 Anti-Ship Beam Drone II
Drone beam 2 charged (cropped)
10
Chain Vulcan
Chain Vulcan
10 Hermes Missile
Hermes, Breach, Hull Missiles HermesMissile
30 Anti-Ship Fire Drone
Drone fire on (cropped)
90
Laser Charger II
Charge Laser II Weapon
10 Breach Missiles
Hermes, Breach, Hull Missiles BreachMissile
30
Hull Laser II
Hull Laser 1&2
10 Pegasus Missile
Artemis, Pegasus Missiles ArtemisAndPegasusMissile
30
Boss Laser
Boss Laser
10 Boss Missile
Boss Missile LetoAndSwarmMissile
30
Heavy Laser I / Heavy Pierce I
Heavy Laser I
30
Heavy Laser II
Heavy Laser II
30


Guides[]


See also[]

Advertisement