Mods and tools

FTL has a small, active modding community.

There are a lot of mods, and mod lists can easily fall out of date. Currently the most comprehensive list is the FTL mod compendium.

Developers' stance and modding history

Subset Games referred to modding as "unexpected" and have said it is unlikely FTL will ever support mods in any way. Nevertheless, the developers allowed the modding community a home at the official forums, where most mods are released and discussed.

The first program for installing mods was Grognak's Mod Manager, which is now outdated. It was replaced by Slipstream Mod Manager.

Installing mods

Mods are distributed as .ftl files, which are simply renamed .zip files. You will need Slipstream Mod Manager to install them:

1. Install Slipstream and run it
2. Select the mods you want installed, hit Patch, and wait for the process to finish
3. Run FTL

If the mods contain no errors the game should start without any problems.

Some older mods were created before Advanced Edition, and may not work properly in the current version of the game.

Occasionally, mods may cause the game to crash - either during loading, inside the hangar, right after pressing Start button, or during a session. This is caused either by errors in the mod itself, or multiple mods being incompatible with each other. It is strongly recommended to read the description of each mod before installing it. In the description, mod authors will often include information about compatibility with other mods.

Notable mods

Some larger overhaul mods

• FTL Multiverse A massive lore expansion, adding many new enemy ships, weapons, and events. Fully incorporates hyperspace features which allows for (among other things) new races including Ghosts, Orchids, Shells, Giant Alien Spiders, and various elite versions of every race.
• Arsenal+ (English Translation) A massive expansion to weapons and drones, as well as events and enemy ships. Includes many new weapon types, ranging from balanced to not so balanced. Uses content from many other smaller mods.
• Insurrection Adds new weapons and events, and attempts to fix some of the major balance issues.
• FTL Supremacy Focuses on adding much stronger enemy ships as well as buffing player ships to extremes.
• FTL Captain's Edition Focuses on expanding events and weapons, as well as new enemy ships. Among the first large "content pack" mods, CE is intended to be more punishing than vanilla.

Some other notable mods

• (Twinge's) Balance Mod Is designed to address balance issues in the game. This mod focuses on improving the usefulness of existing content and making the base game a better overall experience without making the overall game notably easier or harder.
• FTL Balance Mod Light (by Mike Hopley) Is a custom version of Twinge’s Balance Mod. It reverts some changes for an experience that is closer to Vanilla FTL. Overall, the game tends to be harder.

Quality-of-life mods

• Extended Pursuit Indicator Shows a longer preview of the Rebel Fleet advance.
• Better info, smaller tooltips This mod combines better item info and even smaller tooltips mods.
  • Better item info Adds better item, system, and crew info, such as sale prices and exact status effect numbers.
  • Even smaller tooltips Makes text boxes smaller by removing text that experienced players don't need.

Graphics enhancements mods

• Mike’s background mod Primarily a compilation of other background mods, including (but not limited to):
  • High-res background graphics Replaces the background planets, sun, stars, galaxies and the nebula.
  • Better Planets and Background Adds new backgrounds and planet visuals, including ones taken from NASA.
  • HighRes Backgrounds & Planets Replaces the planets and backgrounds with higher quality version. Being a mix of two previous mods it also adds a couple of new visuals and modifies some others in order to stay as close as possible to the original subjects.
• Mike’s graphical fixes Corrects few graphical errors.
• Pretty shields Replaces the shield graphics.
• Hide banner ad Removes the advert from FTL menu screen.

Useful tools

Here is the list of tools that can assist a player in game runs and fights:

• FTL Savegame Manager, a tool to keep track of your savegames in a FTL run. This tool enables a player to collect interesting/bad fights and use those as training to get better at handling those (after a full run you end up with a folder that has a savegame from every beacon)

• FTL Test Tool, a tool with a simple graphical interface that allows you to spawn an enemy ship from a seed (so you can spawn the same ship repeatedly), give enemy and yourself any selection of weapons, spawn whatever crew you want onto enemy ship, block all crew damage, prevent enemy from firing a weapon; you can also quickload to restore to a copy of the game from a few seconds prior.

• Cheatengine ("Using Cheatengine with FTL" video tutorial). Speed up the game to save time in regular runs or for game tests.

• Enemy weapons timing calculator
• Weapon travel times
• Zoltan treadmill
• Enemy ships information

• Combat sims
• Pulsar practice
• Shield drone micro
• Enemy weapons testing
• Event testing

Mod-making

Modding API

Hyperspace is an FTL hard-coded modding API. It's installed separately, and provides many new features for mod makers that are not possible in conventional modding. Hyperspace only works on FTL 1.6.9 currently, but includes a .bat file to automatically downgrade your game and install the hyperspace files.

Mod-making utilities

The following tools may be helpful for mod makers:

• Superluminal 2, for editing ships
• Event Simulator
• Mod Testing Environment
• Font Modifier

Game data access

To access the game data - text files, images, audio, - the ftl.dat needs to be unpacked with Slipstream Mod Manager ("File" - "Extract Dats...").