"This was supposed to be for use in Nebulas and other, more creepy areas, but listen to the thing! FTL is not a psychological horror game, and this track was way too freaky and claustrophobic. Still pretty cool, though."
—Ben Prunty, the composer of the FTL soundtrack, on the Cut Song "Horror"
FTL: Faster Than Light is light on graphic depictions of violence and horror, leaving it up to the player's imagination to fill in the gruesome blanks.
The Nightmare Fuel must have a Zoltan Shield Bypass!
- You can be extremely cruel to enemy spaceships. You can do things like starting on-board fires to burn everyone alive or destroying their oxygen system to suffocate everyone to death. Of special note is one small variant of the Slug Scout (or Slug Interceptor) that has outboard oxygen and engine modules not accessible from inside via doors - you can easily wreck their air supply and their engines, then sit back and watch them slowly run out of good air, especially if they have weak weapons and can do little more than pound ineffectually at your shields while they slowly choke.
- A popular strategy to deal with boarding parties is to simply lock the doors and vent the area of oxygen via your airlocks. This creates a situation where they are desperately trying to bash down your door whilst they are slowly suffocating to death.
- Sometimes an enemy ship will desperately offer everything they have in surrender so you don't finish them off. You can say no and kill the ship for even more resources.note
- The Giant Spiders Random Event. The first possible option is sending in your crew, and if you're unlucky, your crew gets to deal with massive spiders coming out of a vent, before you finally leave, losing a crew member in the process.
- The Damaged and Dilapidated Space Station Random Event. The whole place is filled with corpses and the stench of death and decay. If you're unlucky, one of your crew members can contract the fatal disease that wiped out the station, and not even a Clone Bay will save them (an Improved Medbay will, though).
- An event that involves boarding a station going through an epidemic is freaky in itself. Some versions of the event have the stationers breaking under the stress and lynching the leaders of the colony that are trying to save them. You get to see first-hand how the end started for those poor people.
- Then there's another disturbing event where you go to a distress beacon for a Federation base. There's no one alive on board the station, and the living quarters (and only the living quarters) have blood stains. There's no mention of what happened to the bodies, if they are even still there, or the people aboard besides that the Rebels did it. Your crew just silently turns off the distress beacon and leaves.
- Nebula sectors can be frightening due to the empty-sounding explore music.
- On the original soundtrack, there is a bonus track aptly called "Horror"
. This was supposed to be one of the nebula sector tracks, but was removed because it was considered too scary. So if you think the current nebula tracks are scary, be glad this track didn't make it in. - When enemy crew die, they don't make any noises. When your crew die, you get to hear anywhere from the grinding clank of Engis being dismantled to humans groaning in pain as their last bits of HP are wiped out. However, this dying grunt is also helpful, as it alerts you that you are now minus one crew (and if you have a Clone Bay, it serves as your cue to power it).
- The Explore version of "Debris" sounds very lonely and ghostly, painting the feeling of exploring abandoned wreckage in dark areas of space. The Battle version sounds less ominous, but is reminiscent of alien abductions.
- For those fighting the Flagship's second phase for the first time, the distinct "WARNING — POWER SURGE DETECTED" klaxon gives you that dreadful feeling that something very, very bad is about to happen to your ship. Followed by a swarm of drones or lasers turning your ship into a hopeless sitting duck of a burning wreck, or if you're lucky, only a supershield recharge for the Flagship.
- Some of the "uneventful" beacons. There are quite a few beacons where you find abandoned mines and no life signs are detected, with no clues given as to why they're completely empty. And then there's the event where "a rudimentary automated planetary defense system is looping its message into space: "Warning! Quarantine Level 5 in effect under FHA Act 22, article 11.2. Warning! Quarantine Level 5..." — Just what is going on there?
- There's an event where you can encounter a Mantis cruiser lined with the dismembered remains of Rockmen. Sure, a bunch of rocks on the hull of a ship might not seem that gory at first, but imagine if it were human remains instead and you get an idea as to why the blue option for Rock cruisers in response to this event is written as "Ram the bastards."
- There is an Out of Fuel event in which a large piece of debris, identified as a derelict Rock frigate, drifts by your ship. If you choose to send an away team to investigate it, one of the possible outcomes is an insane Rockman on the frigate will suddenly appear take one of your crewmembers hostage and demand scrap from you. Should you choose to refuse and you also happen to have a clone bay, the text will explicitly state that there is no sign of activity in the bay, leaving the fate of the abandoned (but still living) crewmember ambiguous...
- The Rebel Fleet is always advancing towards you, and their encroachment takes the form of an ever-expanding circle that takes over the current sector from left to right; they can claim multiple nodes at a time. Given that you're using the eponymous Faster-Than-Light Travel, it's implied that they're taking over multiple star systems every time you jump. That friendly colony of miners you were just helping? That shopkeeper you were just buying vital supplies from? Gone, and in their place is a powerful Elite Fighter with orders to tear your ship to shreds and offers nothing of value besides a single fuel cell. And there's a massive fleet of Rebel ships in the background as you fight, pushing hard the feeling that you're all alone and surrounded by bad guys, which become functional in Advanced Edition where they fire Anti-Ship Batteries at you; now imagine a fleet like this in every corner of the galaxy, given that by the time you reach the Last Stand, the Rebels have pretty much taken over everything between the start point and the Federation rendezvous point. Given that the Rebels are human supremacist fascists and no other faction or species in the game comes anywhere near their rate of conquest, it's hard not to feel like Humans Are the Real Monsters.
- When using a hacking drone on the medbay system, instead of healing, it will instead deal damage to the enemy crew, meaning whatever poor souls are inside of the medbay are locked in a room with swarms of nanobots deconstructing and ripping apart their flesh.
