YMMV / FTL: Faster Than Light Multiverse

• Awesome Music
  • Showdown, which plays during the fight against the MFK Flagship, is a menacing, fast-paced theme that really makes you feel just how brutal the final boss is, as well as the stakes at hands during the battle.
  • The Battle themes for the Crystals and the Obelisks are both excellent, as is the additional generic Space-Ass song.
  • The Merchant's Remorse is an intense, yet melancholic theme that fits perfectly for a battle against Sylvan.
• Crosses the Line Twice: It is possible to use the dead Orchid children you get from an event as projectiles from the Clone Cannon.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Both major secret ending paths have preferred strategies:
  • For the Obelisk/True Ending, payload spam strategies are generally seen as optimal. Payload Teleporters are fairly common in the Recovery Site and the Obelisk sectors, since one can be bought for 70 scrap from the Augmented guard and another can be traded for fuel from a ghost ship, and they are rather common in Obelisk stores. Furthermore, these stores also sell the Ancient Recycler augment, which completely negates missile costs at the cost of lowering scrap gain (which isn't an issue in Obelisk sectors anyways). Their excellent system damage and guaranteed stun and breach chance lets a large array of them devastate the systems of any enemy ship in your wake far faster than they can hope to repair them, with their only weakness being their low hull damage, but this can be remediated by pairing them with an Onslaught Minelauncher or Harbinger drone.
  • In Nexus runs, you'd be hard-pressed to see someone not use the Laser Beam for the final fight. Indeed, this beam can pierce all shields, and always lights fires on every tiles it touches, all that for a moderate power cost of 3. This makes it a high-damage weapon that can light huge fires on Prime's ship to knock out his tough Resistant rooms, on top of having no need to be fired in a combo like most other beams. It is often paired with the Cultist Torch Pierce Beam which also ignores shields and lights large amounts of fires for an even bigger fiery carnage.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Enemy Coalition ships before the release of 4.0. They would often wield a wide array of systems at once that could easily overwhelm you, on par with Lanius Bombers in vanilla if not better, and could show up as early as sector 1. While most of these encounters would atleast be limited in their own sectors, Pirates, who can use most of the faction ships, can have these ships at hand, which make for some nasty surprise fights.
  • Crystal Sentinel boarders. They can, and will try to stack lockdowns, so you better hope that any of your crew caught aren't alone and can fight on their own, or otherwise, that crew member is definitely gone. If you do not have a Clone Bay, fighting them on your ship is really risky without proper planning and venting. They also used to phase through doors and lockdowned rooms, until the Multiverse of Merchants update removed that property to make them less opressive.
  • Slug Saboteurs boarders are frightening if they cloak, as they will now cripple your systems at alarming speed, with very little counter options available since they do not take damage during their ability. You can stun them with a Zoltan Monk or Stun Bomb, or try to repair the damage being done with a non-fighting crew, like the aforementioned Monk, or Repair drones, but these options aren't always at the player's disposal. Fortunately, Slug Saboteurs that teleport on your ship are fairly rare, and starting from 5.0, lose sabotage speed for each opposing crew in the room.
  • Mantis Suzerains are fast, deal a lot damage, take less of it, and worst of all can use an ability that make them even faster and stronger. Mantis Bishops, in turn, are Suzerains tuned up to eleven, having the third highest base damage of any non-unique crew, but are fortunately very rare.
  • In the rare case you get boarded by them, then Giant Alien Spiders are, indeed, no joke. Not only are they very fast, they also deal massive amounts of damage, which is only compounded by the fact you tend to see several of them at once. All but the strongest melee crew stand little chance against them without luring them to the medbay or venting them to space.
  • MFK Soldiers are found on MFK Rebel Aces and the Flagship. They are even more resilient than normal soldiers, taking 30% less damage from combat sources and hazards. If you try fighting them, their base damage is x2, which is equivalent to a Suzerain's base output, and gets compounded by the fact their skill levels are always to the max, making any system they're in much stronger and further boosting their already monstruous damage. They are also never found alone, so prepare to see up to four at once wreck havoc on your bridge.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Jerry, the Rebel with a heart of gold. Everyone loves Jerry!
• Game-Breaker: The Defense Drone Mark III costs four power bars to power, but it is worth it: it fires *seven* times a second on anything that's coming for you, meaning it takes a lot of things to overwhelm it. This means that it's completely capable of intercepting entire volleys, reducing even the Flagship's dreaded 3 missile artilery into a joke.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The leader of an Alliance of Alternates who's a Control Freak obssessed with preserving continuity at all costs, even if it prevents his subordinates from doing good, and who battles eldritch beings. Did this describe Miguel O'Hara or Sylvan Prime?
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • When you first see them, Siren ships are pretty unsettling. Not only do they look completely unlike all other ships in the game, but they refuse to communicate at all and attack you with an arsenal that can even manipulate time itself. Even worse is the fact that on board are random aliens that are seemingly permanently Brainwashed and Crazy and never snap out of it. The implications are clear: you are next in line to be abducted.
  • The tone of FTL:Multiverse as a whole is lighter than vanilla. At worst, you can expect darker events to be Black Comedy. However, the comedic tone of the writing screeches to a halt whenever something happens related to Chaos.
    • Occasionally strange, glitched beacons may spawn in hostile sectors. They reveal themselves to be even stranger than usual Siren ships, with a red and black color scheme. Stranger yet, they seem to know about your many runs, only talk by rhyming, seem to revere an unknown entity and are associated with madness and chaos.
    • However, things really come to a head once you destroy three of them, and access a hidden sector. There, you meet The One Who Rhymes. Suddenly, the stakes of your mission stop being destroying the Multiverse Flagship and save the Federation, and becomes saving this Universe itself from being destroyed by the entity. The music also considerably darkens as True Chaos, an oppressive, otherworldly battle music plays. Even if you win, it's clear that you haven't staved off doomsday for long: The One Who Rhymes will simply try again in another universe; even destroying the flagship for you is all but a game to him.
    • And then there's Her. The One Who Rhymes was bad enough, but his progenitor is even worse. At first, She doesn't appear to be that threatening, with her appearing as a smiling Emoticon. Once the fight with Sylvan Prime comes to a close however, She reveals her true colors and if you're stupid enough to do what she asked, She is unleashed upon the Multiverse, plunging it into darkness and madness, and She destroys your entire Cluster as a "reward".
    • She is also capable of manipulating the game itself. Outside of the Nexus, you may rarely encounter bizarre autoships made out of ASCII characters that look jarring compared to other ships. The game then glitches out horribly and produces a high-pitched sound for a VERY effective Jump Scare, and She proceeds to communicate with you, as in you the player, using error messages. The cherry on top is that the event box doesn't seem to acknowledge what just happened at all. Meanwhile, if you choose the wrong option at the end of a Nexus run, what should be an event to confirm you want to smash the rings that control Her power becomes Controllable Helplessness as she disables the other option. It is already to late, Renegade...
    • At the intersection of Her and The One Who Rhymes' madness lies the Chaos-Nexus Ending. After you accepted the gift The One Who Rhymes gave you for beating him and bringing it to the Nexus, the Gnome reveals itself to be nothing less than one of the repositories of Her power, and that you were played like a fiddle. She proceeds to tear Sylvan Prime apart messily, and retreat to her domain, the Realm of Madness. You have no choice but to follow Her with the help of the C.E.L to a strange place where there is no background but weird, shifting emoticons. And then, you finally find Her ship. The Vision of Evil makes The One Who Rhymes' ship look like a scout and regenerates any damage you do to its hull, and the only chance this reality has is for you to brave Her many eldritch powers for long enough that the C.E.L disables Her hull regeneration.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Multiverse grants large buffs to some notoriously bad vanilla weapons.
  • The Burst Laser mk. III now only costs three power bars, fires faster, and can now light fires like its lesser counterparts. This turns it into a powerful and cost-effective burst option. Its previous niche at four power gets filled by the new Burst Laser mk. IV, which fires eight projectiles, making it much more enticing option than the vanilla weapon.
  • The Repair Burst is reworked into a zero-power weapon (meaning that it will always be charging as long as at least one other weapon is powered), and repairs two hull on the target, making it an excellent way to repair your ship for a cheap price (one missile for four hull if you have the ammo conserver), or even repair the enemy ship to facilitate a crewkill.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: Several ships are made specifically for challenge seekers. It is a common challenge to try to reach the True Ending with them:
  • The Sylvan C starts with an impossibly strong weapon loadout, but only has one single hull point. You will have no room for mistakes.
  • The Unoptimized Cruiser only has two weapon slots and two drone slots. Most of its systems also have their maximum level reduced; for example, you can only get 3 shield bubbles and level 4 engines.
    • The Unoptimized Cruiser also has a Type B layout, which is even harder, with its systems having their maximum levels reduced even further. It also comes with other weaknesses, such as only being able to have 4 crew.
      • To top of all that off, there's a Type C layout as well. This one has its maximum system levels reduced further, has only 15 hull points, and comes with a number of other weaknesses. There's another Unoptimized Cruiser, but thankfully it's actually stronger than the Type C; however, to get it, you need to either beat the True Ending with all layouts of the Unoptimized Cruiser, or defeat Sylvan with the Type C.
  • The Wrecked Bomber, aka the Crapbucket, starts with two random weapons, and only has 8 hull.
• That One Attack: The new Multiverse Flagship has some particularily nasty new tricks in store:
  • In phase 1 of the fight, the Flagship has a 4-crew teleporter, which it uses relentlessly to pump you full of humans, Soldiers and MFK Soldiers. Expect chaos as you get outnumbered by enemies on your own ship. While hacking it can partially neutralize it, the teleporter comes back online faster than your hack does, which means you will still be boarded by massive parties, and this prevents you from using said hacking against defensive targets such as Shields or Engines/Piloting, while the Flagship has now upgraded Artillery that fires faster every times it shoots...
  • The Flagship's drone surge on phase 2 already was frightening most of the times, but in Multiverse, it is even deadlier for two reasons; Hacking was moved from stage 1 to 2, which means that having your Shields or dodge chance disrupted (or even a Cloak hack denying you a chance to nullify the swarm) at the same time as the drone surge being unleashed is very likely to turn your ship inside out. Secondly, there'll be atleast one Ion drone and one Anti-hull beam drone among the surge, which are capable of inflicting even more lasting damage and destruction.
  • Did you think that phase 3 would be a Clipped-Wing Angel like in vanilla? Wrong. On top of being terrifyingly tanky, the Multiverse Flagship now sports a pair of non-Artillery weapon. One of them is a Cluster Bomb on medium difficulty or harder, dropping 3 bombs on your ships and quite possibly spelling disaster if you're hit in the wrong systems. It is one of the major contributions to the MVFS' phase 3 arguably being the hardest of the three despite all the aforementioned attacks.
  • The MFK Flagship Ace is equipped with upgraded Flagship artileries, all of them deadlier than their normal counterpart, but, curiously, the most dangerous of the four becomes the Ion Artilery. Indeed, it deals no less than twice as much damage to your shields, reducing them to only 1 for a very long time if you're unlucky. This, needless to say, will leave you extremely vulnerable to everything that boss has to offer, namely the hullbusting laser, the many drones, the power surge, and worst of all, the hullbusting Beam that will shred your hp in a flash.
• That One Boss:
  • When you encounter it, Dianesh's Cruiser is terrifying. Not only does it have a vast arsenal of Elite Crystal weaponry, which negates two shields layer and instantly makes a large chunk of your best line of defense irrelevant, it also has a teleporter to beam Crystal Sentinels into your ship. If they decide to lock down an important room such as Weapons or Engines, you are in trouble. You'd better enter the fight with a high-DPS weaponry to make her capitulate as soon as you can, but even that isn't without drawbacks as it will cause a storm of Crystal Vengeance shards to rain upon your already weakened defense.
  • The Flagship Wreck isn't very well-armed, but it will teleport tons of Alpha Ghosts in your ship, which will proceed to sabotage all your systems at the speed of light. If you try to fight them, you'll find out that many of the Alphas stun, breach, or set fire to the room they are in, making even Medbay retreat strategies invalid. As a result, it's not uncommon for players to beat the Wreck... only for the army of Ghosts on board to destroy all systems on their ship and making it a Mutual Kill.
  • Among all the MV Renegade Bosses, some stand out in particular for being extremely dangerous. MFK C is one of the most infamous, as it boards with a veritable Demonic Spider nest made out of many different elite crews, including five super-elites on extreme mode (two Angels, one MFK, one Paladin, one Knight of Nights). Add to that a Chieftain in the first wave to negate venting strategies, several missile weapons, a Suyari Beam to force you to be quick at disabling weapons, invasions tactics and a clonebay, and you get a real run ender.
  • Shell C sports the strongest defense of any Renegade boss by far: with up to six layers of shields, cloaking, up to four levels of life support, a Damage Over Time to counter boarding and a high-level clonebay, good luck dealing any lasting damage to this boss. Finally gotten through this insane defense and shut down a criticial system? Watch as a Mechanic rolls in and fixes it instantly, undoing all your progress. On the offensive side, this cruiser boards with shells, which are easy to deal with using asphyxiation at first but eventually charge their ability and start instantly exploding the moment they come accross one of your crew, which is quite possibly "While they were manning at the instant the shells teleported in" for cheap unavoidable system damage. Prepare for a long and difficult battle of attrition.
  • No Ion Field? Then Sylvan C is all but guaranteed to give you a bad time. Its game plan is simple: bring your shields down with two to three Energy drones while ramping up a Kamayari Beam akimbo as boarders harass you. This puts your fight on a strict time limit before the beams ramp up to the point of eating half your health in a second. If you're especially unlucky, you'll have Sylvans himself to deal with on your ship, who can effectively shut down one of your systems instantly and is incredibly tanky if you can't snipe him with your weapons. Oh, and did I mention that all that is combined with a high-level cloak that will make you need to hurry even more?
  • Speaking of ionic apocalypse: Monk B is second to none when it comes to ramping up an ion cascade on your shields, so you better have enough ways to keep 2 shields up (such as zoltans or manning drones) before its fast drones tear you to shreds. If you don't, then prepare for the worst as the zoltan shield will slow your mad dash to avert this combo of death, quite possibly enough that you die.