Shortest Trip to Earth Advance Guide (LootTable, Loadout, Shield Generators)

May the odds be ever in your favour! Nothing is worse than seeing that juicy +25 reactor module in the enemy ship, but upon destroying the enemy, all you get is their crappy shield battery…

You can change that.

Any module you destroy will not appear as loot, this means if you destroy the stuff you DON’T want, this improves the chances of getting what you DO want.
This should influence your targeting in most engagements, but every now and then it may also be worth it to take drastic action to make sure you get what you want. This can be done by boarding. Boarding allows you to in some cases have your crew destroy every single module except the ones you want before killing the last crew member and triggering the self-destruct.

However usually, you will have to settle for destroying all modules except the one you want AND the bridge, since it can be hard to destroy the bridge without killing the last crew, and once the self-destruct countdown starts, your boarders will ignore commands to attack modules.

This strategy is AMAZING in Sector 9 (minor spoilers ahead) since you face of against Sec. Corp. ships, some of which have only 4 crew (2 on bridge, two v.weak robots on guns) and no point defence! This means there is almost ZERO risk of your crew dying! These ships also have amazing +22 power reactors and amazing engines. As you can see from the screenshot below, using this tactic, I was able to get SIX 22 power reactors by the end of this sector (I already had some)!

Others have talked about the importance of swapping your loadouts when entering into combat, but specifically you should have 4 loadouts by mid-game:

1. Crew at rest: your ship should be pretty full of containers, cryo sleep, gardening modules, research modules etc.
2. Battle Stations 1: for flying into combat. All container modules remain in place. Cryo, gardening and research modules should be replaced. (you should preference having shield generators on-line vs other module types, as they need time to charge fully, whereas swapping to ECM modules in battle makes little difference since they will likely be up before the first shots are fired)
3. Battle Stations 2: for warping into combat. Only one container module remains – one which holds some fuel, others should be swapped out for combat modules. This way you can have almost every module devoted to combat, but still warp into new sectors where (depending on your sensor range/stealth detection level) enemies may unbeknownst to you be lurking, and will engage as soon as you emerge.
4. Battle stations 3: for in-combat – you swap a final combat module into the last container slot

One key tip that I haven’t seen mentioned elsewhere is that you can make use of container slots in combat through tech artifacts – some of them offer very good bonuses to accuracy, evasion, and/or hull reinforcement.

Although once you get properly accustomed to the game you will seldom if ever run out of fuel, RNG can still catch you out once in a blue moon and you may need to use the SOS beacon to get fuel. In this case, don’t wait until your fuel runs completely dry! Doing so means your engines will no longer contribute to your evasion score, leaving you more vulnerable if you are engaged in combat.

More often, though you will be using the SOS beacon for “farming” – that is where you are very confident in your ship’s abilities and wish to enter into more fights for more loot of all kinds. However, there is usually a risk inherent in this: warp life – they can damage you with no “up-side” – very poor loot, or can even turn your explosives into organics. Therefore, when I SOS farm, I do so next to a wormhole. This means if you see a jellyfish coming, you can fly quickly through to another sector (it will not follow you). It will remain in the system you left, so make sure you do this in a situation where you don’t ever need to return to that sector (for an exit gate for example).

Also, if a trader arrives offering deals, always take them even if you’re not bothered about the resources as they might cheat you, giving you the option to “attack the cheater!” and get the engagement you wanted.

I tend to SOS farm at least once per sector, stopping after evading the warp life – it brings in a lot of extra materials.

As you probably know you can upgrade internal modules to “core” slots to improve your ship’s HP by 1, or upgrade again to a hybrid slot (losing the HP bonus), and again to a weapons slot.

On rare occasions however, it can be useful to DOWNGRADE slots. Doing so allows you to recoup some of the resources invested in upgrading them. Usually this would be a big waste of resources, but there may be times where you absolutely NEED extra resources fast – for example, you may need 20 metals to open some cryo-pods, but you had auto-repair switched on and you have none left. This would be the perfect time to downgrade a core slot to a regular slot, temporarily decreasing your max hp by 1, but gaining some metals and synthetics. Similarly, you may need extra cash to buy that perfect module – it might be worth downgrading something so you can sell the metal/synthetics and buy your new toy.

Note, you cannot downgrade hybrid slots back to core, it’s a one-way upgrade.

Shield generators are usually superior to shield batteries.

Batteries have more starting shield HP, but generators produce an ongoing trickle of shield points. Most battles go on long enough so that generators are the best choice on paper. Even if you’re destroying enemy ships in a single volley, in an engagement with 3 ships, you’ll probably have spent long enough in battle that the shield generators will have outclassed batteries of a similar energy and price-point.

For example:
– Shield generator has 6 shields, and recharges 1 every 5 seconds
– Shield battery has 10 shields

Comparing the above, an engagement will only have to go on 25 seconds for the generators to have out-paced the batteries in effective shield HP. (and that’s assuming the generators aren’t crewed – another advantage they have)

In the screenshot above, my late-game ship generates 1 shield point every .44 seconds. That means for a battle that lasts just 45 seconds, I’ll be generating over 100 shield hit points (on top of the starting shield points).

However: enemies with a lot of EMP weapons may get your shields down too fast for the effective shield points over time of the generators to begin working in your favour, since going down causes them to be EMPed for a while, thus not generating points. Hence in these scenarios, upfront shield power may be preferable.

TLDR: It’s probably best to use a mixture of batteries and generators.

No matter how good your ship is, it will take damage – canons ignore your shields and PDs, and even with high evasion, will hit some of the time, some nukes have too much hp for even 4 commercial PD to take down.

If a lucky hit temporarily takes out a power plant, it can be disastrous if you’re not prepared for it, as it causes your performance to spiral – maybe the first hit was “lucky” but now with -20 power, your ECM modules go offline – maybe the next hit doesn’t need to be lucky. Maybe your weapons go offline so the battle lasts longer and you take more damage.

In short, you should have more power than you need – and spread the power plants out so that it’s less likely that more than one will be hit by the same attack at the same time.

As I alluded to in the last section, the longer a battle goes on, the more time you have to get hit with stuff. Therefore you want to maximise your DPM (damage per minute). Obviously some weapons are much better than others, but weapon choice matters less than investing in upgrading to get MORE weapon slots. As you can see from the screenshot at the top of the guide, I had 10 weapons by the end of the game (12 actual slots – 2 had PDs, so that I could swap the weapons at the back of the ship with the point defence modules at the front in case of attacks from behind requiring PD without lowering my DPM).

Investing in more slots is the only way to get your DPM to hit those crazy high figures – and it creates an “upward cycle” as battles get shorter, you have to spend less on repairs, and have more to invest in even more slots.