I also imagine many don't know what to do about it, except gnashing their teeth and trying desperately not to seize up their computers and smite their windows with them.
I'm here to help.
Go and download a program called Cheat Engine. I'm sure you know how to use the Google if you're playing FTL, and if you don't, this is going to be way, way over your head.
Install it and get Cheat Engine up and running. That's on you, too, shouldn't be too hard. Note: all of the images are links to the full-sized image, since this forum cuts them off.
This is Cheat Engine. When you load it up, it will look more or less like this. That icon in the top-left that flashes between red and green (here caught at green,) is the icon that tells it what program to start looking into. You should have FTL loaded up by now.
This is the big, ugly, nasty list of processes, but fortunately the ones which have started most recently tend to be near the bottom. The process you want is FTLgame.exe, so click open.
Now, you will need an FTL game up and running before you go any farther, and not just on the menu screen or hangar. So pick your ship, assign names to to unfortunate loyalists who will be accompanying you in the journey, and get into the game, to where you can see your ship. I went with the Kestrel, simply because it's iconic, recognizable, and found myself in a Nebula system.
Now, the first thing you're going to want to do is give yourself more fuel. That's why I've typed 16 into the Value bar in Cheat Engine, and you can see I've pointed the cursor at the fuel gauge in FTL. Click on First Scan in CE.
As you can see, and probably have surmised the meaning of, there were over 14,000 strings in FTL: Faster than Light, that equaled the number "16" at the time I searched. That's way too many, and you'd probably cause god knows what to happen if you hamfistedly changed them all to something huge.
Fortunately, we're about to narrow that list down dramatically.
Warp to another system. It doesn't matter what event you get, even if you start out in battle, just pause it, and if you get a wordy event, simply don't click on it yet. Your fuel gauge has obviously dropped to 15, from 16, and you can see that, in the text bar in which I entered 16 previously, I have changed it to 15.
Press 'Next Scan'. The first time I did it, there were like, 14 results, most of which were rapidly cycling through values. I pressed it a few more times, until I got only two results. You will never get fewer than two results, so highlight them both (shift+click is the easy way, there are others,) and press that little red arrow at the bottom-right of the list of results. My mouse cursor isn't visible on the screen shot, but the tool-tip it raised for hovering over the icon is.
This will put the results at that big white list on the bottom. I double-clicked the top one, over at the right, where it shows the value.
Go ahead and put in whatever you feel like. I don't know if too high a value will crash the game or cause an overflow or what, but I've found it can easily take 200+ missiles. Just set it up somewhere reasonable; if you run low and feel like coming back for more, nothing's stopping you.
Now, as you can see, that worked! My fuel gauge in FTL has gone up to 45, and I can jump 45 times in sequence. But also notice that the value I didn't change has also changed to 45.
As near as I reckon, one of the values you will get that's always the same as the actual value is the number that's displayed on your screen. The "hidden" value controls this display value - changing the display value won't do anything at all. The only way to figure it out is to try one, and if the number in FTL doesn't change, you got the wrong one, delete that one from your working space list (or not - more on that later) and change the other one.
You can also set those descriptions in the list to anything you like - Fuel and Fuel Display, for instance. And that's it! Just repeat this process of searching for the initial value, causing that value to change (go up or down,) filtering for the value until you're locked in on its memory location, and changing it as you see fit. You'll need about 5K to fully upgrade a ship (including buying all buyable subsystems and upgrading them as well,) and you should come out with about 2K left, enough to comfortably be sure you won't go bankrupt no matter how much you spend.
Aaand that's it. Cheat as little as you feel you need to in order to give yourself a fair, fighting chance even if the RNG frowns upon you, turns around and farts in your general direction (and then taunts you a second time,) or go whole-hog and be almost (though not entirely) assured of victory. It's still possible the RNG could screw you, but it's no longer probable.
And, of course, I haven't just helped you cheat in FTL. This is applicable to pretty much any game where the critical information is on your computer: which means that no, you cannot use Cheat Engine to give yourself a bajillion Gold in World of Warcraft. (Besides, Blizzard would come down on you like the wrath of an angry god if you somehow did so.) You probably also won't be able to cheat in, say, DotA or something unless you're the host, and even then alt-tabbing all that much to do so would probably result in you losing no matter what gear you could buy. It's also going to be dicey and unlikely to work for any game wherein the object you want to edit is handled as an inventory item in a tetris inventory, like ammo in Deus Ex: Human Revolution, but any kind of less-dynamic inventory (such as that of a Final Fantasy game, assuming you were playing one on a computer,) or values which are not tracked as grid-inventory items (such as ammunition and coins in Arcanum: of Steamworks and Magick Obscura,) will work just fine.
So now you know. Have fun.
[Advanced]
Now, one thing you should know is that the display memory value - that is, the one that doesn't actually change the value you're working with - stays constant across games for as long as FTL is actually running. In the example I used, the value at address 0C7C8660 was the hidden, actual value, making 28D4B85C the display value.
If I had gone and pressed escape to go back to the hangar and start a new game, the hidden value would migrate to a new address and the old address would have some gobbledygook in it, but the display value's address would remain constant. Thus, when you filtered again, you could look at the addresses you found and add the one which was not at 28D4B85C, and proceed in confidence that it was the right value. Not a huge benefit, since it's almost as easy to just try them both manually, just thought I'd point it out.
