Invent your own environmental hazards

[Sleeper Service]

...that will probably never make it into the game, but who knows what modders will be able to do with FTL Overdrive.


I'll start:

Radiation Sectors (could be paired with other hazards)
Crews of all ships present receive minor damage over time. Zoltan could be immune to this.

Debris Field
Much like asteroid fields, but ships are bombarded with debris from long lost battles instead of asteroids. You receive extra scrap after completing the encounter via salvaging parts from the field. Even more with scrap collector arm.

Crystal Shard Field
Much like asteroid fields, but ships are bombarded with shield piercing crystal shards instead of asteroids. Yes, only in crystal sectors.

Beacon in Low Orbit
Leads to fighting in the atmosphere of a planet (I know, spaceships capable of atmospheric flight aren't exactly a logical ting to build but anyway). Both you and the enemy get a altitude meter on the HUD and your ships abilities to climb altitude is determined by its engine-power. During the fight altitude changes randomly in the upper half of the meter, but better engines let ships climb faster again. Loss of dodge chance through critical damage to engines or helm results in ships descending towards the ground, leading to instant death/heavy periodical damage from crushing into hills/trees/buildings, with different images according to planet.

[aaaaaa50]

Oh wow, all my ideas are evil!

Minefield
Asteroid field with asteroids replaced by shield-piercing 1 damage mines.

Warzone
Ships fighting each other in background. Both you and your opponent occasionally encounter weapons fire from random weapons.

Rogue AI
Like a boarding event, in that it can happen in sectors with or without an enemy ship to fight, only with drones. Sometimes this will include boarding drones.

X Swarm
X could be space piranhas, auto ships, whatever. You're attacked by a really weak ship, but when you destroy it another ship immediately attacks you. You will be under a mild Warzone effect that decreases as you destroy each swarm member. Always gives you high amounts of scrap if you defeat the swarm.

Death Zone
Any combination of two or more environmental hazards. Always visible on the map.

[966socho]

All of these sound awesome! Asteroids needs to be able to be modified more easily. Feature request for FTL: Overdrive?

[Metzelmax]

thick nebula
The nebula is thick and occasionally clogs your engine. Every 20 seconds you lose 1 engine power.

Magnetic storm
This storm will disable random systems. With ever wave it targets another random system but unfreezes the first one.

Radiation zone
This part of space is of high radiation; your crew slowly dies while staying here.

[5thHorseman]

Radiation zone
This part of space is of high radiation; your crew slowly dies while staying here.

Hmmm. Maybe in addition to that, have Radiation be a "thing" in the game. Bombs and missiles leave radiation in a room that's something a bit like fire and lack of O2. This would make them a little better of an option.

Maybe instead of slowly dying, your crew's total HP slowly degrades over time as they are exposed to radiation, and there is NO WAY to get that lost HP back. Running through an irradiated room wouldn't do it, but say every 5-10 seconds in the room (fighting, repairing, or fixing a system) would lose 1 HP.

Ships would have anti-radiation systems that would, over time, expel radiation from rooms. When the ship is "safe" (ie, you can open the ship dialog) radiation would vanish instantly to mimic waiting around for it to go away.

[Mikeshadow]

I like the idea of extra environmental hazards simply because I feel the game less fun without some that can mess you up really badly, this post seems inactive but I will still put some of my idea in.

Singularity nearby
A black hole is detected near this beacon, both ship's evasion is disturbed by its gravity pull.(The evasion will go crazy but the engine charge is not affected)The hazard also affect projectile based weapon(Laser/Missile/Ion/Crystal/Flak) to miss more often.Beams and bomb are not affected.

Dense nebula
This beacon was placed in a super dense nebula, you barely can even see the enemy ship's condition.(This hazard makes you cannot detect the enemy ship's system location and whether functional or destroyed.Slug's telepathic ability also fail in this hazard.)

Gamma ray burst
You are in a path of a black hole's jet,wave of intense radiation will affect your crew and system.(This is by far the most dangerous hazard I can think of due to the fact that the radiation wave will stun and damage crew, ionize, damaging system as well as dealing 1-3 hull damage to your ship depend on your shield power.The wave is less rapid than the solar flare in the red giant hazard but if you meet a strong ship in this place, you are probably screwed.)

Abandoned war zone
Same idea as the debris field but have different type of debris that have 1-2 shield-piercing 1-3 damage debris hitting your ship.The debris is slower than the asteroids much like the speed of the flak projectile.

Noxious nebula
This nebula contain poisonous material in it.Make sure your airlock is shut.(If you open the airlock, the room will be filled with poisonous material as well as having no oxygen, but even the room is refilled the poisonous material will still be in the room and can only be removed by jumping several time.Careful not to open nearby room because it will spread instantly.Any crew inside the room will take same amount of damage as suffocation do,suffocation and poison damage does not add together.)

War zone is the best idea for my opinion, I can imagine random ships firing in the background destroying each other and random laser and missile fly by and hit your ship.If this hazard pair with an anti-ship battery that shot both you and enemy, it's just chaos. This might be the best hazard to be place at the beacon where rebels and federations fighting each other in sector 8.

Fun Fact: This IS actually my first post in the forum.

EDIT: I got some more idea.

Hacking Satellites
(Similar to Anti-Ship Battery does not count as environmental hazard for the Stealth Cruiser achievement)
Your ship have been targeted by nearby hacking satellites that being launched by Rebels/Pirates.
(You will receive a "Hacking Surge Detected" warning and random system(1-3) will take the same effect similar to a hacking drone)

Corrosive Nebula/Scavenger Nanobots
(Both hazard have the same effect but appear in different area.)
You are inside a nebula contains highly acidic materials/You are swarmed by millions of scavenger nanobots.Both ship will slowly took hull damage and scrap gains in this area is halved.
(Although FTL Captain's Edition did add the corrosive nebula but the way you take damage is by an event text, the way I want this to work is one hull point will slowly getting red and blink rapidly for few second and deal 1 hull damage to your ship,happen every 15-35 seconds,nebula is slower than the nanobots)

RED ALERT:Multiple Ship Targeting
(Similar to Anti-Ship Battery does not count as environmental hazard for the Stealth Cruiser achievement)
Your ship is targeted by another nearby ship,leave this area quick!
(Instead of having a slow ASB firing at you, random weapon shots(except beams) will fly toward your ship,these projectile can miss and fires almost constantly without warnings. Stronger weapon are rarer.Example:Breach missile. Multiple projectile in a single fire also can occur to simulate the burst laser or multi firing weapon on the background ships.)
This hazard can also be friendly like the ASB in the abandoned sector,and maybe replacing some ASB in the rebel controled beacon where you fight the rebel elite.Mostly occur when fighting Rebel,Mantis and Pirate ship. Rockmen like to solo so forgot that.

Also for the abandoned war zone hazard, it occurs more often in the abandoned sector and lanius always appear here.Sometime even not in the sector.

[OC2142]

Absolute Zero
Crew slowly take damage over time, rooms 'ice over' similar to crystal lockdown, power is slowly leached away from reactors, fire chance is negated to 0 regardless of weapon type. Charge up time is doubled and fires already present are instantly extinguished.

[Gencool]

Ooooh, fun. I always like things that seem beneficial until you're in the wrong situation;

Nanobot swarm - The area is infested with Engi nanobots after a medical Engi-ship exploded. All crew in the area are healed at a constant rate, as if the ship had the nanobots augment (note: affects both sides both sides, often combined with boarding ships and other hazards such as nebulas)

Breathable Atmosphere - hull breaches and open doors produce oxygen at a rate equal or higher to a fully leveled oxygen system. (again, have fun against boarders or ships with fire bombs, hehhehhheh...)

Pheremone Cloud - An artificial environment created by Mantis to make combat more entertaining. In these events, all crew (both sides) move at an accelerated rate, and temporarily receive a two-level boost to all stats. (basically - everything's going to happen faster than you're used to. Often paired with Boarding Mantis ships)

Zoltan Star - a green star that releases pulses that act in the opposite way to Pulsars; both ships temporarily receive an additional level of energy to affected systems (even pushing them over the cap if they're already fully charged), whilst ships with Zoltan shields also have the shield meter recharged (you'd mostly meet Zoltan pirates around these)

Hyperreactive Dust Cloud - when in these storms your reactor temporarily gets fully charged, regardless of how many systems you have active. However, having any one system at full charge for too long causes it to short circuit; doing 100% damage to the system (with equal hull damage), stunning/causing fires in the room, and ionizing it until its repaired (meaning it will still be inactive for a little while after you've fixed it). Systems near to blowing start sparking and bustling with green electricity as a warning. Possibly make it so that laser/ion weapons in these events also get hypercharged; each point of system damage is replaced by one level of temporary energy, as if a zoltan was stood in the room...

(I actually quite like the idea of this being an augment, too, where you can overcharge a room, but if you overcharge it for too long it gets wiped out for ages)

Diplomatic Zone - weapon-fire is not tolerated; any time either ship fires a weapon/activates an offensive drone, the system is ionised by local enforcement and you receive a 'warning'. 3 warnings results in boarding by enforcement staff, 5 results in a PDS being activated. Counts for both sides, but enemy ships encountered here have heavy weaponry and cloaks which aren't disrupted by weapon fire (which avoids the penalty), or are themselves (often corrupt) enforcement officials and thus not effected.


And a fun one;

Alien Spider Nest - whilst at the beacon, you are regularly boarded by alien spiders through open/un-powered doors and breaches (basically anything that acts as an entrance). The spiders act like fully-leveled mantis, have high health levels, and take reduced damage from oxygenless rooms or fires. (Usually acts against both ships equally, but enemies love to use hull piercing missiles...)

[philwire]

Didn't see this post so i'm basically copy/pasting the one I did to here

1- Captain's logs
What I mean here is to create a "book" of all events for a FTL adventure, creating sentences with the events on each jump. Such as:
Captain's log, November 18th 2014 - We jumped in a sector inhabited by Mantis fighters. We will have to be careful.
We jumped into a fight. We had to reroute Medical bay and Oxygen power to Engines . Lost 2 men in battle. The alien ship's hacking system drained our shields many times. After a few good shots from our Flak Canon MK2, they surrendered. They paid us 2 fuel cells and 29 scraps to stay alive.

How's that?
Then have the possibility to export the journal to a .txt file for later reading/printing. Or auto-send to Hollywood for the next Scifi TV series


2- The reactor's giving all she's got!
In this case, I think it would be nice to have a little 1% or so in general all-around bonus for one (or each?) spare energy bar. Using that last energy bar would then mean that all resources are used at 100%, then the 1% loss will mean brown-outs starting to occur, screens flickering, all kinds of annoyances when power is running low, or demand is higher than offer. By all-around 1% bonus I mean in weapons loading speed, engines escaping enemy shots, shields loading faster, cloaking/hacking/mind control lasting 1% longer and cooling down 1% faster too, teleporter cooling down 1% faster too, medbay healing 1% faster, clonebay cloning 1% faster, oxygen supplying 1% more/faster, FTL engines 1% faster, drones 1% faster/stronger... you get the idea. That little 1% extra margin might be THE turning point at a tough battle, who knows? Also, make it a 1% bonus in easy, 2% in normal, 3% in hard, so despite the game is on hard setting, that little extra bar will MEAN something in the end. But still keep it low enough to keep the advantage of buying upgrades, of course!
Or maybe an augmentation to have the ability to squeeze that extra last power from all systems, but have a random system lose 1 power bar after say 1 minute of overrunning due to overheating? Yes, similar to the battery bank, but sill....different.

[DarkPhoenix141]

Event Name: Anomaly Storms

Event Description: Large pockets of nebular space have formed a massive spacial anomaly, the ensuing storms have deposited wreckage and remains of the ships lost in the nebula, some ships coming out of the large swirling (And spherical) vortex merged with other ships. Occasionally forming large masses of metal that can envelop and destroy even the largest of cruisers. The swirling storm also disables sensors and cut power in half, also reducing the engine effectiveness (Reduce evasion by 10) and increasing charge time due to the anomaly.

Also

Breathable Atmosphere - hull breaches and open doors produce oxygen at a rate equal or higher to a fully leveled oxygen system. (again, have fun against boarders or ships with fire bombs, hehhehhheh...)

This has to be the most evil thing I ever heard. And I played Stealth A in a rebel sector.

Got a rigger with a beam drone and mini beam with a heavy laser.

And it was going so well.