Combat: boarding a Rock Fighter, both ships as room grids

About this game

Developer: Subset Games · Publisher: Subset Games · Platform: PC (Steam) · Art style: Minimalist & vector · Screen type: Battle / Tactics

More FTL: Faster Than Light screens in the Gallery

What to study

FTL shows a whole space battle as two floor plans. Your ship (left) and the enemy (right, in the TARGET panel) are both drawn as grids of rooms, so you never shoot at a hit-point total, you aim at a room: the enemy's weapons room, its O2 room, its medbay. The target panel still summarises the ship conventionally (Class: Rock Fighter, Relationship: Hostile, hull bar, three shield bubbles), but the grid underneath is the real interface, and it doubles as a second board when you board: here one of your crew stands inside an enemy room trading blows, visible as a tiny figure on their floor plan while your own seven-name roster with health bars watches from the left edge. Everything urgent is a bar filling or emptying, weapon charges in the four WEAPONS slots along the bottom (Anti-Bio Beam lit, Burst Laser II still dark), the FTL Drive CHARGING gauge as the escape clock, hull and shields as segmented strips, and the game's one-word verdict on the last enemy shot, MISS, floats over your shield bubble. It is real-time, but designed to be read like a tactics board, which is why the pause works. Frame at about 0:28 in the FTL Faster Than Light Trailer (Steam), manually extracted at 27.5s: the scene-change pass emitted no frame for this fight.

Patterns

How the screen is arranged.

dual-panel-combat room-grid status-row charge-bars

Components

Parts on screen.

Grid List Speech bubble Vitals bar Gauge Slots Toggle

Screen inventory

• TARGET panel headed Class: Rock Fighter / Relationship: Hostile in red
• enemy hull bar and three shield bubbles in the target panel
• own HULL bar with three shield bubbles, EVADE 25% and OXYGEN 100%
• seven-name crew roster with green health bars (Kirby, Nathan, Alison, Tai Yi, Tee Lek, Markel, Noemi)
• MISS feedback text over the shield bubble
• boarded crew figure fighting inside a room of the enemy ship's grid
• four-slot WEAPONS bar with per-weapon charge state (Anti-Bio Beam, Dual Lasers, Breach II, Burst Laser II)
• AUTOFIRE toggle
• FTL Drive CHARGING gauge
• powered-system icon row along the bottom and SUBSYSTEMS cluster at bottom-right

Top 3 colors

#010102 28%#5a4a49 20%#2e2926 17%

Top three palette colors by share. The remaining colors make up the rest.

Source and credit

© Subset Games, FTL: Faster Than Light screenshot: FTL Faster Than Light Trailer (Steam), shown for design study and commentary. PlayCraft is an unofficial fan project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Subset Games.

Source tier 2 (publisher-released) · screenshot: Steam store page · Steam page

Source details

Fetched 2026-10-22. verified 2026-10-22: frame manually extracted at 27.5s from the pipeline-downloaded FTL Faster Than Light Trailer (Steam) and inspected visually at full resolution; real game UI (both ship room grids, TARGET panel, weapons bar, crew roster, MISS feedback) confirmed visible and legible; no trailer caption overlays the frame

no published policy found (checked 2026-10-22); fair-use study use, takedown honored within 48h

Rights holders: see Copyright & takedown.