Stealth C

Plan your jumps carefully, to avoid being forced into asteroid fields. Suns and pulsars are also bad, since they have a higher chance of enemies with drones. Look for flexible routes, so you can avoid these hazards without losing beacons. Consider avoiding nebulas too, as they often contain Auto-assaults — but plasma storms are worth trying, for the incapacitated ships event.

Put the Slug in piloting. Put the Rock on weapons, because the central location offsets their slow movement; weapons is also an important room to repair, and Rocks have a hidden 67% bonus to fire-fighting. The Human can start in doors, and quickly move to engines.

Use your Shield Drone precisely. Against Zoltan Shields, use precise beam placement and timing to help disable weapons.

As with Stealth B, keeping oxygen below 50% decreases the chance of weapons being hit.

As with Stealth A, your starting weapons can be kept for the whole game, if you get hacking; alternatively, you can replace one or both with something harder-hitting, like a Halberd. The Mini Beam can hit four rooms on many ships.

Your strong weapons are your best defence, so spend your first 25 scrap on weapons-3 as a damage buffer. Typically buy shields next, and then look at improving offence or upgrading to shields-4. It’s also reasonable to buy a weapon before shields, so consider doing this if you find something like a Flak 1. Also remember you can use the Mini Beam as an Anti-bio Beam, increasing the value of shields-4.

Drones-3 is tempting, as it gives your Shield Drone a damage buffer. It also lets you run both drones together, which helps in fights against combat/beam drones. But it helps much less in other fights. Weapons-3 protects you in every fight and will definitely be used later — whereas you might sell one or both drones to afford shields! So on balance, I’d rather buy weapons-3 and then save for a store.

At pulsars, a single Zoltan Shield layer will completely absorb the ion pulse. Bizarrely, this only works when you have a shields system. Before then, pulsars will ignore the Zoltan Shield.

Sector 1 distress beacons are well worth visiting, but guaranteed fights are better. You have a clone bay, plus blue options from the Rock (good), Slug (weak), and beam (weak). Note that Long-Ranged Scanners effectively decrease the value of unmarked beacons.