This article explains how to use the hostile hunt or ‘auto-combat’ feature in FastTrek.
First, crew your ship of choice and send it to the target system. If there are any hunters there (e.g. hostile faction), you will want to evade them before you activate FastTrek. Otherwise you can hit Start as soon as your ship is in warp.
So when you’re ready, select the corresponding ship’s tab in FastTrek and click Start. That’s it, you’re done!
When the ship is recalled for any reason (destroyed or see options below), FastTrek will automatically trigger its repair and request alliance help. If a ship is currently repairing, it will attempt to speed up that repair, utilising the free speedups that you have available and making as much use of the final free 5 minutes as possible. It will not spend Latinum for repairs.
Recall Options
Recall when full
While mining or hostile hunting, FastTrek will recall the ship when it has a full cargo.
Please be aware that there is a bug with certain ship/research/below decks officer combinations that may result the ship in not showing as full when it actually is. Unfortunately it won’t recall in that situation.
Recall when OPC
While mining or hostile hunting, FastTrek will recall the ship when it is OPC.
Recall after number of hostiles killed
While hostile hunting, FastTrek will recall the ship once it has battled the specified number of hostiles on each trip.
The counter applies to and will reset after each trip. So if you specify 30 here and enter ‘3’ for number of repeats, FastTrek will hunt 90 hostiles in total.
Unlike some other STFC bots, FastTrek will check for actual battle and not just ‘fire and forget’. So if you need to hit 7 freebooters for the daily task, you can enter 7 and rely on FastTrek to do it properly. At worst it will hit an extra hostiles or two, but it won’t overestimate.
On the other hand, if you need to hit a certain level of hostile and your target system contains hostiles of multiple different levels, you may want to add a few so that you end up with the required number.
Recall after number of mines emptied
While mining, recall after emptying/refreshing the specified number of mines.
Speciality Modes
Hostile Hunt
Standard Hostile hunt – indiscriminately target any reds in the system.
Voyager Bioship
When enabled on the Voyager, automatically activate the “Advanced Sensors” ability to reveal a Species 8472 Bioship, and do so repeatedly until recall is triggered (see options above) or the ship is destroyed.
You can also use this for Assimilated FKR hostiles in the Borg Delta Quadrant systems.
Keyword Hunter
(Previously Hirogen Hunter)
Without a Voyager, and especially if you are unable to hit Hirogen Elites, this mode allows you to target any “Hirogen” hostiles in Deltaquadrant systems, by entering ‘Hirogen’ as the hunted keyword. FastTrek will automatically avoid “Lost” hostiles in those systems to avoid filling your hold with ‘junk’.
Similarly you can try “Reptilian” to attack only Xindi-Reptilian Hostiles.
Or try “Texas Class !Sentry” – each separate word must be part of the name, while a word prefixed with an exclamation mark as in this example means that this must not be part of the name. So the above will target Texas Class ships but avoid Sentries!
Mining
See Mining Feature
Repeat Options
Target Location
This is where you’d like to send your ship. For more information please read all about target locations options.
Number of repeats
FastTrek will repeat this many times. Recall options apply to each trip, so if you enter ‘3’ here and have a recall of “30 hostiles killed”, FastTrek will hunt 90 hostiles in total.
Tips
When using FastTrek’s auto-combat feature, “Recall when full” is most useful for grinding Actian, Borg, Voyager or J’em Hadar hostiles.
Auto-combat tends to be slightly less efficient than a manual run, however, the key is that you don’t need to be sat in front of the screen. So if for example you normally hunt Actian in a level 45 system and know exactly how to split between Chrysalis and Apex, maybe try level 44 instead, so you know FastTrek will come home with a full load, even if it took slightly longer to do so.
Human Contention
In systems with lots of human activity, FastTrek will perform worse than a human player, because it does not (yet) anticipate their moves. This may result in competing for the same hostiles and potentially annoying other players. You might better off waiting and coming back later to avoid peak play hours on your server, or to head to a different, possibly lower level system and let FastTrek grind it out.
