This can be anything from Hyperspace in Star Wars, Warp Drive in Star Trek, travel through the Warp in Warhammer 40k or anything else.
I’ve always liked “slow” FTL travel, where going a few light-years still takes a few days or so. I also really like travel through an alternate dimension like in 40k, Event Horizon, Witchspace in Elite Dangerous.
I wanna know your favorite versions, or do you prefer stories that obey the laws of known physics, like the Expanse or Rimworld?
A bunch already here that I like for different reasons but I think my favorite is what they did in the game The Sword of the Stars. Sadly a case of a game with great ideas but only so-so-execution.
My memory on the mechanics might be wrong as I haven’t played it for years but basically as a strategy game the fun twist is that every species has a fundamentally different approach to FTL.
You have a Lizard species with basically Star Trek warp drive with fixed speed above light speed from any point to point of their choosing.
Then you have humans that stumbled across naturally occurring interconnect lines between many stars and can travel faster along those routes by comparison to warp drive but have to travel below light speed off of those lines.
Then an aquatic species that doesn’t do FTL in the normal sense. They developed teleportation but is it only for short distance. However they are able to get the power requirements down very low and rapidly repeat the process and so they flicker across space and the distance of each step gets longer the farther they are from a gravity well so they travel faster around the outside of something like a galactic cluster than in the middle of it. Reversing the normal pattern of where things get colonized.
And last was an insect species that developed ship size star gates but travels sub light to anywhere new but as long as they bring a gate ship travel is basically instant after that.
And the bonus layer is that since the game has direct ship to ship combat also in the mechanics the difference drive types have trade offs as well like the insects having extremely good combat drives since they don’t have ANY FTL systems on their combat ships so it all goes to direction propulsion.
So far it is the only Sci-fi setting I can think of that has so many different ones overlapping not just something like a newer system replacing an older one.
I remember hearing about this! Never got a chance to actually play it though.
The concept of different races travelling differently reminds me of David Brin’s Uplift series, though. Everyone uses Hyperspace, but different species use different “bands”, which behave differently. “A-level” behaves somewhat similarly to Hyperspace from other settings, and is preferred by oxygen breathing species. There’s another level that’s used mostly by hydrogen-breathing species, and is inhabited by quantum-order life. The one that sticks out for me is “E-level”, which is mostly used by memetic organisms - you have to shift your self-conception to traverse a changing landscape. It’s… really trippy.
I really love roguelikes and I’m mad that their version is unsupported and basically unplayable right now
edit: The Pit. I want to play that on my steamdeck so badly.
Early versions of Stellaris had something similar, but reduced in scale- it’s a 4X grand strategy where you’re basically controlling a spacefaring species you create, if you’re not familiar with it.
They did away with multiple FTL systems at some point, but early on in the games lifespan when creating your species you’d pick between hyperdrives, wormholes, or warp iirc.
Hyperdrives were basically Star Wars style space travel- predetermined FTL ‘roads’ in space that you can travel along.
Warp was ‘the ship teleports from where it is to where it’s going’.
Wormhole was the most interesting one to me, because it used giant ‘hubs’ you’d need to build in space to… well, make a wormhole from the hub to wherever the ships were trying to go. The downsides were that you had to build hubs and they were expensive, and you could only actually leave from the hub itself which had a limit on how many wormholes it could make. The upside was that it had dramatically better range than the other FTL options so you could build one on the borders of an enemy and then basically show up wherever you wanted.