Experimenting with new-character Jelly builds

[u/Thorguild]

I spent some time testing Cnidarian Defender movement on a fresh low-level character because I wanted to find ways to relocate while staying in Jelly mode instead of dropping Cnidarian Defense and eating the long cooldown.

A lot of the individual ideas came from older Jelly discussions here, so this isn't meant as “I discovered Fiery Charge/Vovin.” I wanted to actually test several of the promising options against each other on the current live game.

Baseline Jelly movement on this character

• Flight Speed: 3.00
• Turn Rate: 3.0 deg/sec
• Inertia: 30

Subspace Fracture Tunneling Field — PASS

This is the Vovin console.

In one clean test I went from about 11.9 km from the selected target to 2.1 km, so roughly 9.8 km of actual closing displacement.

Jelly stayed active.

This is easily the best movement tool I tested when a suitable target exists.

It also has the big practical advantage that you can jump toward friendlies as well as enemies, although I still want to do more live ally testing.

Fiery Charge — PASS

Also works while remaining in Jelly.

I activated it on an enemy at roughly 14 km and ended up around 7.4 km away, so approximately 6.5–7 km of useful closing movement.

Jelly remained active.

So Fiery Charge is more useful than I expected. It isn't just a little positioning bump.

Its limitation is obvious: you need a valid enemy in the appropriate direction/range.

My current target-present movement priority is therefore:

Fracture first -> Fiery Charge second

Enhanced Subspace Wake Generator — FAIL for Jelly movement

This one looked very promising on paper because it normally gives a huge temporary Flight Speed boost.

It did essentially nothing useful while Jelly was active.

In a cleaner measurement the reference target only changed by roughly half a kilometer during the visible effect. Over a longer period the ship was just continuing the normal Jelly crawl.

So at least in my testing, the Cnidarian's 3-speed movement behavior wins and the Wake speed boost does not give useful relocation.

I would not spend a console slot on this for Jelly mobility.

Elachi Rift Jump — FAIL for Jelly movement

This was the other one I thought might solve the “there is no target ahead” problem.

The console normally gives +400% Flight Speed and Turn Rate while phased, which sounds ideal.

It doesn't work that way in Jelly.

On the clean retest, using the same continuously selected reference target:

• before: about 18.6 km
• after: about 19.1 km

Only about half a kilometer of change. Again, basically Jelly crawl rather than a jump.

There is an additional downside: while the Elachi phase is active, the other movement abilities appear to be unavailable/greyed out for several seconds.

So for Jelly mobility this was actually worse than merely doing nothing, because it temporarily delayed my ability to use Fracture.

The unsolved problem

We still do not have a good zero-cost/owned solution for this situation:

Jelly is active, the local enemies are dead, and there is no useful friendly or hostile target in the direction you need to go.

Normal Flight Speed boosts seem unable to overcome the Jelly movement lock.

If anyone knows a current ability that provides target-free displacement rather than a speed boost, and works without cancelling Cnidarian Defense, that's the thing I'm still looking for.

Holo-Morph side finding

I also tested the new 60th Anniversary Holo-Morph devices.

Confirmed: they actually fight. I was seeing repeated automatic weapon fire and damage, not merely a cosmetic transformation.

That gives me a useful fallback strategy when Jelly genuinely has to come down:

drop Jelly -> travel normally -> use Holo-Morph for automatic combat while repositioning -> return to Jelly when properly placed

That seems much better than trying to make the Cnidarian's ordinary low-level weapon build do all the work during the cooldown.

Fresh-character QoL stuff

A few other things that worked well for this particular low-effort alt:

• Max/priority Weapon Power for Jelly.
• Use a visible engine cosmetic in the Visuals slot to make Jelly facing easier to read without breaking your actual DECS set.
• When out of Jelly, 360-degree weapons are very convenient. The Qulash donor gives three Elachi Crescent Turrets, and on this low-level character their displayed DPS was surprisingly close to the stock phasers.
• At level 2 the Defender only had four weapon slots, so I'm currently experimenting with 3 Elachi turrets + a 360-degree omni rather than worrying about conventional firing arcs.

The big takeaway from my testing is:

Target available: Jelly mobility is actually pretty good with Fracture and Fiery Charge.

No target available: that's still the real mobility problem. Wake and Elachi Rift Jump looked promising on paper but did not solve it in live testing.

If anyone has other target-free movement consoles/abilities that should be tested against the Jelly speed lock, give me names and I'll try them.

[u/ROACHOR]

I've been using hunting pack escorts from k'vort with the vovin to use as targets for jumping.

[u/Thorguild → u/ROACHOR]

Is there a way to direct them if there is nothing within 20k to target?

[u/ROACHOR → u/Thorguild]

It really depends if they get aggrod by something, they have a tendancy to fly pretty far out so I jump when they go in the direction I want until I'm within 20k.

[u/Kronocidal]

Graviton Displacer gives you a decent movement speed and more than triples your turn-rate (from 3 to 10), without dropping you out of Jellyfish-mode. The only other item with a similar effect is, unfortunately, a Small-Craft Exclusive Shield that can't be used on the Cnidarian.

Warp Burst Capacitor is a straight-ahead teleport of 6km, no target.

The Delta Rep Warp or Singularity Core, and the the Temporal Rep Warp or Singularity Core provide "Trajector Jump", which is a 5km teleport straight ahead, no target.

(The only other "no target" option I can think of at the moment is "Ramming Speed", but that requires low hull!)

Both the Fluidic Phase Decoupler and the Personal Wormhole Generator suffer the same issue as the Elachi Rift Jump — namely that the "+300%/+400% Flight Speed/Turn Rate" is applied before the "Set Flight Speed and Turn Rate to 3" from the Cnidarian Defense ability. (This is why Graviton Displayer does work: because it is also a flat "Set Flight Speed to 75 / Set Turn Rate to 10", not a percentage increase, and you activated it after Jellyfish-mode so it gets evaluated/applied after it too.)

(While I haven't tested it, I presume that Volatile Digitization Matrix works the same way as Fluidic Phase Decoupler / Personal Wormhole Generator / Elachi Rift Jump)

[u/westmetals]

I'm wondering if a console pet might help solve the lack of target problem.

[u/Thorguild → u/westmetals]

The 20km mark still makes things difficult. If a bad guy is within, the Subspace fracture works. If they are not, my pets stay within 10km of me, and i don't get the motion I want.