Cuttlefish

Designer

The **Cuttlefish** is a Tier 4 ship in the Nautic Series mod. Like other ships in its upgrade path, it has high mass and its method of damaging enemy ships is to ram them. However, unlike other rammers, the Cuttlefish uses its high speed to ram, rather than a dash.

While in the ship code it has a very weak dash (to prevent teammate trolling), the ship's energy capacity is too low to use the dash.

Energy (Capacity, Regen) and Bullet (Damage, Speed) should never be upgraded.

This ship is OP and upgrades to other OP ships: Giant Squid, Narwhal, Orca, Octopus, Colossal Squid, which are excellent miners and attackers.

## Strategies

### Fast Mining

This ship is a fast miner, mining even faster than the Barracuda.

When exiting the depot, you are temporarily invincible. You can left-click to lose the invincibility early. After it ends, you can either use your shield and gem pool to continue mining (and pick up gems that fall out), or you can re-enter the depot and repeat. When mining without invincibility, your shield will be depleted very fast, but with full shield, you can mine at least 120 gems (1/3 to 1/2 cargo).

This ship can fill up its gem cargo extremely fast when mining. If your shield is empty and cargo is full, you can regenerate almost all shield while you unload the entire cargo into your station. In a dense asteroid field without many players, more time is spent depositing gems than mining.

### Base Nuking

With its high health and speed, this ship can easily fit into gaps in the enemy base with heavy mines and be able to escape, even with the entire team shooting and blocking you.

One full cargo of 4x4 heavy mines can deal 3200 damage to the enemy base, although delayed after deployment, for a cost of 800 credits. One full cargo of 4 torps can deal 4000 damage immediately upon impact for 2000 credits. 10x4 heavy mines also costs 2000 credits, and it deals 8000 damage, but it requires the enemy to shoot the mines too quickly or the cuttlefish to ram enemies into the mines.

While less efficient, entire teams of cuttlefish sometimes attack an enemy base with torpedoes. Just one cuttlefish alone could undermine anywhere from 1000 to 2000 gems of enemy contribution progress. Two cuttlefish (proven by Earth1283 and MeDumb) can exterminate a station structure module with 4 torpedoes each, totaling to 8000 damage. 10 cuttlefish with 4 torpedoes each (40 torps) can deal 40 000 damage to nuke a station.

An alternate strategy is to save up the credits to do the base nuking as a Giant Squid.

### Summary

* It is usually best to powermine and contribute to base. You can then buy 4 packs of heavy mines or 4 torpedoes for base nuking.
* Heavy mines are essential in this game mode, so are base nuking or base defense. Because you have a high speed (probably just a bit lower than the bullet speed of most other ships, it is possible to escape in both an open area or in a medially-dense asteroid field)
* It is possible to attack most enemies and this ship will beat many Tier 6 ships in a 1v1 and dense asteroid field, but attacking slows down your contribution to base.
* It can ram Tier 7 ships into asteroids, especially with depot invincibility, but it is not very effective.
* If you do not want to upgrade to Giant Squid, or you want to skip Tier 5, continue to powermine the base to Level 4 before upgrading this ship to Tier 6. The Swordfish is relatively underpowered.
* Using this ship with the *powermine and base nuke* strategy is still viable even if the enemy has Tier 6 ships, but at that point, it is usually better to upgrade to Narwhal if possible.

There are various strategies for secondary weapons:

1. Base nuker/protector: Heavy mines x4; or Heavy mines x3, Small mines x1
2. Miner: none
3. Attacker: Missile x2, Heavy Mines x2
4. Enemy Troller: Rocket x3, Normal/Heavy mines x1

## Trivia

* Like the U-Smasher, the Cuttlefish has a weak dash to prevent teammate trolling.