This is Tharka's, at the Gateway to Hatikva's.

Vanilla game, 1d 22h into the save.

What's ridiculous about this, I saw maybe 2 K at once in Hatikva's. If the Xenon had even a tiny brain, they'd send this whole fleet and demolish the opposition.

Instead, they send one tiny task force at a time.

Also I have bad radar coverage here, so there might be more in the sector.

I just picked up the game recently and after doing all of the tutorials I started my first save and immediately ignored the starting quest and started playing in the sandbox. I’m now 100 hours or so into this save and scrolling around on R/x4 I keep seeing people talk about “the HQ” and “research”. Maybe I should do that first mission now

I'm ready to place my first shipyard. It will be Terran only for the moment, as I'm still spinning up the other production lines and my Terran production is doing really well.

I'm thinking of settling in Argon Prime. Good location and great workforce bonus. However, I'm concerned about supply lines because my Terran factories are in Saturn 1 and Asteroid Belt.

Should I setup an intermediary warehouse station in a place like The Void to reduce overall travel time, or is there another approach I should consider?

I’m once again asking that ship paint jobs be released from Ventures and missions/quests mechanics and made available for credits in the vanilla game. The Argon can sell me a whole spacecraft carrier but withhold the paint? I think it’s a little ridiculous that I can make my own death ball of mass destruction, but I can’t paint ships the way I want to. I see all these dope camouflage paint patterns that I don’t have access to and it is frustrating that it’s locked behind a mechanic that is defunct or locked behind a mission that I don’t want to do.

Yes, I know there is a mod for this, but I’m asking for this in the vanilla game. I know I’m not the only one that shares this sentiment.

I was able to start playing around with eleven labs and reaper software to make my own voice lines. Currently working on some logic where one actor gives orders over flet command and another will respond. Still WIP but it coming along nicely. I need help with people who know how to put filters on audio to make it sound more distorted.

So I started up a new save with 9.0 and "Find Lockbox" missions used to be very easy, fly to an area marked on the map, ping away with long range scan a couple of times, when your scan hits the boxes you're looking for, they were marked on the map, you could open them up => Payday.

Now I fly to an area, scan and find either nothing or the pings found lead me outside of the mission area again, so are the randomly spawning lockboxes, not the mission ones.

I had the problem several times now, so I'm asking myself, if there is something bugged with these missions right now or did they change them somehow?

Though I run a few mods, these are vanilla friendly, none of them are fiddling with missions in any way.

Features

• Creation of custom POIs on the map at any location or by assignment to objects (non-player stations, gates, abandoned ships, lockboxes).
• Automatic name generation for POIs based on the assigned object name or location coordinates.
• Automatic POI assignment to newly discovered abandoned ships, lockboxes, and data vaults, with optional exclusion during claim procedures for ships.
• Duplicate prevention - checks prevent creating multiple POIs at the same location.
• POI management tab in the Property Owned Information menu for centralized access to all your POIs.
• Context menu for POIs in space and on the map, with options to rename, self-destruct, or locate POIs.
• Optimized rename window location - rename dialog appears near the selected POI instead of at the mouse cursor.
• A "hidden" feature - discover it only by using the mod.

Installation

• Steam Workshop: Player POI
• Nexus Mods: Player POI

Usage

Detailed Guide

Author: Chem O`Dun, on Nexus Mods and Steam Workshop

(For TLDR, go to to bold text below)

In a recent turn of events, the HOP are being absolute douche bags, using the output from my factories to sneak build 2 defense platforms in Second Contact II flashpoint. Now both sides have been spending the last 3 hours pounding on each other like deranged lunatics with no end in sight.

^{Under normal circumstances I would be delighted to know that I humbly contributed to misery and suffering happening somewhere in the X-universe, but it's business before pleasure I'm afraid.}

Now to the problem... fighting off the HOP, ANT was forced to abandon all defense of the void, where the bulk of my non-Terran industry is, which means I had to park my only destroyer group at the gate to frontier edge to hold off the Xenon (which already kicked out the ANT from that system), and are particularly violent this playthrough. This also means that the very same destroyer group had to be called back from Hatikvah and I have to do regular manual interventions there to keep those cyber-assholes from overrunning that system, where my main customer base is, after an... "unfortunate set of accidents" wiped out the competition! ;)

^{Okay, okay, I admit! I kited Xenon destroyers towards factories that were producing the same things I was in Hatikvah. In hindsight, it wasn't such a good idea because they also took out the defense platform along the way, but I digress.}

I think that this detailed appraisal of the situation has given you a good idea what is going on here. Not to lengthen the story too much- I need to curb trade with HOP.

My question is the following: If I set a trade rule, blacklisting HOP from trading with me, and this particular trade rule is the only one I have, is then this particular rule considered as "default" or do I have to do it some other way?

^{I don't want to manually set every station to blacklist HOP because I fully intend to resume commerce with the 3-eyed maniacs as soon as ANT kicks them out of flashpoint, which they seem to be hell bent on doing since they've already destroyed the HOP attack force and are actively fighting the aforementioned defense station.}

I'm not sure if I hit a bug or something but I have a single Terran Wharf that is hostile towards me, evening though my rep is +17. I have tried leaving sector for hours, doing security missions for other Terran stations, etc but nothing seems to remove the status. I made sure I had nothing in my inventory when I went back in sector.

Any ideas?

Are they any more effective than just putting everyone on the same intercept order? Do they have any effect at all?

Hey guys im at my wits end and no post or youtube video could help me troubleshoot.

I set up a trading Station that is supposed to pick up stuff from my stations and sell it elsewhere. I didnt get to the selling part because my traders will only rarely pick up stuff if at all.

All my stations have docks. piers and cargo drones, they are in the same system. Trade rule is correct and i buy for more then i sell and i have enough storage allocated and there are no production modules on the trading station.

My trading Station has like 10 Demeters and 2 Helios and they just idle instead of picking up the huge stock pile of over 20k Hullparts waiting at my station. Then every once in a while 1 ship may go and pick up some hullparts and then they just idle forever again.

Why arent my traders all flocking to pick up that stockpile?

Please help me guys. I dont know what to do. Ill attach Screenshots. maybe ive been staring at the menus too long and you can see whats wrong.

If you need more screenshots i will provide them.

Has anyone made or know how to make a graphic of sorts that show the default button layouts for X4? I have a HOSAS setup, dual Constellation Alphas, which it has a default bind set for, but it uses the button numbers, which I haven't committed to memory. Would be great to have a reference to go by.

Implementation of the Shadow Tracker device, allowing players to track specific ships in the universe by consuming a special inventory item.

Features

• Ship Tracking: Use Shadow Tracker devices to track specific ships, making their location constantly visible on the map.
• Crafting and Inventory: Shadow Trackers are craftable items that can be stored in the player's inventory.
• Shadow Tracker Tab: A dedicated tab in the UI displays all currently tracked ships.

Installation

• Steam Workshop: Shadow Tracker
• Nexus Mods: Shadow Tracker

Author: Chem O`Dun, on Nexus Mods and Steam Workshop

Hi,
why isn't the refined metals production facility linked to the Ore storage ?

I teleported to my Tokyo and found drones parked. The fleet had just finished taking out a xenon construction site.

Im working on a complete independant sound mod for a comms channel to add more immersion when in cockpits and bridges of ships.

Would people be interested in this? The video is a sample of the project.

Hey all,

I'm still relatively new to X4 and trying to build a Terran mining/trading/manufacturing empire. My goal is eventually to become mostly hands-off and focus on managing the business rather than personally flying every ship everywhere.  I just started the teleportation research on the PHQ.

 Current financial situation:

Credits: 300K, but with a very slow and steady income.

Mercury Solar Station

• 4x Energy Cell production modules
• Small container storage
• 3 Frog traders assigned

Mars Microlattice Station

Currently building a station with:

• 2x Metallic Microlattice production modules
• 1 dock
• Small container storage
• Small solid storage
• Small liquid storage

Asteroid Belt Miners

• 1 M ore miner
• 3 S and 1 M Silicon miners
• 0 Helium Miners

What happened is that I started building the Microlattice factory before fully understanding the Terran production chain. I originally thought it only needed Ore and Energy Cells, but I've now discovered it also needs Helium. That required adding liquid storage, and now I'm basically broke.

My next planned purchase is an M gas miner for Helium.

My questions are things like below:

1. Did I build this factory too early, or am I still on a reasonable path?
2. Should I expand the existing Mars station into a Silicon Carbide complex, or build a separate Silicon Carbide station somewhere else  (basically focus on specialized stations or multi-use stations)?
3. If expanding in Mars is the better option, how many Silicon Carbide modules would you pair with 2 Microlattice modules?
4. Is Mars the best place for this long-term, or would you relocate future industry to other sectors?
5. At what point do you start adding Computronic Substrate production?
6. How many Ore, Silicon, and Helium miners would you consider the minimum for a small but profitable Terran industrial setup?

For context, I'm a busy Dad with limited playtime (30-60 minutes in the morning before work), so I'm generally looking for the most efficient and least micromanagement-heavy approach rather than the absolute min/max solution.

Any advice from experienced Terran industrialists would be appreciated!  Any QoL mods I need to look at as well?

tl;dr get it here.

I had some updates I wanted to do to the map, and feature requests and bug reports from /u/Voidheartd and /u/3punkt1415.

The big things are a new Trade Opportunities widget, and I reverse engineered how resource field replenishment works (there was a fair amount of science here), so I can accurately tell you the state of every resource field and when it will respawn, and well as compute the theoretical maximum amount of resources you could pull from a sector (though I'd be impressed if you could strip 10 million ore instantly... that's a lot of miners).

Pics here.

A note about the max resource extraction rates - they are theoretical and presume you mine everything the instant it respawns. I think in practice you're unlikely to get half of that except in sectors with very small fields that you mine heavily.

Up next I will be exploring creating a live serve mode that could let me do cool things like render every ship in the universe dynamically. It requires some actual engineering though and drawbacks that I don't love, so I'll probably be noodling on it for a bit.

New User Features

Sector Map Updates

• Data-vault overlays — regular vaults (cyan stars) and Erlking vaults (gold stars) at every zoom level, showing opened vs unopened state and, on hover, code / status / blueprint; legend labels carry opened/total counts.
• Player station markers — zoomed in, each player station shows a marker with a name/code tooltip.
• Highways on the map — Superhighways and local ring Highways as their own Base Map toggles, drawn along their true spline tracks; gate lines now attach at the actual gate positions rather than zone centres.
• Resource overlay redesigned — the whole-hex tint that washed out busy sectors is gone. Each selected resource now draws percentile edge gauges: mineable-now up the left hex edges and max replenishment rate up the right edges (a half-full gauge = the median sector), so "empty but replenishing fast" reads distinctly from "full but slow to come back". The sector detail panel lists every resource field in a collapsible dropdown — current / capacity, gatherspeed, and a respawn ETA for depleted fields — with respawned ("overdue") fields correctly shown as full. Resources render regardless of which factions are selected.
• Defaults — gate/superhighway/highway routes on by default; Kha'ak stations off.

Trade Opportunities

• New Opportunities view — the Trade tab now opens on Opportunities: ranked buy-here → sell-here lanes per ware, with per-ware "buy here / sell here" offer charts and top trading stations. Click a lane to jump the charts to its ware.
• Real trip economics from your own ships — each lane's profit-per-hour is built from your player trade ships' loadout travel speed and the lane's actual route length (station and gate positions along the gate-graph path, split into plain vs local-highway km), plus dock time — not a flat estimate.
• Controls, as cards — ware filter, ship preset (its cargo hold and computed travel speed shown read-only), adjustable travel drive ratio and average highway speed, per-ship-size dock time, and a sell-player-reserve-stock mode. Sort by Cr/h; Distance (km), Time, and depth-capped Depth Cr columns.
• Documented assumptions — the "what these lanes mean and caveats" note explains what each control does to the model.

Universe Charts

• Total Sector max replenishment per Resource — a new sunburst on the Universe → Overview tab, companion to "Total Sector resources per Resource": each resource ring is subdivided by each sector's share of that resource's theoretical maximum replenishment rate (Σ capacity ÷ respawndelay, units/h).

Dashboard Layout

• Five question-shaped tabs — the dashboard is reorganized into a two-level layout (Map / Trade / Empire / Market / Universe) with sub-tab pills; the active view and sub-view persist across reloads.

Internal

• Resource respawn model — the parser now captures each resource area's respawn-eligibility clock (starttime, schema v7) alongside its yield/level/gatherspeed tokens, and extract-gamedata pulls regionyields.xml and gatherspeeds into new reference CSVs. The reverse-engineered v9 depletion/respawn mechanic — areas deplete under mining, respawn whole once past respawndelay, and the stored yield materializes on the next miner contact — is documented in docs/resource-depletion-model.md, validated by an in-game experiment.

Bugfixes

• Weapon sim: mass drivers read as heatless — Paranid Mass Drivers store per-shot heat on <heat initial> rather than <heat value>, so they showed no overheat time or cooldown. Fixed, and the heat cycle is now simulated discretely: mass drivers overheat in 2 shots, and initial-spike + value beams (e.g. the Scalar Aperture) are modeled correctly — all validated against in-game behavior.
• Weapon sim: clip weapons showed burst rate — clip/burst weapons (Tau Accelerator, Bolt Repeater/Turret, Neutron Gatling, …) displayed the intra-clip burst rate instead of the sustained fire rate the in-game encyclopedia shows (S Tau Accelerator 3/s → ~1.06/s).

The problem with station traders is that even though they are doing random amounts in trading even though the stations request way more then all the queued trades combined. It is rather annoying because my special energy generating station is not doing its job as out of my 20 traders only 5-10% of their total capacity is utilized per trade on average.

Maybe I am doing something wrong? have anyone find a solution to this?

Maybe there are some mods that actually fix this awesome 80 energy cells trades?

EDIT:

I think the issue is that traders do not get the energy cells from the station i intended. They seem to randomly choose between stations that are actually selling the energy cells and some of those stations have just tiny amont to sell.

In my opinion there should be logical checkbox within the game "prioritize higher occupancy" that would automatically cut of those micro sized trades.

While stations are useful for trading, ship building, and faction dealings they also have a few other uses I'd like to go over. These will hopefully help while navigating the galaxy. Some or all of these may be obvious to vets but I'll go over all of them for those who wish to improve their X4 knowledge.

Data Leaks

Each station can produce data leaks. While in scan mode in your ship or suit nearing a data leak close enough will activate it. There are two categories of data leaks: red pulse and orange sparklers:

In scan mode the HUD will show a waveform as shown in the right example. The large the waveform the closer you are. It also makes a distinct sound when you approach it. When viewed from enough distance where modules render you can also see glints around the station which indicate a data leak is in that general area:

Here I can see there's a data leak towards the bottom of this Split station so I know exactly where to go in scan mode. Note that you will obviously need to approach from all directions to ensure you've seen the further out glints. There's also some that may be blocked and you won't notice until you've used the waveform approach instead.

Red data leaks can produce blueprint if the appropriate hacking technology is researched and the appropriate faction/reputation requirements are met. They can also produce commissions to give discounts. If you plan to purchase a ship from a wharf/shipyard consider checking for red data leaks first as they can help reduce the cost. Sometimes a commission or blueprint is not rolled and you simply get data decrypted succeeded message with nothing else. For blueprints this can either mean you already have the blueprint, don't meet the requirements for the blueprint, or if neither is true your RNG was just bad. To obtain a blueprint for a module the data leak MUST be on the module itself. You cannot obtain blueprints for build modules or unique modules such as those present at Teladi trading stations. Saving before scanning a red data leak will let you save scum the result. Just be aware that constant reloading will continually reset progress. It may be worth it at times to just buy the blueprint if it's cheap enough.

Orange data leaks are for quests and only quests. They will not produce the results of red data leaks and visa-versa. One of the special data leak quests is to unlock your HQ should you have one of the Grand Exchange starts that aren't Terran Cadet/Project Genesis. It's generally the first one you scan. Many of these quests generally involve illegal activity though with lucrative rewards. Orange data leaks in FRF space can produce quests from Fallen Families. These are the only way you can increase reputation with them. At 10 rep they won't harass you.

Quests

A station has a chance to proc quests when you're within radar range of them. That is 40km from the nearest module not to be confused with the station core distance shown when you select it through the map or gravidar. Targeting a station through the gravidar or the map will let you see if there's a quest for it regardless of radar distance or not if you've discovered it:

In this example I can tell a station has a patrol quests despite it being nowhere near radar range. Though I still have to be in radar range to show the quest and accept it:

Station Scanning

I will note that at 30 rep every station of that faction will show you every detail in logistic view regardless of if you scanned it or not so at that point it's a useless to do. For those stations that don't meet this condition you simply approach a module until it highlights like so:

As you do this the information unlocked value for the station will increase:

At 70% is where you get most of the good data from. Now looking at the logistical view for this station:

I get a lot of information like I would on my own station. The main things missing are active buy/sell orders and any workforce bonuses. Here I can see the station is dreadfully low on medical supplies. If I expand the wares section of a station's information tab I can get some more information as an example for this trading station:

Here I can see that a shipment of Claytronics is in route and there are purchases that will be made for Advanced Composites, Drone Components, and Water. green indicates additions while the brownish color indicates consumption. This can be particularly useful for "scan ship containing X" since you can see when someone is coming to get the ware in question.

NPC Hiring

NPCs can be hired for many purposes including quests. Captains, Traders, Managers, Ship Traders, and Individuals cannot be hired. Person of Interests will offer you a mission instead. You can check an NPC's stats by approaching them until a window appears:

This individual has 1 morale and piloting making them an interesting candidate for a starter captain. They may also be a good candidate for any mission looking for pilots. NPCs of factions with bad reputation (if you docked via faction cloaking for example) will straight out refuse to talk to you. Most NPCs are the race of the faction, though some factions like HAT may have mixed races at their station. Note that if you are present on a player station with workforce it will show individuals you can recruit to work elsewhere:

Sometimes your station may get special NPCs who are not the race of the main habitat. These tend to have higher than usual stats from what you'd expect at a faction NPC. Faction NPCs tend to be higher in stats going up to 3* boarding and engineering. Piloting can go up to 2*. Finding management on an NPC will be a very rare occurrence. If you just need manager seminar fodder your own station is usually better. If you're looking for 3* monster marines you'll want to go to faction stations. If you're scouting NPCs from factions it's best to do so at trading stations or any station with lots of docks for encounters (except the Teladi trading stations which have absolutely abysmal NPC density). Prices for faction NPCs are based on their skills, usually reaching around 3mil max.

Person of Interest

While close to stations you may notice a yellow person icon beside it.

Clicking on the station will show a list of names. These are known as person of interest. When you see this, the first thing you should do is look for an out of place room at the elevator. These are rooms which are not one of the standard:

• Engineering Section
• Security Room
• Management Office
• Trader Corner/Docks

Note that if one of them is a Bar you might want to check the station for orange data leaks as you may have found a black market station. Other times you might find an agent for diplomatic missions. If no such special room shows up then check the docks. Here I've found the individual in question:

Unlike normal NPCs who you are able to hire these simply have a Job offer option. In other words it's a way to find quests besides the chance for them to show up in radar range of a station. Especially useful in finding missions in low station density areas like Terran space. Note that finding an individual on something like a trading station with multiple docks may not be a wise idea. In the case of special rooms:

In this case the room was the Godrealm War Room which is where I sign up for HOP war room missions against PAR. This works even if the quest leading to it is not active. If a black market has been unlocked you'll see an icon with sunglasses on it in the list. For your HQ there will be a list of icons who look like they are in suits to indicate diplomats at your station. Finally, an icon with a crown on it indicates the faction representative is located at the station.

Trading Corner

These are locations in stations which are generally present in docks (except those weird Teladi trading stations). So the more docks the more trading stations. This is why if you want to purchase inventory items it's best to do it at trading stations as they have the most docks per station. Items you can purchase include:

• General items for crafting purposes
• Seminars for pilots and managers
• Sometimes you'll get crystals and unstable crystals in the list
• Pirate faction station trading corners will also have a chance to sell you illegal wares with SCA pirate bases being a particularly good source

It's also where you can sell Flux Capacitors and Programmable Field Arrays for significant money. Now one thing that's important to note is wares will shuffle if you exit the station for some distance, usually it's best to teleport cycle or re-enter the sector. As an example here's the wares of a trader for a station:

Now I teleport to another station and back again:

Notice a basic management seminar is now available. Prices have also changed. The coloring on the right is either grey or blue. Grey means there's no item to purchase and/or sell. Blue means there's ware for the item by the trader to purchase or in your inventory to sell.

Crafting benches can also be found to the right of traders when facing them. These allow you to craft items from various inventory items. Some are simple wares to sell, others are for diplomacy purposes, and some are straight out illegal. Which can also be used to...

Hack The Gibson

Security rooms, engineering sections, and some parts of docks have different panels you can use for various purposes. As an example:

This is the turret control panel. If I have a security slicer I can disable the turrets on the station for 10 minutes. Items required for hacking will vary depending on the panel. Note that this can be done on enemy stations if you have a ship with faction cloaking such as envoy or cypher. Though, your cover will drop so it's a good idea to boost the hell away when you're done. Each panel has a different result and each screen is unique to its function. Note that a person being in the room has no effect on hacking.

Ship Dealerships

These are special rooms in Shipyards and Wharfs with a ship trader and a workbench:

Note that equipment docks do not have a workbench, only a ship trader. Interacting with the ship trader will allow you to purchase ships and/or upgrade docked ships. Though, a majority of players will most likely do this through the map menu. Workbenches allow you to add or remove ship mods should you have the proper research unlocked. Though removing them alone doesn't require it, only adding the mod. Note that faction shipyards and wharfs will charge you to modify your ships, but player owned shipyards and wharfs do not charge.

Hi all, about 80 hours into my first Terran Cadet playthrough and my Terran economy is booming. I've been dreading branching out into the commonwealth supply chains as it appears much more demanding than the Terran, but now is the time.

I have most of the production modules, and a good amount of money saved up to start the stations. My question now, is which production chains should do you normally pair up as I will be making several station and avoiding the "megastation".

Thanks in advance for the help!