Not sure if this is intended behaviour. I was hunting an H in the Memorial to get that data shard for the blueprint research, and I quickly knocked out the big seismic guns, after which the H just shut down. It just sat there, with fully functional engines and medium turrets, taking a pounding from my plasma turrets, making no effort to get in range for its needler turrets.

It did not bail (can they even do that, like the fighters?), it just kinda...gave up, and took the long range bombardment. I still destroyed the engines, just in case, but it stopped right when I destroyed the large turrets, and the engines were fully operational for minutes after that, and still stood still.

You there, with the damn laser tower I see you! Get that out of here!

Hey everyone! Just wanted to share a quick update after a couple of days of coding and sound design for the mod.

Everything you hear in this clip has been created specifically for the project so far, including custom fleet command voice lines, ambient bridge chatter, and new ship audio.

The biggest breakthrough has been getting custom audio fully integrated into the game and using logic to trigger dynamic hull damage sounds based on incoming damage. If you listen closely, when the green laser hits my ship you'll hear my custom hull damage effects playing. Instead of relying on the default audio or lack of, I created my own basic hull warping, metallic stress, and internal impact sounds to better represent what it would actually sound like from inside a capital ship under fire. I plan to queiten the outside to actually reflect being inside the ship.

The long-term goal is to simulate the experience of being inside the ship, where the audio reflects what's happening around you. For example, once shields fail, you might begin hearing the hull groan, warp, or thud under heavy impacts. Those sounds are all driven by gameplay logic and scale with the amount of damage the ship is taking, giving the player meaningful audio cues rather than just visual feedback.

This is still very much a work in progress and there's a lot to refine, but I'm genuinely excited about this milestone. It finally feels like the project is starting to come alive, and it's opening the door to a much more immersive combat experience with sound.

This happened to me in the recent playthrough of The X Star Wars Mod. It was quite fun; I could fix it by leaving the system on another ship.

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

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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

(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?

9.0 gutted the envoy its now just a expensive taxi that feels like a waste of money

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

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.

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've been thinking about trying a custom start with the HQ in a terrible sector and hated by most. Maybe start in a Xenon sector, like Scale Plate Green, would be very hard to survive. Or perhaps a sector with the massive khaak stations every where might be more manageable. I'm still very much in the thinking stage of this.

I'd start with the HQ, and maybe one destroyer, a handful of fighters and fight to survive from the moment I begin. Give myself the main scrap blue prints or scrap station to make use of what ever I'm up against. Have one potential trade partner maybe at -5 and everyone else wanting my head.

If you feel like helping me brainstorm this or have suggestion about the perfect sector to start in, chime in.

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

Couldn't find anything on Google (who can find anything substantial there nowadays anyway..) so asking X redditors before going to Egosoft directly as I'm unsure if this is a bug actually.

Since a while, my SCA turn hostile for no apparent reason and stations/ships will shoot my ships on sight. Sometimes it's out of nowhere, sometimes it happens when I build some station, regardless if in a sector they have assets in or not. As far as I remember, until the Terraforming Project done, the rep to SCA is fixed to -5 and can not change. As I'm not using any mods, do anyone face the same? Or did I just forgot about this being possible/normal in the past 4-5y I didn't play?

The bizarre thing about it is that I have teleport ships sitting at their Pirate Bases for trading in my fucktons of panels and so on and once I teleport to any of those ships, rep goes back to normal..

Here some screens, last one I just teleported to the ship:

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.

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).

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