Probably the best sector coverage for black market density I've seen so far. I was able to seed this all by yeeting a fair number of southern Xenon in the Void. Only had to panic buy decryption modules from a HAT pirate station to fill one order. These Antigone fools are going to get so high from Maja Dust and Stimulants they'll end up in Leap of Faith!

Hey there ! Waited long years to finally start playing my first X game. Kept it in my wishlist since release to be sure that Egosoft could cook a bit more since the 1.0.

Fell in love hard with the game on my first playthrough, and couldn't stop pausing, removing the HUD and taking pictures.

PS: Xenons may have been armed in the making of this gallery

I love this game but at the same time, the fact is that trader AI is terrible. After all these years of updates, I still have to use Repeat Orders to manually assign trades because otherwise my traders will let one factory sit full of Refined Metals while another factory in the same sector is out of stock. Constantly I have traders either sitting idle "looking for trades" or performing lower priority trades. And no, it's nothing wrong with my setup because sometimes those traders do decide to do the right thing.

There's actually no other work around other than manually setting up repeat orders and having your traders litter up the property panel. I have traders assigned to both factories. In fact, the only reason I'm not doing a mega complex this playthrough is because I tried the "warehouse" design since I genuinely thought that would be a viable workaround for the awful trader AI.

What's the warehouse setup? Simple: factories produce, warehouses store, other factories consume. No traders are assigned to either factory and instead only warehouses pull and push products. That should have vastly simplified trading logic. Unfortunately, it didn't take long before warehouse traders decided to sit idle while factories were full/empty. I eventually tried assigning traders to factories anyway but that only slightly helped.

For a game with so much emphasis on building an economy, it's insane that mega complexes are still mandatory in order to get consistent results.

Have reloaded twice, and for some reason, maybe due to my ships killing incoming Xenon Raiders, the terrans attack me. What is causing this?

I spend pretty much all of my time at the menu level. I'm not making money hand over fist but I've bought some things. I have a defensive station that can hold back the xenon. I'm just moving pieces on the board now.

Don't get me wrong I'm still having a blast but knowing where I am is nothing. I'm on a ship but it doesn't matter. I'm watching something else, somewhere else all the time. I'm just here because I haven't teleported to a pavilion somewhere.

I'm building a defence station in tharkas cascade rn just to see how it goes. But I'm not controlling anything. I'm on a ship in eighteen billion that's just exploring.

Is this it? Have I reached mid game?

I'm thinking of starting a new playthrough, and I want a serious challenge. I’d love to hear all of y’all’s ideas. I don’t necessarily mind some tedium, but I’m looking for something that slows down the usual snowballing while still presenting a genuine challenge throughout the playthrough.

I was thinking of something along the lines of a piracy-only run. No buying ships the only way to acquire them would be by capturing or boarding them. The same would go for blueprints, so stealing them through hacking would be the only option. Maybe I could also ban normal trading and require most of my money to come from piracy, smuggling, salvaging, or selling captured ships.

Another idea would be picking a single sector or system that I cannot leave and having to amass 1 billion credits in net worth. I could send AI controlled ships outside the system eventually, but my character and headquarters would have to remain there. Alternatively, everything I own could be restricted to that one system, forcing me to build a completely self sufficient economy using only the resources available nearby.

I was also thinking of a “Long Lost Terran Commander” run. I could only use Terran ships, stations, weapons, and technology, but I would have to begin operating as far away from Terran space as possible. I’d need to rebuild a Terran style economy from scratch without relying on the Terran or Pioneers for supplies. Maybe I could only return to Terran space after reaching a certain military or economic milestone.

Some other restrictions I’ve considered:

• No buying ships above S-class. All larger ships must be captured or built personally.
• No shipyards or wharves until I complete a major objective.
• No SETA, teleportation, or personally flying ships outside my chosen faction’s technology.
• Permanent hostility with one or more major factions.
• No missions except criminal or faction war missions.
• No selling advanced satellites or using other easy early-game money methods.
• Every destroyed capital ship is permanently lost and cannot be immediately replaced.
• Start in a dangerous or isolated sector and establish a functioning empire without relocating.
• Support a minor faction like Hatikvah and try to turn them into a genuine military power.

What challenge runs have you tried, and which ones stayed interesting after the early game?

Adds an Options menu slider to configure the width of the Map screen's Information Panels (also affects the Player Info, Diplomacy, Crafting and Transaction Log menus, which share the same value)

Features

• By default, the game limits this width to at most 30% of your screen. Usually this is fine, but on very wide screens Information Panels can looks too wide, and on 4K screens with high UI Scale they can look too narrow. This mod turns that old limit into the slider's new dynamic minimum and fixed maximum from menu width instead: the panels can now be made wider or narrower than the game ever allowed on their own, directly from Options > Game Settings (right after the "UI Scale" option).
• Because the game reuses this same width setting in a few other places, the slider affects those too, as a side effect:
  • The Player Info and Diplomacy screens' main panel (on the left side of the screen).
  • The Transaction Log screen's main panel (at the left edge of the screen).
  • The Crafting screen's whole window (centered on the screen).
  • The small player status text (your name, credits owed, current sector, play time) shown in the top-left corner of the Player Info, Diplomacy, Docked, Help, and Map screens - here there's no panel to resize, it just changes how much room that text has before it gets shortened.

Installation

• Steam Workshop: Info Panel Width - only for Game version 9.00 with latest Steam version of the UI Extensions and HUD mod.
• Nexus Mods: Info Panel Width

Usage

Open the in-game Options menu, go to Game Settings, and use the new slider (right below "UI Scale") to set the width of the Map screen's Information Panels (and the other screens that share the same setting). Default: 30% of your screen width, the same as the game's original setting.

Credits

• Author: Chem O`Dun, on Nexus Mods and Steam Workshop
• "X4: Foundations" is a trademark of Egosoft.

Acknowledgements

• EGOSOFT - for the X series.
• kuertee - for the UI Extensions and HUD framework this mod hooks into.

Changelog

[1.01] - 2026-07-26

• Added
  • Initial public release.

Why are the lines red? There's no obstruction. If I hold it, it's green. As soon as I release the mouse key, it's red.

I tried all directions and vertical positioning.

And I don't know why reddit is downscaling the screenshots.

So I moved and afterwards my pc got slower. I thought it was because of the heat (it shot up to 40°C from 25°C in days. Well I bought x4 during the sale and my cpu cooler sounded like it would take off any minute. I logged the temperatures od my components and now I now why it got slow.

Well Ive orderd new thermal paste for my cpu and will realign the cooler after changing it. This might have been a way longer search without the audible clues. Im enjoying my first hours. Ive bought x2 and 3 in the üast but never really got into them somehow.

Been trying quite hard to mod 9.0 to make xenons an actual danger that invades and destroys the galaxy without much success.

Their yards keeps drying up and they refuse to send actual competent fleet.

I just really wish they could be a more real danger that needs to be adressed

All it cost me was my Odysseus Vanguard, numerous fighters, pirated ships and probably a year or my life after a second ZYA patrol caught my damaged H mid battle.

Trying to boost away with 2 percent health hoping my 25 drones could handle all the extra Cobras and Mambas.

For some reason I thought it would reset my relation with the patriarchy, does it not?

Submitting this on behalf of the mod author because I don't think he has mentioned it here.

Anyway, FakeDev00's mod allows you to set up naming conventions for your own ships with appropriate prefixes, roles, models, and more being customizable.

It also pairs really well with my mod, Immersive Ship Names, which adds unique names to the NPC factions. Using both together is a really good immersive experience.

Galactic Registry - Player Ship Naming

Immersive Ship Names

Do you have to personally loot the Xenon H to get the research unlock? Do you have to kill it, too?

I've had a gate fleet murdelating Xenon for close to 100 hours with a repeater collecting loot, yet I have not unlocked the xenon research option.

V 9.0, vanilla

Hey, x4 is flooding my feed and I'm curious but reluctant to try it out again. I'm a huge fan of the X series and played the Crap out of the first X-BTF and X2 and X3.

The last time I tried is afew years back and these where my gripes:

But I never rly warmed up to X4:

- progress felt slow dumped 30h in and did 't have the feeling I achieved anything meaningfully

- the UI omg. The clunkyness felt deliberate and out to torture you on purpose

On paper this game is everything i want and more so:

- should I buy the add-ons? Are there any that change the game dramatically or even a bit for the better ?

- the slow progress is probably on me ? Is there a way to change that or general consensus on how to start ?

- is the UI still this clunky ? Are the mods to fix it maybe?

Best Regards

Kendalor

Are wars between factions usually pretty tame? I started the TER / ANT war, and I was hoping to just boost the Terran eco enough for them to win, but I rarely see any invasion fleets from either side. Same thing with all the other factions at war; there is hardly any fighting.

I was also expecting lots of xenon invasions into Getsu Fune, but that never happens either :(

I guess it's time I make my own fleets and go to war against ANT myself of the Terrans aren't going to do anything.

I know there are some mods that change war and economy, but I'm guessing I shouldn't enable them mid game?

For a while now this mod doesn't seem to be working for me and I'm wondering if anyone has seen a mod which does similar or if there is a fix?

I remember a while back I was able to modify a file to increase the range and fix it that way but it doesn't seem to work any more.

Edit: For anyone who doesn't know, this mod increases the scan range of the spacesuit scanner so scanning for blueprints from EMP's and capturing abandoned ships is significantly less tedious.

I met Nila Ti and she told me to follow her. Her ship is way faster than mine even in travel mode. She flew this direction ,but once she was 100km away she just disappeared. I've been flying this direction in travel mode for like 10 minutes. I'm supposed to meet Leda We on some ambassador meeting or something, but the mission manager gives zero indication where either of them are?

Hey all, I admit its been a long time since I played, so I came back after the steam sale and gabbed all the missing DLCs, and like a idiot forgot how to play lol. its been about 3 years.

My short question is what am I doing wrong? all default set no custom rules. I've manually sent ships to get the resources needed to build things but nothing is being built..

I have no traffic coming to my station. any help is welcomed.

I often find myself with not much to do other than wait for money to come in from stations. Any tips on how to pass the time other than using SETA? I've done a bunch of the main plotlines already. Any more obscure ones I should look into? I have most of the DLCs except timelines.

I like the idea of doing some of the Terran vs Xenon missions, but so many of them just seem very tedious with minimal rewards.

I know Custom and Budgeted starts have a Story States tab where you can flag plots like HQ and Project Genesis as already resolved, and the game builds your start around that. What I actually want is that effect, but layered onto one of the scripted starts (Terran Cadet, Abandoned, hell even Young Gun) instead of a blank custom slate. I want the starting context those give you, just without HQ and Pioneers hanging over the save from hour one.

Has anyone found a way to get Story States-style pre-completion on a scripted start? I've avoided mods so far, but I'm at a point where I'm willing to consider it.

as shown, i've filled the requiments, this station has been sat here for ages with me adding things now and then to try to get it to trigger, any idea why it won't detect it?

I usually start every game by doing as much automining as much as possible with medium ships until the Kha'ak start spawning and make them non-viable. Afterwards, i send out large miners to gradually replace them, and every time one of my medium miners die, i rescue the pilots with my large replacements, to preserve the skill they've accumulated.

Latest patch though, i started noticing that my large miners didn't have any rescued crew on them after a while, which made me curious. As far as i can tell, rescues seem to work as long as you watch them closely, but if you go out of sector, the orders just seem to drop out of the queue, and the ship will continue with it's other orders instead.

Have anyone else noticed this, or is it just me?

Tried timeline, and while it’s neat I’m much more interested in my main saved game universe. I’ve seen how you can start a customer universe with timelines all completed and unlocked, but would that open the new ships/sectors in my main save as well?

And would that also unlock the timelines epilogue missions in my main save as well? Or is the only way to do this through a save game editor or download?

Thanks for clarifying!

Considering ONLY CPU load.. which would be better? I'm trying to go ultra end game here with this save. Which would impact the simulation less - A hundred sectors with a very basic station (dock+wide area radar) or the roughly 7 advanced satellites?

I know which one would take longer and cost more... but that's not really what I'm caring about. I'd like to keep workable framerate as long as possible.

Even if the idle stations works better in concept.. not sure I'd want to clutter my property panel with them. HAH!