Sometimes I find presentation is a detriment and I certainly found how X3 shows pages of items and stuff made my eyes glaze over
There is a second large DLC due this year, the CE covers you for that too.
I checked on that; the CE content also gives that. Just a weird pricing bit. Went for it, and Steam won’t let me buy the CE upgrade, now, saying I have everything so I should be good.
The X series requires a big up front commitment of time and learning. It’s a difficult series to get into.
Okay, so any must-have mods for a first play through or is vanilla the best way to dive in?
I like Crystal Finder and Signal Leak Hunter for QOL reasons. I hear the VRO mod is a good balance overhaul mod but I don’t know enough about the base game yet to recommend or not. Those are on Nexus Mods, not sure if on workshop.
Avoid the Faction Enhancer: Catch-up Module. It has a really bad bug in it right now that can kill your game save (speaking from personal experience).
Much appreciated!
It’s self promotion, but I recommend Escape Teleport and Better Kill Credit even for otherwise vanilla playthroughs.
Sorry :(
It’s actually a bug in their engine when a certain mod flag is used. I sent them a reproduction case with an empty mod so hopefully they will fix it soon.
Haven’t played any X series since early in the X3 days. Here’s hoping for a good time to dive into.
@KevinC thanks for the mod mentions. I’ll check those out.
Is that your mod? If so no worries, it was an early game.
Grabbed! They look quite useful, especially Escape Teleport.
I can’t seem to find these. Are they on Nexus?
Check the steam workshop, they are on the most subscribed list.
Sounds good, thanks man!
I broke down and got this just before it went off-sale. Figure if I can’t think well I can hopefully watch pretty space battles. So should I run all the mods both @KevinC and @Mysterial mentioned? Should I run the beta patch?
You madman! :) This is a pretty hard game to play when you can’t think – at least when you’re climbing the learning curve of the game and the UI.
I’m running VRO (the trailer of which I posted earlier) and a big stack of mods but it makes the start harder so not sure if I’d really recommend it out the gate. I started with it but I played X3:TC quite a bit and can be a bit of masochist when it comes to this sort of game. :)
I know I’m so dumb in this regard lol, but also a bit desperate to get lost.
How does VRO make the start harder? No need to answer if it would be too much to explain. BTW I don’t see the crystal mod you linked. Is it still up there?
Well, keep in mind I started with VRO so I don’t have a direct comparison myself, I’m going off of what the mod author says. I’ll post it here so you can get it straight from the horse’s mouth:
Regarding mods, not all mods are on Steam Workshop (I always search Workshop first and grab them there if available) and Crystal Finder and Signal Leak Hunter are examples of that. You’ll need to get them via Nexus Mods, but they do have an app (Vortex) that can download and install mods for you.
Crystal Finder
Signal Leak Hunter
The X series reminds me a bit of Bethesda games like Skyrim. There’s a million mods that can be downloaded and installed and a lot of them are great but it’s also perfectly fine to install the game and play it vanilla. Wrangling up a bunch of mods can kind of be a pain in the ass and when the learning curve of a game is already difficult sometimes it’s best to keep it simple at first. I’ll leave that up to you. :)
Do you think it’s worthwhile hopping into the beta? Or do beta updates wreck your game? These seem to be mostly bugfixes:
Version 3.10 Beta 1 (394044) - 2020-04-07
Summary
- Added mission to expand HQ if selected research requires excessive resources.
- Removed Dal Busta dialog option after Split story is completed.
- Changed New Game menu to show tutorials at top.
- Improved balance and pricing of recruitable personnel on station docks.
- Improved performance for games where player owns very large number of ships and stations.
- Improved colour differentiation between racial Construction Vessel ships.
- Improved storage capacity of Split mining ships.
- Improved mastering of legacy music tracks.
- Fixed certain hazardous regions giving massive numbers of crystal drops.
- Fixed wrong faction sometimes being blamed when ships or stations are destroyed.
- Fixed mining drones not launching to collect broken-down asteroids they had earlier marked for collection but didn’t collect due to cancellation.
- Fixed cases of defence drones docking before all are launched sometimes preventing any further defence drones from being launched.
- Fixed male Split characters sometimes having female voices with Split Vendetta installed.
- Fixed HQ laboratory being removed when reconfiguring station.
- Fixed AI ships attacking indestructible objects indefinitely.
- Fixed player account balance potentially going below zero.
- Fixed being completely unable to manually dock Drill without docking software.
- Fixed hatch on Gorgon closing too soon when leaving in spacesuit.
- Fixed high loadout presets not favouring Docking Computer Mk2 if compatible.
- Fixed Elephant sometimes being equipped with Spacesuit Scanner.
- Fixed Raptor not being able to mount large missile turrets.
- Fixed build times for station modules taking much longer than they should.
- Fixed spacesuit oxygen replenishing after saving and loading.
- Fixed certain drops being repelled by container magnet.
- Fixed lasertowers deployed by player in Hatikvah mission not changing owner
- Fixed wrong player-owned ship sometimes being destroyed during HQ story.
- Fixed invulnerable ship during Split plot.
- Fixed Dal Busta not offering Split story at HQ after player rejects story offer until save and reload.
- Fixed Dal Busta not offering Paranid/Split storyline when starting from Accomplished Scientist gamestart.
- Fixed Dal Busta calling to talk about multiple plot opportunities at same time.
- Fixed signal leaks not being generated in Accomplished Scientist gamestart
- Fixed Paranid plot mission Prophetic Mission stalling because of missing dock.
- Fixed Paranid plot getting stuck at Remain Vigilant objective.
- Fixed excessive delay between HQ plot related signal leaks if one was previously missed.
- Fixed missing equipment for multiple factions when starting Paranid plot with older saves.
- Fixed Paranid plot battle taking place in wrong sector under rare circumstances.
- Fixed excessive ware amounts required for final stage of Paranid plot.
- Fixed Fires of Defeat gamestart long-term mission getting stuck because of captured ships.
- Fixed Hatikvah story getting stuck in rare situations during bomb-placing mission.
- Fixed various missions being offered by incorrect faction.
- Fixed player ship not coming to stop during certain cutscenes.
- Fixed missions offered by NPCs on dock areas incorrectly appearing in Mission Offers menu.
- Fixed mismatched ships and loadouts when editing shopping list entries in Ship Configuration menu.
- Fixed missile turret capacities not being included in loadout information.
- Fixed lasertower engines and weapons being shown in Encyclopedia.
- Fixed missing option to delete incompatible saves in Load Game.
- Fixed missing Dock Interactions menu in certain situations.
- Fixed missing mouse picking on map after closing Mission Briefing in certain situations.
- Fixed missing tabs in Property Owned menu in certain situations.
- Fixed rectangular target elements being displayed in first person in certain situations.
- Fixed further cases of NPCs not being targetable on platforms.
- Fixed menu crash in Info menu in certain situations.
- Fixed long but rare freeze on Map.
- Fixed several cases of Split storage modules appearing offset in station build menu.
- Fixed lower front windscreen not being transparent when looking from outside on Kestrel.
- Fixed turret group assignment and position of some turrets on Rattlesnake, Monitor and Odysseus.
- Fixed paint mods on Raptor not being aligned correctly.
- Fixed Split flak turrets not using correct barrel geometry.
- Fixed weapon positions on Mamba.
- Fixed player logo not being properly visible on Monitor.
- Fixed some missing voice recordings in German, French and Russian localisations.
- Fixed engine sound problems under specific circumstances.
- Fixed suspense music playing while on station.
- Fixed graphical artefacts for AMD Navi GPUs (5600/5700).
- Fixed rare problem with platform guidance causing performance to drop.
- Fixed several causes of crashes.
I dunno, I haven’t had a chance to try the beta. Those look like some good fixes but I didn’t see anything at a glance that felt like it was a must-have especially starting out. I haven’t tried a beta branch from them so I don’t know how stable (or otherwise) it is.