Depends on the location and the local economy. Do you know if those parts are available nearby or are stocks depleted? If there’s a crunch for that resource in the economy it might be a good money-making opportunity to produce them yourself when you get to that point.
These are ships for your fleet that your AI pilots will be flying? I didn’t do a whole lot of custom stuff with them, I really only spent a lot of time tweaking ships I was personally flying. At least until I got to the point where I had a whole industrial chain built out to feed my own shipyards.
I don’t recall as it’s been too long but I think so.
Yeah that’s the idea, for now I’m still thinking small scale and I’d like to order maybe 2-3 corvettes and a couple of fighters to serve as my escort going into Xenon territory. All in all I’d have to retrofit maybe 10-15 ships just for this purpose, and it seems a little bit of a hassle. I’m using Paranid bases (Nemesis, Ares) and their components leave a lot to be desired, especially shields.
Gotcha! I’m likely out of my depth there because I only played with VRO which completely changes the balance of everything so I was able to mostly just stick with the default loadouts of the ships and choose the race/model of what I wanted for the AI. If I needed something slower and tankier I’d hit up Teladi space or grab some Split ships if I just wanted raw firepower.
For your situation I can’t think of a way to have that automated beyond ordering your AI pilots around to an equipment dock and change their loadouts. It’s been a while so I might be missing something, though. Sorry I can’t be of more help.
No worries! I will also try VRO further down the line, because I’m 200% sure this campaign won’t be my last one.
I am honestly impressed with how easy the systems and interface are to grasp if you put just a little effort into it. And this level of simulation is very, very hard to beat, nothing like dropping down out of supercruise to check on your minions (ahem…) to see if they’re actually doing what they are supposed to be doing, and then quite literally catching them in the act, doing exactly what they are supposed to be doing. Much to the chagrin of my inner micromanaging asshole boss.
Absolutely loving this game, and while I do think some of the mods are absolutely necessary, the framework is there and oh man is it strong. I’d really love to see even more mods for this game, on the level of Skyrim, but that’s probably a pipe dream.
In any case, I don’t regret a single cent spent on this game, and I look forward to see where Egosoft will take the series.
I feel the exact same way. Like Skyrim, it’s best with mods that smooth out the edges and give you a bunch of QOL improvements you want to shake your fist at the developer for not including. But unlike Skyrim/Bethesda, Egosoft has a small fraction of the resources so I’m happy to cut them a lot of slack. :)
I’ve got some vacation time coming up at the end of the year and I’m planning on starting up a new campaign then. Your recent posts have definitely upped the itch factor as I haven’t played since shortly before the Terran DLC came out!
Yeah, unfortunately it is a commitment to get into it. Have to have the time and mental energy available to learn the interface, hit up Google for things you can’t figure out, etc. Amazing if you can get there but totally understandable looking at the hill and saying “No thank you!”. :)
Egosoft could do better in many places but to be fair a lot of it is just because of how much depth there is to the game. They could only flatten the curve so far given how much there is to the game. I mean, learning to pilot your ship around and make some money is the core of a lot of space sims but is barely even scratching the surface with this one. Not many titles out there where you can play the full space sim experience but also hop out in a spacesuit, command a fleet of AI ships, build and manage an entire commercial empire, etc. It’s bonkers and I absolutely love it despite the many many warts.
Most of the value here is simply in seeing which menus you can open and what they do. In order of importance:
Flight controls and HUD, Menu and Universe (first two vids) - worth watching for the menu explanation alone. Flight basics you will grasp through tutorial anyway, though ship scanning (shift+F) is omitted there.
Making money early - watch 2 minutes to see how crystal farming works and how to sell items at a station. Super simple.
Basic mining - would heavily recommend this because it shows you how ship behaviour (scripts) works, and this will be super important for other areas of the game
Basic trading - alternative to mining, I didn’t get much value out of this one because I use an auto trader mod anyway, but it quickly explains how to navigate the trade filters. Worth it
And that’s it! That’s all you need to get started for real, maybe 1h of tutorials. I will also list my mods and explain what they do and why I use them:
Better kill credit - gives you ship kill bonus for kills made by your AI ships, and also provides rewards for capital ship kills even if you don’t get the killing blow. Can be safely skipped, but worth having later I suppose. In about 30h of playing I haven’t seen the need for it yet.
Crystal Finder - super huge for a beginner. It gives crystals a nice glowing aura, making them much easier to find. There are several variations of this mod around, all pretty much do the same. Once you get the money train going this becomes obsolete, but in the beginning it’s a very nice alternative to grinding out simple missions
Data Leak Range Increase - worth its weight in gold, figuratively speaking of course. By default the range for data leaks is like 50 meters, forcing you to hug the stations to find them. This mod increases it to 600m and makes it viable to also scan them in bigger ships. Do not skip.
FBB - Fly by Boxes - loots containers with inventory items (not cargo!) on the fly. Very nice QoL mod
FBL - Fly by Lockboxes - automatically opens and loots lockboxes. I don’t have the patience to manually shoot off the locks. Great QoL, but can be skipped
FS_EXP - Sector Explorer - adds a custom behaviour (auto script) to the list of possible jobs that make your ship an automated explorer. Highly recommended, though do check “skip hexa pattern” if you want to greatly speed things up.
Improved repair laser - greatly increases range (from 10 to 100m I believe) and rate of repair for your spacesuit laser. Spacesuit is something I don’t particularly enjoy, so anything that speeds up the time I need to spend in it is a must have imo. If you value immersion skip this, otherwise get it.
Increased Long Range scan - several variations of this mod exist. Mostly cuts down the number of scans you need to do in the system to uncover all the POIs. Made obsolete by Sector Explorer and Satellite Sector mods
Friendly Fire tweaks - doesn’t trigger FF if you accidentally graze friendly ships and stations. Must have, especially if you like space shotguns (Shard batteries) like I do.
Larger asteroids only - removes smaller asteroids from the belts, giving you a nice performance bump, as well as making them easier to navigate
Learn all the things - your crews get a chance for auto lvl up every hour. Pretty nice, I will likely pair this with faster XP rate later
MRS - mobile repair service - custom job that makes a ship act as a dedicated repairer. Haven’t seen practical use for it yet
sector satellites - great mod, makes sector exploration completely painless and quick. Requires some manual changing of true/false flags in the config file to really be useful from the start, if you don’t want to spend cash on advanced satellites
Signal Leak hunter - great in the beginning and for finding black market deals, it highlights all the data leaks around the station. Can be skipped, but in the beginning it’s great for finding easy missions
Better target monitor - adds a little more info to the target monitor. Requires API mod (next on list) to use. Not mandatory, can be skipped.
Remove dirty glass - must have, vanilla cockpits are way too obtrusive
spacesuit_bluetooth - increases range of detection in a spacesuit. Great to have
SST - secret stash - hides your illegal inventory items from the police. Minor QoL if you want to avoid temporary rep penalties.
TaterTrader - absolute must have for me. Adds an automated trader script that can do autonomous trading according to parameters you set up. I mostly use the Dead Tater preset with default values, and it works amazingly well. I have a fleet of 10 auto traders right now and they easily earn me a couple million credits every 30 minutes or so. Very very nice passive bonus so you can focus on other things.
How cool is it that you are able to step away from the captain’s chair and issue orders to the NPC to perform the tasks on your behalf. Certainly beats manual flying to refit a ship or some other mundane task like that! Especially since docking is not fully automated. Laziness ftw :)
I think FBL would be what I would add from my initial use of crystalfinder and sector wide navsats. But I would be interested in seeing what the trading script adds.
It is hard for me to re-experience the learning curve since I have been an X fan from the beginning. It does seem, however, that even though each iteration adds complexity, there is some ease added as well.
My recommendation to beginners would be to figure out things you want to do in the game and then research how to go about doing them. Set some smaller goals like setting up a mining operation, building a small installation, piracy, crystal mining, etc., and then figure out how to do them. Along the way, you will need to learn quite a few conceits of the game – and perhaps your small goals will change.
I just put some advanced modifications on my Katana and oooooh man. -23% mass AND drag? This beauty handles like a fighter now, love it! I also put in an order for my first destroyer! Can’t wait to see what it can do against a K.
Did you get these off Steam Workshop?
Can’t find “Crystal Finder”, “Improved repair laser”, “Friendly Fire tweaks”, “Learn all the things”, “Signal Leak hunter”,
FBB - Fly by Boxes - Is this the same as “Fly by Looting”?
I updated crystal finder and learn all the things through nexus mods. Assume that the others are there as well. There is an “extensions” folder in the main X4 install location (not the save game location) (usually something like SteamApps/Common/X4…) where you can download and unzip nexus mods painlessly – and should work seamlessly with the Steam Workshops mods.
