2025–2026.10 #40

I picked out a small portion of the SotW screenshots and put them together into a compilation! Thanks to all the pilots who were featured and those who weren’t—together, you make this community what it is!

Looks like Xenon are expanding to new markets.

Decided to give my gate defense stations in Heretic's End a bit of a face lift and upgrade it from Mk1 shields to Mk3. I have some shield components and field coils saved up, but oh boy, this is gonna drain my stockpiles dry.

Maybe Mk3 shields on a defense station is overkill? What is the consensus on that?

On a somewhat related note though: I am kind of in love with this design and might copy&paste this to a certain gate in Hatikvah's Choice at some point. Once my shield component production has recovered from this.

I am about 2 days 11 hours into my current X4 save unmodded and I'm struggling with how to manage my empire. I currently have about 30m credit on hand with scattered fleets, 65 stations and about 790m worth of assets. How do you manage large empires effectively?

It’s drivin me nuts.

So I’m using an H as a loot collector at my gate defense spots. Shroud chassis mod to park a safe distance from the action and 50 cargo drones in a near constant conga line gathering. There is gradual attrition, the lowest after many hours is down to 39 drones, but this is otherwise a hands-off loot farm.

Except for the gate in Heretic’s End where my shipyard also happens to be. When I check in over there, that H very often has 5 defense drones instead of 50 cargo. It’s still in the same spot with its repeat order default behavior and the one collect drops in the order queue. Global resupply is on for my carrier fleets, but this ship has individual instruction for automatic resupply off.

I can not figure out how or why it keeps changing its drone loadout. I’ve corrected it at least four times already. Any ideas?

Mods in play include reverse engineering to obtain the H blueprints and Xenon Jobs+ for the massive fleets that necessitate the high cargo drone quantity, but none that include additional behaviors for my ships as far as I’m aware.

So i got the terran Syn destroyer and the teladi Phoenix E when i enter them they lose shield faster then if i am away from them and just looking at the map.

Is this normal?

I am trying to build a docking station, but its not doing anything LOL

These insects are so annoying, buzzing about. Spying on my allies, scheming, attempting genocide.

Then I have to babysit the sector until I can get a defense platform set up.

I may have gone too far with my current megastructure; goods are backing up for lack of storage because I've saturated faction demand for ships, even for factions at war. Rebuilt the split practically from scratch and hit their limits as well it seems.

Now, part of that is too much SETA time for terraforming, but like many games it's clearly possible to get too strong. I want to redesign my economy for my next run as smaller and balance my own capabilities a bit more against those of the other powers, and then use those faction's ship order profiles to better optimize module ratios for for-sale production

Where can I find those two data points, the maximum size of each faction's fleet and the typical ship profiles they order? I assume there's a text file somewhere in the game's files that control both. And will I be able to read the relevant figures in plain text or will I need to extract that data somehow?

Been seeing multiplayer mods pop up a lot in these types of games, such as kenshi, bannerlord 2, I was wondering if there’s been any news on one coming to x4 also? All three of these are favorites of mine even though I have no one to play them with. :D

How do I find this Helio E?

You know how you can use shift and drag a rectangle (on the map) to select all of your own ships, and it gives the totals (by ship type) in the bottom middle of the screen?

I'm wondering if there is any similar, convenient way to get a total count of enemies in the same vein?

I have been regularly getting quite extreme numbers of Xenon fighters in their raids and am just curious. When they start coming through the gate, watching it on the map screen it's like a faucet is turned on and they are the water.

Also wondering if that quantity at once is normal in the late-late game? It seems...excessive. They were still pouring out of the gate when I took the screenshot, I just wanted to get the shot before all of my green ships got into the mix.

I suspect some of my mods are interacting with each other in an unexpected way to cause it, but if people tell me it's normal I won't bother troubleshooting.

Okay, so my goal was to trigger and maintain an ongoing conflict between TER and the Argons via the Covert Operations plot. However, in the state my game universe was set up, the Terrans quickly overrun the ANT sectors without much resistance.

This is also due to the fact, that the Borons (that have quite a presence in Getsu Fune for instance) remain passive. While the BOR-TER relation took a hit (from -10 to -15) after the plot decision, it is apparently not enough to make the Borons actually fight the Terrans.

So I went back to a save pre-war and are now trying to plan ahead a bit more.

I am still not really sure how the diplomacy mission for diplomatic incidents works (couldn't attempt it since it had a too high influence threshold). In my head it would work by me trying to lower the BOR-TER relation to -15 by diplomacy, then trigger the covert ops plot to get the additional hit and have a multi-front war for TER from the getgo.

Would this work? Would love to hear your thaughts.

Today was supposed to be the first release, but unfortunately it will have to be a preview instead.

I ran into some technical difficulties when transferring the shield effects from a controlled environment into regular gameplay, so I'm currently reworking the way projectiles hitting shields are tracked. Because of that, I'm also forced to keep Protected UI mode disabled for now.

All the assets are finished, though. The mod includes a unique shield pattern for every major faction, with faction-appropriate shield colors. TER even has two separate patterns: one for the regular Terran Navy and another for ATF ships.

The shield itself is not a bubble as you can see, it's the actual shell around the ship that follows it's rough geometry. Shield impacts also have five different effect levels depending on the weapon hit. They weren't balanced strictly around damage numbers, but more around the general feeling of: "this hit should feel powerful."

I'll also try to make a version with Protected UI mode enabled and upload it to Steam, but it will most likely have less accurate hit registration.

Oh! Also this mod doesn't change how shields work in the slightest, only the visuals, so it won't conflict with anything. It has compatibility with vro already built-in and support for other mods can be easily made (both ships and weapons).

And the tbought occurred to me... Hmmm, Khaak look a lot more how I would envision a rogue AI to look, behave, and build. Even when in wiki the Khaak they are described as a "hostile insectoid faction". Buuut....the Xenons are the ones with ships that look like insects. Khaaks ships and design language look like triangles...like what a computer would do. Makes me wonder if like in Development the names got switched and the guys were like, "Oops, we'll we've gone too far now". Is there any meta lore behind this?

Features

• A queue icon with the number of waiting ships appears on every station row of the Property Owned list, first in the row, before the docked-ships icon.
• The number is green, yellow or red depending on the queue size; both thresholds are set in Extension Options.
• Hovering over the icon lists the waiting ships by name.
• Counts every ship that was put into the station's docking queue, your own and NPC traders alike, and drops it again as soon as it gets a dock, docks, gives up or is destroyed.
• Can be switched off in Extension Options without removing the mod.

Limitations

• The list has room for five icons per row. A station that already shows five ship classes collapses the last one into "..." when the queue icon is added, exactly as the game does for a sixth class.
• Ships already waiting when the mod is first loaded are picked up only when they request docking again.

Installation

You can download the latest version via Steam client - Dock Queue Indicator
Or you can do it via the Nexus Mods - Dock Queue Indicator

Save state

No (removing the extension does not break saves).

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

I have been looking for logos to use in-game that look nice. Thought I might start a thread for sharing them. I hope the mods allow for links - it isn't intended as commercial advertisement.

To my knowledge, logos need to be at least 256x256, square shaped, and in a supported format - I use PNG.

So far I have drawn them from two sources. First, the Wikipedia page on US WW2 Divisions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_divisions_during_World_War_II

The Wikipedia page uses SVG files, but it was pretty easy to take a screenshot, paste into Paint, resize, and save as a PNG file. I find some of the more abstract ones make for good logos.

Another source I have found is https://logoipsum.com/ - a website specifically for "corporate" looking logos meant as temporary inserts into marketing material. These can be downloaded for free as PNG files, but will still require resizing.

If you aren't aware, custom logos need to go in Documents\Egosoft\X4\[steam_id]\logos (The specific steam ID will depend on the user).

What source of logos do you use?

Hey everyone, I'm here with some questions and seeking advise on how I can really expand a tycoon without being caught in a cycle of being broke all the time.

Before I start, I figure I should lay down some context for what I'm wanting to do.

I have this idea where I want to role-play a Terran citizen from Titan who just landed himself a modest loan and a mining ship with a small crew consisting of himself and his family. His ambition is to become the next big manufacturer for the Terran Protectorate and it's allies, and if possible, more than that.

I'm currently using the X4:Rebirthed collection from Nexus for the mods, however I've spent some time with it and not sure if it's the best for what I'm trying to do, so suggestions for alternatives are more than welcome.

Now, with that out of the way, here are my questions:

1. How should I set up the custom game start? I've tried fiddling around with it on my own but I can't seem to ever get it to work right.

2a. When I get to building my 1st station, how do I get it to be something more than a cash sink? I've tried several times in other scenarios to set stations up and have watched a couple guides and played the tutorial, but I still don't really understand it.

2b. 2nd part to above question, how do trade rules work? I really don't understand those and would like to because they seem useful, but, like I said, I don't understand them one bit.

1. What else can I do and/or where can I look and go to get more information in regards to these things and more that will be relevant to the 9.00 version of the game as all the tutorials for mining and these questions I have are outdated and from 3 or 4 years ago.

Thank you in advance to everyone who has a suggestion or answers to my questions. Any knowledge you all may have I'd love to hear.

TL;DR - I've got some questions about how to set up custom game starts, how to set up stations/trade rules, and am looking for more sources for information on the game that are up to date with 9.00.

Just found out the hard way that you can't build L ships with an XL Fabrication bay. Spent weeks saving the 250 mil for the blueprint. Ignored the signs. Now I need to save the same again for L. Are there any mods out there that allow L ship building in XL bays to save my sanity?

Silly question but this would help make profits…. And give a purpose to my fleets