X4: Foundations – Tips for New Players

Tips and Tricks

Note: Credit goes to bohedo

• Buy a docking computer for quicker docking. The Mk1 works if you are near the docking area and in the right orientation. Mk2 is super nice – You just have to get near the docking area and can be at any speed or orientation.
• Be careful not to upgrade your only ship at a station that doesn’t have enough resources. You could end up sitting there for hours.
• To get a quick lay of the land, ride a super highway (the strips of blue that look kind of like rivers in space). You just have to fly in to it to get on. It will take you on a giant loop of many sectors. The easiest way I’ve found to get off is to use stop engines.
• An easy way to get to max travel speed is to hold down boost for a bit and while still holding it down, switch to travel mode.
• An easy way to make money at the very beginning is to go to a trader, buy bandages, needles and seditives and use a crafting bench to create first aid kits. The same trader will buy the first aid kits back for a large profit. Going to just a few stations will earn you enough to buy a better ship or upgrade your current one.
• To sell a ship, Open the map then select the ship you want to sell, then right click on a shipyard or warf and select sell ship in the drop down.
• On the ship information screen you need to set “serviceable crew men” to less then you have, then make him/her a marine, then select the marine under the “full crew” section and promote them to pilot.
• The trade menu can be a bit comfusing to use since there are so much information about prices and different wares being sold/bought… There is an easy way to filter so you only see the product you are interested in… if you example click on energy cells with your mouse then everything els will be filtered away making it more easy to find though who sell and buy them. If you zoome in/out on the map while you do this, then you can see more/less stations in the search result.
• Scan mode, for stations, is also used to hunt down these data leak things. With scan mode active, you can hear them as radio static. When you get closer, you see sparks on or next to the station. When you touch that with your ship (barely), it begins to decode. You can get station module blueprints sometimes, occasionally a mission, etc. You can also use scan mode to scan other ships to check their cargo. There’s more to it than this, but these are the things I’ve done reliably.
• Manually docking the first time was confusing as hell. Not only must you follow the easy to see green lines to the docking zone, you need to line yourself up with your pad. This is best done by looking for a hologram. You need to roll (tilt side to side with q and e), align the front of your starship (hold mouse1 and turn to face), and get yourself lined up with the centre of the pad (z and x to put throttle backward and forward, or mousewheel also works), then hit s to go down and land.