I always wanted to play X4 Foundations but the sheer size of the game its dynamic interactions and complex econemy always scared me away. But the intrigue of having EVE:Online but as a singleplayer game pulled me back.

In the beginning you can select a pre-defined start. It determines what starting money you have, where you spawn and which starting quest you have if you have one (Not every characters starts with one).

I remebered the last time I tried to play an X game X3: Albion Prelude. It basicly boiled down to spawing in the sandbox and the game saying now play the game! Because I selected a start with no quest.

Beginner Unfriendliness

The Bad Tutorial

The tutorial is not bad because it does not teach you how to navigate or play the game but because its detached from the real game. You need to specifically first select the tutorial to go through it.

And I lied the tutorial does not teach you everything, the reason for that is simple it would take many hours just of reading text to teach everything.

One important aspect in the game is creating your own Company/Empire. Especially this system is quite complex with many facets. I believe specifically this aspect needs a better tutorial introduction.

Building stations, producing goods, trading, fleet management are aspects where a good tutorial is really needed is currently lacking.

Personnally I suffered from the problem of selling goods from a mining station to other sectors. My idea was creating a mining station where miners unload their ressources and traders sell it to possible other sectors to improve profits.

This was not as easy as I would have expected it. First simply unloading ressources is instead “selling” you need say that your station is buying ressources that your miners mine so they can “sell” it to your own station.

From a abstraction standpoint I disliked that because it confused me (Why do my own miners have to sell to my own station?) This was my first problem I tackled.

Then the next problem was that my freighter complained that they dont find any buy orders to sell the ressources.

It took sometime understanding the problem, freighters are for transporting things that can be but in containers and of course mining ressources are not for containers but instead for storage.

Storage is something mining ships have. So you need mining ships to trade them. So I builded mining ships without mining lasers to trade ressources.

When a station only sells mining ressources and has only traders assigned that cant haul the ressources it should complain and say no mining vessel assigned to trade or something similar.

Cool Stories

While you can find many quests most of them are generic autogenerated ones. But there are handcrafted story lines with multiple quests and branching decisions ranging from ship rewards or making one faction declaring war on another. Those are called plots.

I did not play all plots, not even that many. But those that I have played suprised me in a positive way. The lore and world building of X4 is deep and interesting.

This brings me directly to another problem. When you start the game you dont know what plots even exist. Not only that some plots have requirements that need to be met to even show up.

This resulted in me looking at the wiki to even understand what cool stories I can experience.

Needing a Wiki/Guide

Often I needed to look at the wiki or a video guide to understand how I can do something. Often the game throws you a misson like obtain 2 spacesuit bombs. Saying that you probably cant buy but craft them. You need unstable crystals that can be found where? Reading the wiki I found that you can sometimes buy them at pirate stations because usually they are illegal to have in the first place.

Its frustrating to get missons and not knowing what to do.

Misson Design

I really like playing X4 Foundation more like Everspace 1/2 or Freelancer. Its important to understand that X4 is not made to be one of the games. In that regard the misson design falls a bit flat. They feel a bit flat.

Its possible to mod the game and add your own plots and missions to the game. The game engine is highly moddable because the game data can be extracted by tools like the X4 Unpacker (I made it ^^)

The Economy

The economy is deep, everything that needs to be build, from ships to stations needs ressources that need to be mined or produced. If those ressources are missing the supply chains slows down and the war machine gets in trouble.

I have no real complains for besides one quality of life improvment I would wish for. A civilian sector. Currently the economy is mostly run by factions and the player. There is one aspect missing and that is civilians that trade not for a faction but instead for themselves.

Voice Acting

There is some real voice acting mostly regarding to plots and stories. But there is also a good amount of AI generated voice lines. I really dislike them not necessarily because they are AI genereated but simply because they sound bad. AI voice generation is fastly improved 2025 they definitly should upate that.

Constant Updates and Improvments

X4 gets constant updates and improvement that make the game better and better. All updates and dlcs are usually a great addition to the game.

Modding

The entire game logic is data driven. While the core simulation is written in C++ all story missions, galaxy data and faction logic are defined in XML. On one hand this is incredible. You could actually write your own game using the underlying simulation logic. Everything you actually do in the game can be modded.

The game also uses lua to drive the UI, but the developer egosoft opened up the game engine more and now its possible to also use the FFI of the used luajit implementation to do what ever you want.

Things That Can Be Modded

• Adding new ships
• Adding new missions and stories
• Adding new voicelines
• Adding new factions
• UI changes (a bit more complicated)
• Patching existing things
• AI logic
• Everything that has nothing to do with the underlying simulation logic.

So there must be a crazy amount of mods right?

Mhhh actually not. While there are some really impressive mods, for example there is a fully working star wars mod that brings the star wars world to a impressive simulation. I personally would have expected to have many different series ported like Mass Effect, Star Trek, Battle Star Galactica or even games like Freelancer simply ported to a space simulation that actually fullfills the promises that where given over 20 years ago by Chris Roberts.

Freelancer promises a living world where the economy can run without the player but can be influenced by the player. X4 is Freelancer, its Eve: Online but in singleplayer.

So what is the problem? Why is there not the biggest modding community of all space games? The modding tools suck ass. First to start modding you realistic need to decompress your game data. Why? Because it shows you how the developers actually crafted their game logic. Now to do that you have to download a tool that is over 10 years old and does not work on linux… called Catalog Tool. Its a command line tool you have to use.

Another problem is state management scripts can register global variables and other scripts can refrence them. This is all good but working with such complex state, for example many different scripts that refrence them at the same time. Looking at how the developers manage it they keep the state to a minimum and when registering new variables they either use them in the same script the registed them or have a two places the first one creating it and the second script using it.

This is quite sad because the system is really powerful but needs to be only used sparingly to not create spaghetti.

The second thing I dislike is that I can only say “it looks like the developer are doing this like that” there is a high chance I am miss understanding something and comming to the wrong conclusing costing me and other valuable time.

I needed to create my own X4 Unpacker in C# so I can actually decompress my data on Linux as wine didnt work for me.

Now the next part would be understanding how can I do X?

• How can I add new sectors?
• How can I add new factions?
• How can I add new missions?
• How can I add new gamestarts?
• How can I patch existing data?
• How can I … You get the guist of it.

One thing that is good documented is the Mission Director it clearly explains how to use it. But a cook book would be far better. X4 needs a modding cook book on how to do X. And this is what is missing. The written XML data for a simple generic mission like escorting a ship is over 2000 lines big. Its verbose and overwhelming to look at.

I dont think the developers will do it. It seems that they dont see it as a way to increase their user base and dont want to make more money? Mods need to be easier to be created, faster to write and iterate upon.

There needs to be two guides, one to read and one to listen to and being able to follow its steps. Also the tooling needs to be improved. A different script editor that reduces boilerplate and can visualize the event flow would also help immensely.

Maybe I have to write the modding guide myself.