Rataphract's Tips

This is just a list of some stuff I figured out for myself while playing, and both want to remember for myself, and figured might help some other people.

- To access the in-game Tutorials, hit H. Do the tutorials, seriously.

- There is a specific travel mode, for travelling (hit shift-1, among other ways, to activate it). There is also a scan mode, which seems to be for finding secrets and stuff (shift-2), and a long range scan mode, which seems to be for finding things like stations and secret lockboxes. (shift-3)

- While wandering around stations, it's possible to find traders who are in buildings at the docks with a large shopping cart hologram above them. You can buy crafting items from them, such as needles and bandages, and craft medkits. This turns a really good profit, at least for me as I start out.

- To get missions you have to use the map screen, you don't talk to people on a station. There is a tutorial for this. It details some requirements for accessing plot missions (level 10+ in a faction, for example, but I can't confirm this.)

- Sometimes you will overhear police radio type stuff. If a tiny ship gets marked as an enemy, for whatever reason, it seems to be safe to shoot it. You get a small bounty and a small boost to relations with the local faction.

- I think I found some space landmines! They showed up on longscan as a field of ?s, and when I got close I couldn't target them. But by running into them my ship exploded. They looked like yellow glows which I was hoping were some kind of valuable space mystery.

- Longscanning and scanning can be used to find secret stuff. On longscan, look out for purple pings in the world (not on the map) which are invisible to radar.

- When trying to hire people on a station, click the ship you want to add them to, then right click it and click 'select' in the popup menu. You can then assign them a role in the right hand hire dialogue menu.

- You can use the number keys, 1-4 and 5-8, to switch weapon groups on primary and secondary weapon toggles. I like leaving 2 empty, so I can be sure not to accidentally shoot at civilians when in crowded space.

- If you right click an object on the map, you can select 'start guidance to object', which will lock it in yellow brackets. This means that if you switch on your autopilot, either in the ship interactions menu or by hitting shift-A, your ship will autopilot to the vicinity. Remember to turn on travel mode when necessary (Shift-1) and be aware your ship will NOT dock, or even necessarily slow down, when approaching that object. To be automatically flown around more easily, it's better to get a pilot or captain, get up from the command chair (Ctrl-D or get up in the interaction menu), and give orders to the ship you're in on the map interface. (Left click it, then right click where you want to go for a context menu.)

- There's a sort of interplanetary superhighway - these long blue ribbons you can kind of see on the map, and in space. If you fly near one, then lower yourself down (using the s key), you can lock onto it and race around at very high speed. This is awesome. It's possible to speed up slightly with x and slow down a bit with Z, so you can overtake traffic. :D

- 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.

- Remember that hitting boost (tab) drains your shields. It also drains your opponent's shields, so consider making an effort to chase them down if they've just boosted away.

- If you've heard something about the strange acronym 'PHQ', or are interested in nefarious plots, a great start would be to do the ship modes tutorial and learn how to use scan mode (shift-2). You may encounter someone who needs your help by following up on a data leak signal near a station shortly after completing this tutorial, and your first steps to PHQ might be someone you find saying 'Please Help Quick'.

Tips I found, or copy-pasted from elsewhere.Mostly from discussions.

-
Calaun - X4: Foundations 50 minutes ago
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.
Last edited by Calaun; 49 minutes ago

-

Apocalypse 11 minutes ago
ok so i figured it out. 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.

-

Delle(DK) 18 hours ago
tip..: 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.

-

zidahya 13 minutes ago
Does anyone know how the Scan Mode works? The Modules change the color if i scan them (I think the color is for the type of module red = combat, yellow = industrie?). But the moment the scan is complete seems completly random to me.

Rataphract [author] Just now
@Zidahya - 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.

Some requests for info copy-pasted from elsewhere or from me - if you can provide a good answer I like in the comments, I'll copy-paste it into found tips above. I'm not so smart I know everything myself!

- A clear explanation on how to use crew. What we know so far is that you can recruit people on stations directly, or sometimes from wharves and shipyards and whatnot from the upgrade interface. With people on stations, you have to right click the ship you want to add them to and select their role. For pilots, you may have to right click a service crewmember on a ship through the information panel listing (specific crew) and then you can upgrad them to pilot/captain. But does anyone have a clearer explanation/guide for this process?

- -Slavgaard- 6 hours ago
I just need a 'printout' of the keybinds so I don't have to keep itting esc and looking them up.
( Shift 1-3 = modes, 1-8 = firegroups, f = interact, o (letter o on keyboard) = cargo suction ray tractor beam thing that makes crates fly at you, z/x or mousewheel forward/back = throttle... Off the top of my head. Complete list, anybody?)

- Graf Orloff 2 hours ago
Gentlemen, is there a way to find a Black Market to sell some illegal goods? Map search doesn't seem to find any.

-
Narretei 53 minutes ago
how do i get rid of crewmembers? can i sell/fire them? how?

( Narretei - if you Comm with a crew member, one of the options in the discussion lets you fire them. Haven't tried it, but seen it. )
-
gunner 44 minutes ago
Hi guys, I know how to recruit a Marine from a Wharf from a Ship dealer, but the Mission requires the Marine to be level 3. I believe my Marine is level 0 or 1, so how do I upgrade that 1 Marine?
-

ChimeChild 10 hours ago
Does anyone know the difference between SERVICE CREW and MARINES? Which one do I need for TURRETS.

(More broadly, how do turrets work? What do each of the icons mean?)
-
Zsah 16 hours ago
I have a few questions. One. You can get some items that are considered gifts. Like pilot, moral, so on and so on. How do you apply them? Second, is there the script editor in this one like there was in x3? Three when ordering them to mine or explore. They simply just go to the middle and that's it for exploring. mining. They just go randomly to random rocks. Is there a way to specifically order them to hit certain rocks?
-
Kruzeru 16 hours ago
How the hell does behaviors work, I simply want to have my mining ships mine for a specific resource and then sell it back to a station, without constantly manually doing it everytime. OR have it where they drop off the resource to my station, and have a frigate constantly taking the resource back to a station to sell.
(More broadly, how to successfully order around NPC ships in a variety of ways)

- Gold Standard 21 hours ago
I want to role-play as a robber baron or pirate. If anyone has any tips for finding missions to increase my pirate rep and where to buy ships , let me know
(More broadly, a guide on the basics of how to break the law successfully?)

There's an attempt to write an unofficial manual for the game, which I heartily invite you to contribute to, over here on the X4 Wiki: https://www.egosoft.com:8444/confluence/display/X4WIKI/An+Unofficial+Manual+for+X4%3A+Foundations

Currently it contains a list of the default hotkeys and some very basic getting started information.