X4: Foundations – How to Set a Waypoint

Guide to Set a Waypoint

Basics

You are targeting something, not setting a waypoint. Though that works perfectly fine in most cases. Select ship/station/jimboburuncle on the map, hit the ‘T’ key, tada, you have targeted and locked a ship and it will now show up on your viewscreen in cockpit.

Now, if you want to set an active waypoint that your autopilot, or you, can path to, you add one more step. You select whatever ship you are in from the map, then right click on what you want to run into/visit/land on. That brings up a context menu and one of the options is…uh…’set active guidance’? If I remember the wording correctly.

Congrats, now instead of a cool white target box, you get a sweet yellow one. That you can tell your autopilot to head to. AND you can still have a target lock on something.

If You Can’t Get a Marker to Show Up on Your Hud

So, your problem is that the computer in your ship has not a single damn clue how to get to there. Anything obfuscated throws your navigation computer off. Cause, well, it doesn’t know where it is, heh. It knows it’s ‘over there somewhere’ in this case though, but that doesn’t work for it. Best bet, if that is a mission target you are trying to get to is to com any ships near you and ask for directions. They will give you a waypoint exactly where you need to go, and when you hit it, it will flip back to what you were in before.

If it isn’t a mission target, then pop into long range scan, point in that general direction and fire off a scan. That will get you a ‘?’ on the map which you can waypoint too. Also note, since you know ‘where’ it is you can just manually engage travel drive towards it and not bother with the scanner if you so choose.

As an edit, a dead give away is the ‘Find way to ‘ for the waypoint. You know it exists, you ‘know’ where it is, but…not really.