X4: Foundations – Tips for Early Game

Starter Tips for Newbies

Generally taken you’ll want to automate gaining credits as soon, and then use that income to increase the rate at which you gain them. Early on loot collectors and auto miners are your most valuable passive source of income:

Auto Collector

Buy a cheap, fast ship such as a Pegasus Vanguard and give it an Mk3 shield and Mk3 Split Combat Engines (Use Mk2 early on as it is much cheaper). Then set this ship to repeat orders and have it collect drops near a combat zone, followed by a drop-off at the player HQ. Hatikvah’s Choice I near the Xenon gate tends to be a great spot.

You’ll have to periodically visit the PHQ for drops and sell them, but the income is very decent. 1+ mil for Spacefly caviar (Made from 25 Spacefly Eggs) and 150k for each Programmable Field Array. As a Pegasus Vanguard costs around 250k for minimal specs they pay for themselves in very short order. And due to their speed they virtually never get shot down if set to run. (I lost one in a ~40 hour old game where 5 of them were set to collect non stop for the entire duration of the game despite being constantly close to Xenon ships).

Auto Miner

Autominers are the next static income source. Just buy a Gas or Mineral autominer and set it to Local Automine for Ore, Silicon, Methane, Helium or Hydrogen in a sector that has these resources and has stations that buy them. No attention needed except the initial setup. If a sector supports more miners just order a new mining ship to “Mimic” the previous one to lower the setup time needed.

I personally like using Alligator’s (M size) for this job due to their excellent speed are relatively low cost (About 700k for a gas and 1 mill for an ore autominer, though you can certainly use cheaper parts to halve that number). Even with cheap parts they travel at 670m/s which means that pirates, xenon and Khaak virtually never catch them.

I’m currently running around 550 of those in my 40 hour old game and lost a total of 4 of them in that timeframe. With two of those actually lost because a fleet commander got shot down, and me not noticing the rest of the miners (In mimic mode) just decided to halt and float next to the Xenon K that shot the first miner down….