Good guide. One thing I would add is that there is still a use for S and M mining ships when you have the cash to run the larger ships (21:05): The smaller ships complete each cycle much quicker and are good for training up captains, which can then be moved over to the larger ships once they have enough stars.
@@ospjp4 I was like that too, had the game in my playlist for a year wanting to play it until I finally did. Play the tutorials 3 times, play thru the Terran Cadet start once, watch some guides when you have time then you can start a legit run with The Young Gun start. You'll get the hang of it.
Trading computer is needed for the AI to trade it's minerals effectivly. Combat thrusters are always selected for AI since it's the only way they stop running into things. Police scanner is the only thing you should take off.
Coming from a lot of play time in X3 but that was years ago. These guides help so much getting to know the changes and what I need to know in order to have fun in X4 so thank you for that.
I have over 4400 hours of gameplay experience on X4 but I didn't know about these little orange spots on the asteroids. I always just blew up the whole thing and collected the remains. :)
I bought the game this weekend and your tutorials are being incredible so far for me to (try to) learn it. I was intrigued by space games and this one is the one that I think I will enjoy the most for what I saw.
Been playing for a mth now already got a medium miner ship. The KEY is learning the game menus and sub menus it’s def. micro managing heaven lol Great tutorial by the way please make more especially about station building.
I would add to the guidance, that you need to go into the individual instructions tab for the ship; and under attack select escape; or if your miner gets bounced by Xenon, or Kha'ak they'll just call for help and die.
Kha'ak are the reason why i'd always rather save up my money for L miners instead of bothering with smaller ones. With good shields and argon flak cannons, they can actually defend themselves against small attacks or at least stand their ground long enough until a sector guard shows up.
Thanks for the informative video. In contrast to mining in X-Rebirth with a cap ship and drones where everything kinda makes sense, this is really very complicated if you don't know where to look.
When I saw you can hire and communicate with crew on your own ships in X4F I knew I had to try it. That involvement in the world means I can forgive the odd poor texturing. I found Elite Dangerous just painfully slow in its traveling, Star Citizen's mission bugs render it constantly dissapointing, and Space Engineers technically fun but uneventfull. The game I did find to offer the best of all the space games I played so far was Empyrium Galactic Survival. X4F seems to have a lot of depth which im hoping will keep me interested and justify spending so much time learning all these bloody key binds lol.
Empyrion ftw! Waiting for Eleon to drop an update this week so the server i play on can wipe and we start again; great thing is server admin’s let us carry over stuff in virtual backpacks - shoutout to Wolfpack server! Just starting X4 as well, been wanting to play it for a while now and finally got a sweet deal from GoG. Enjoying it so far, if you’ve played some other space games in recent years it’s relatively easy to pick things up.
Thank you for your X4 guides, they have been very helpful. Question about automining, do I need to have explored the system and put up some resource probes ahead of time?
You mentioned pirates a few times in this but (as far as I know) pirates, whose ships are not equipped to handle solid or liquid cargoes, don't ever target miners. It's Kha'ak, Xenon and outright hostile factions that you've to worry about.
Im of course generalizing "piracy" to include Ka'aak, Xenon, etc, however for ToA, Piracy is much bigger now and you can find them attacking your miners (Actual Pirates) so just keep in mind! :)
I can’t find the advanced auto mining and L mining ships video, referred to in this video at 20:55. Anyone got a link? I did find the video titled ‘Efficient Mining (and Trading)’, but that is more geared towards station building to support miners that are already in place.
Great video, thanks. When the miners sell the minded goods, if they are multiple stations in the sector that requires it, will it always go to the one with the best price? I assume it will.
You probably know by now, but I believe as long as you have the trading software for your ship then they will seek best local price. But I think you may need to drop a satelite at each viable station for the software to get the upto date prices. Sorry, im a new player as well.
@@coffeeandvapes1308 Thanks, Yes, I watched them for a while and worked it out. but it's always good to share information on games, for other new players :)
Hi mate - Finally got a medium miner... Gonna do some Local Auto, is it worth putting out resource satellites in the asteroid belts, and satellites near the stations that use the materials, or will the miner crack on and find the material and where is best to sell?
@@TheRuggedGamer Seems local auto doesn’t have the smarts to get the ship around the resource satellite or even into an ore zone, seems the ship wanders about fairly randomly. Is this the games way of balancing ? Will it better when my pilot gets some stars for local auto? Thanks for answering and loving ya vids.
@Dave Graham theres some videos covering all the mining aspects which should make it a little clearer, hard for me to put into a single comment what could cause the issue, but there are a lot of considerations and tricks
Hey man, your videos are great. They have been helping me a lot. One question though, everytime I use the sector automine option, a mining order is created but it is nowhere near the mining tiles. I've to manually drag the order to a convenient tile that has the minining material im looking for. Any ideas why this happens?
Hi, good guide. I have a question about the docking computer for an ai controlled ship. Is it of any benefit? I see conflicting responses to this question. Thanks.
Sorry, I didnt see this comment on my notifications and came across it recently. Yes AI docking computers means the AI docks much faster, meaning things progress quicker and they dont sit idle for a time in docking areas
I wonder what I'm doing wrong.. I have 0% cargo space in use, meaning it's completely empty, and I can't pick up anything at all.. does the vacuum just not pick up anything that is too big to fit inside or something?
@@TheRuggedGamer I blew off some of those highlighted spots from an ore asteroid and tried to pick them up but they just bumped off the nose of my ship. At this point I'd assume that might be because I have a fighter ship, not a miner.. or I'm missing something I can't imagine at all at this point. I barely have 3 hours of gameplay in the game, so I probably missed a lot of stupidly obvious things..
So would it work to get snall miners until you can afford a medium or large then sell them. Captain and crew would have experience so transfer them before selling.
So theres no way to tranfer mined storage, in theory you could dump storage then have the large one collect it, but that would be very tedius. A better way is to use a small storage depot nearby to the mining point then use a large ship to transport it to further distances
Is this a bit like No mans sky if you do mass mining and drive the prices down as there is an abundance of said material could you then purchase a huge amount to drive the price back up to then re-sell again at a massive profit??
The container spaces way out ways the amount you can fit on your ship, filling up your ship will not really change the price that much. If you had 10 ships the price will change between each buy so the first ship that buys it will be cheap (due to loads of stock), but the 10th ship will be more expensive, due to having already bought 9 other loads.
@@KiteoHatto It should be covered in the videos, but yeah pretty much. Ive not been on x4 for a bit but i think if you ctrl right click it will queue up move orders for you
I still have a problem with local automine that they fill up then say there is no where to sell, even though there are stations in that specific subsector (local) that are buying. I can then manually tell them to go sell and they will and start mining again, but once they fill up they just stop. I can repeat orders to get around this but from your guide it seems that i'm missing something since local automine should mine then sell if they can to a station in that sector?
@@TheRuggedGamer Thank you for reply, I'll just get the a fighter to escort it as well. Regradless still fun idea from an RP perspective.. thanks for the awesome tutorials as well
So right now in my playthrough I set a miner to auto mine Silicon however when full it just complains that it has no where to sell, I have to manually tell it to sell to a station in a Hex next door, is this really how this works now?
For local automine, yes, it remains in that sector. However if you checkout my video on efficient mining and trading youll get an idea how to boost it massively
@@TheRuggedGamer Yeah, I thought so. With so many updates to the system I'm not even sure what the current crystal refresh is and if I need to leave the sector or just wait for certain amount of minutes. Sometimes they are very hard to spot too. I was thinking of using a mod for it but feels like cheating so I now only mine crystals when seeing them, actively searching for them is probably waste of time.
@@texx8205 It was a very good source of early game cash in earlier versions. In current versions they have been nerfed severely - as in once you found a very valuable crystal, all other crystals around you will be replaced with the cheapest ones for a specific amount of time. It was way to easy money. At least much easier as they were intended to be, so you could call it a "fix" for an exploit. Imo the best source of early game income are looting leftovers from battles (can even be done semi automatically once you have the HQ, by creating repeating orders of collect items and deliver items to HQ stash) and boarding ships.
@@hiddenmonkeyofdoom It still under performs. Repeat orders can also lead to loss of profit and your ships not trading quite easily, it requires more fine tuning and monitoring
@@TheRuggedGamer no, because a local miner can flood the market causing more stalled operations than having ability to spread out for less skill. My repeat orders crew pull in an average of 75% more than local and even expert miners.
this is the new X series ? the cockpit looked like Elite&Dangerous thingy... eewww.. it would be a HUGE BUMMER if i buy this game and find im missing the cockpit from X-Rebirth that looks more alive and interactive than this plastic thing..
@@TheRuggedGamer Nvm turns out if you spying on him he won't mine anything and just circle endlessly. I left to another region and he started mining, very slowly but still works.
Your guides are quality mate. I've been automining for a couple of days because I got a cracked copy of the game and it's earning someone 2 eth a day. Only joking, this game is well worth the money :)
This is not a beginners guide to mining. You already have a map full of stuff which is overwhelming, and the way you pop in & out and do a thousand mouse clicks,etc with no explanation is very frustrating. I do appreciate the time you take to do these, and I’m sure they’re helpful for a lot of people, but they are not for beginners.
Hmmm yes and no. I have been playing the game for like 10 hours and done missions and remote trading. I have never ever built or used a mining ship before. This explained to me everything that was needed. It still took me a couple hours before to know where to remotely send ships, remote trade, dock/undock, craft, build stations etc etc. Explaning everything needed to start the game is too much for a 20min video.
You of course watched the previous videos in the playlist to see how the ships were obtained, being a full beginners guide. The concept of this video isnt to tell you how to get the fleets, its how to mine and its various systems in X4. If you need "how to get fleets" id suggest this video isnt for you.
Good guide. One thing I would add is that there is still a use for S and M mining ships when you have the cash to run the larger ships (21:05): The smaller ships complete each cycle much quicker and are good for training up captains, which can then be moved over to the larger ships once they have enough stars.
Bro i do not understand this game lol
@@ospjp4
I was like that too, had the game in my playlist for a year wanting to play it until I finally did.
Play the tutorials 3 times, play thru the Terran Cadet start once, watch some guides when you have time then you can start a legit run with The Young Gun start. You'll get the hang of it.
Trading computer is needed for the AI to trade it's minerals effectivly.
Combat thrusters are always selected for AI since it's the only way they stop running into things.
Police scanner is the only thing you should take off.
Coming from a lot of play time in X3 but that was years ago. These guides help so much getting to know the changes and what I need to know in order to have fun in X4 so thank you for that.
I have over 4400 hours of gameplay experience on X4 but I didn't know about these little orange spots on the asteroids. I always just blew up the whole thing and collected the remains. :)
Definently helpful. I'm new to the game, complicated and tough as hell, but I love the game so far.
And essentially free credits as I'm running about the verse, doing quests? Yes please
Thats awesome to hear! Glad your enjoying it
I bought the game this weekend and your tutorials are being incredible so far for me to (try to) learn it. I was intrigued by space games and this one is the one that I think I will enjoy the most for what I saw.
I hope youve been able to enjoy it! Its a steep learning curve but such a fun game
Been playing for a mth now already got a medium miner ship. The KEY is learning the game menus and sub menus it’s def. micro managing heaven lol Great tutorial by the way please make more especially about station building.
Updated version of my favorite x4 guide? Yes please!
Too kind :)
Hearing that announcer interrupt you in the end made me chuckle. You have probably heard It a million times but It was the first fo me xD
Its so annoying lol
I would add to the guidance, that you need to go into the individual instructions tab for the ship; and under attack select escape; or if your miner gets bounced by Xenon, or Kha'ak they'll just call for help and die.
Kha'ak are the reason why i'd always rather save up my money for L miners instead of bothering with smaller ones. With good shields and argon flak cannons, they can actually defend themselves against small attacks or at least stand their ground long enough until a sector guard shows up.
@@manug2508 Well a good M Class will help you get that money faster, but yes as soon as possible swap out.
Thanks for the informative video. In contrast to mining in X-Rebirth with a cap ship and drones where everything kinda makes sense, this is really very complicated if you don't know where to look.
When I saw you can hire and communicate with crew on your own ships in X4F I knew I had to try it. That involvement in the world means I can forgive the odd poor texturing. I found Elite Dangerous just painfully slow in its traveling, Star Citizen's mission bugs render it constantly dissapointing, and Space Engineers technically fun but uneventfull. The game I did find to offer the best of all the space games I played so far was Empyrium Galactic Survival. X4F seems to have a lot of depth which im hoping will keep me interested and justify spending so much time learning all these bloody key binds lol.
Empyrion ftw! Waiting for Eleon to drop an update this week so the server i play on can wipe and we start again; great thing is server admin’s let us carry over stuff in virtual backpacks - shoutout to Wolfpack server!
Just starting X4 as well, been wanting to play it for a while now and finally got a sweet deal from GoG. Enjoying it so far, if you’ve played some other space games in recent years it’s relatively easy to pick things up.
"You're an inconvenience"
Holy shit dude you murdered her
Truly our humanity is the 1st thing to go in the uncaring emptiness of space.
Very informative. Thanks for the video.
Thank you for your X4 guides, they have been very helpful. Question about automining, do I need to have explored the system and put up some resource probes ahead of time?
The automine picks up without, but it "can" make it a little quicker
mining drill mk2 give a lot more mining speed than two turrets. the turrets do almost nothing unfortunately. (AI / OOS)
Appreciate the guides Rugged Gamer, cheers.
You mentioned pirates a few times in this but (as far as I know) pirates, whose ships are not equipped to handle solid or liquid cargoes, don't ever target miners. It's Kha'ak, Xenon and outright hostile factions that you've to worry about.
Im of course generalizing "piracy" to include Ka'aak, Xenon, etc, however for ToA, Piracy is much bigger now and you can find them attacking your miners (Actual Pirates) so just keep in mind! :)
Any suggestion on where to automine? Any recommended space?
Thank youuu
Grand Exchange or Black hole sun are both good areas :)
I can’t find the advanced auto mining and L mining ships video, referred to in this video at 20:55. Anyone got a link? I did find the video titled ‘Efficient Mining (and Trading)’, but that is more geared towards station building to support miners that are already in place.
Great video, thanks. When the miners sell the minded goods, if they are multiple stations in the sector that requires it, will it always go to the one with the best price? I assume it will.
You probably know by now, but I believe as long as you have the trading software for your ship then they will seek best local price. But I think you may need to drop a satelite at each viable station for the software to get the upto date prices. Sorry, im a new player as well.
@@coffeeandvapes1308 Thanks, Yes, I watched them for a while and worked it out. but it's always good to share information on games, for other new players :)
Thank you very much
Hi Mate, just started playing the Foundations base game (no DLC) - Are these guides still relevant to me?
Yes, they cover mainly the core gameplay, the only thing you wont have is some sectors or faction ships.
@@TheRuggedGamer Great ty
Hi mate - Finally got a medium miner... Gonna do some Local Auto, is it worth putting out resource satellites in the asteroid belts, and satellites near the stations that use the materials, or will the miner crack on and find the material and where is best to sell?
Its a bit 50/50 with resource nodes, it "can" help find best spots for miners. Standard satellites are great around stations, gates, shipyards etc
@@TheRuggedGamer Seems local auto doesn’t have the smarts to get the ship around the resource satellite or even into an ore zone, seems the ship wanders about fairly randomly. Is this the games way of balancing ? Will it better when my pilot gets some stars for local auto? Thanks for answering and loving ya vids.
@Dave Graham theres some videos covering all the mining aspects which should make it a little clearer, hard for me to put into a single comment what could cause the issue, but there are a lot of considerations and tricks
Man i could just afford my medium miner and HOLY SHIT this ship is HUGE... what the hell is Large size going to be.. a while city?
Wish I found this tutorial last night before I started whining in discord about this very thing…
My mining ships are just clustered in on spot and doing nothing dunno what to do
Hey man, your videos are great. They have been helping me a lot.
One question though, everytime I use the sector automine option, a mining order is created but it is nowhere near the mining tiles. I've to manually drag the order to a convenient tile that has the minining material im looking for.
Any ideas why this happens?
The fleet dynamics of the game are great...but the leggo ship designs totally suck... They should redesign the ships...
I'm a bit confused. So my crew mines it but never picks it up unless they just happen to accidently run into it. Any fix for this?
Hi, good guide. I have a question about the docking computer for an ai controlled ship. Is it of any benefit? I see conflicting responses to this question. Thanks.
Sorry, I didnt see this comment on my notifications and came across it recently. Yes AI docking computers means the AI docks much faster, meaning things progress quicker and they dont sit idle for a time in docking areas
I wonder what I'm doing wrong.. I have 0% cargo space in use, meaning it's completely empty, and I can't pick up anything at all.. does the vacuum just not pick up anything that is too big to fit inside or something?
Depends what your trying to pick up and which cargo space you have
@@TheRuggedGamer I blew off some of those highlighted spots from an ore asteroid and tried to pick them up but they just bumped off the nose of my ship.
At this point I'd assume that might be because I have a fighter ship, not a miner.. or I'm missing something I can't imagine at all at this point. I barely have 3 hours of gameplay in the game, so I probably missed a lot of stupidly obvious things..
@1110jesse yes. A miner has a solid storage, for ore. A fighter has container
So would it work to get snall miners until you can afford a medium or large then sell them. Captain and crew would have experience so transfer them before selling.
Yes, and the experience also increases price if you did sell with crew. either or works!
Can you set small mining ships to mine for the large ones
So theres no way to tranfer mined storage, in theory you could dump storage then have the large one collect it, but that would be very tedius.
A better way is to use a small storage depot nearby to the mining point then use a large ship to transport it to further distances
Is this a bit like No mans sky if you do mass mining and drive the prices down as there is an abundance of said material could you then purchase a huge amount to drive the price back up to then re-sell again at a massive profit??
The container spaces way out ways the amount you can fit on your ship, filling up your ship will not really change the price that much. If you had 10 ships the price will change between each buy so the first ship that buys it will be cheap (due to loads of stock), but the 10th ship will be more expensive, due to having already bought 9 other loads.
How do you go about uncovering the fog areas in each hexagon ? Barely any silicone buy orders in my 18billion area.
When ships owned by you enter the area covered by fog, just like an RTS fog of war, it uncovers
@@TheRuggedGamer i know that, i mean do you just queue a bunch of "fly and wait" orders or what ?
@@KiteoHatto It should be covered in the videos, but yeah pretty much. Ive not been on x4 for a bit but i think if you ctrl right click it will queue up move orders for you
I still have a problem with local automine that they fill up then say there is no where to sell, even though there are stations in that specific subsector (local) that are buying. I can then manually tell them to go sell and they will and start mining again, but once they fill up they just stop. I can repeat orders to get around this but from your guide it seems that i'm missing something since local automine should mine then sell if they can to a station in that sector?
Its all down to profitability, and not much of a way around it. If the ore is bought too cheap they wont sell it
@@TheRuggedGamer I played a few more hours and the issue seems gone now, thanks!
if I have enough credits is it worth buying a fighter escort or just two miners and have them work together? or are attacks even really that common?
It varys between games, sometimes your lucky and its quiet, sometimes your constantly hounded
@@TheRuggedGamer Thank you for reply, I'll just get the a fighter to escort it as well. Regradless still fun idea from an RP perspective.. thanks for the awesome tutorials as well
How do you order a fighter to escort the miner??
@@longboi3426 have the fighter(s) selected and right click on a target ship to defend and put them in a defend target wing
So right now in my playthrough I set a miner to auto mine Silicon however when full it just complains that it has no where to sell, I have to manually tell it to sell to a station in a Hex next door, is this really how this works now?
For local automine, yes, it remains in that sector. However if you checkout my video on efficient mining and trading youll get an idea how to boost it massively
What about manual mining of rare crystals, is there any way to find them other than flying around a looking for small flashes?
Unfortunately not, the only way is manually looking for the little light blips
@@TheRuggedGamer Yeah, I thought so. With so many updates to the system I'm not even sure what the current crystal refresh is and if I need to leave the sector or just wait for certain amount of minutes. Sometimes they are very hard to spot too. I was thinking of using a mod for it but feels like cheating so I now only mine crystals when seeing them, actively searching for them is probably waste of time.
@@texx8205 they are only needed to give that little boost of economy, mining alone should help your funds from that point (usually)
@@texx8205 It was a very good source of early game cash in earlier versions. In current versions they have been nerfed severely - as in once you found a very valuable crystal, all other crystals around you will be replaced with the cheapest ones for a specific amount of time. It was way to easy money. At least much easier as they were intended to be, so you could call it a "fix" for an exploit.
Imo the best source of early game income are looting leftovers from battles (can even be done semi automatically once you have the HQ, by creating repeating orders of collect items and deliver items to HQ stash) and boarding ships.
Repeat orders is better as of now than local mining. Merely cause you can make it sell a lot further than even advanced mining.
This is based off whether you have vision of no sectors
The automine behaviours have one notable advantage over repeat orders: repeat orders can't be mimicked by subordinates.
@@calrogman nope that was changed considerably in the beta for 5.0
@@hiddenmonkeyofdoom It still under performs. Repeat orders can also lead to loss of profit and your ships not trading quite easily, it requires more fine tuning and monitoring
@@TheRuggedGamer no, because a local miner can flood the market causing more stalled operations than having ability to spread out for less skill. My repeat orders crew pull in an average of 75% more than local and even expert miners.
this is the new X series ? the cockpit looked like Elite&Dangerous thingy... eewww..
it would be a HUGE BUMMER if i buy this game and find im missing the cockpit from X-Rebirth that looks more alive and interactive than this plastic thing..
My pilot doesnt automine, he just went to a random spot next to the mineral cluster and spin around like an idiot
Have you selected available resources and does he have room in his storage. Is there somewhere for him to sell to?
@@TheRuggedGamer Nvm turns out if you spying on him he won't mine anything and just circle endlessly. I left to another region and he started mining, very slowly but still works.
oh a reason video
Your guides are quality mate. I've been automining for a couple of days because I got a cracked copy of the game and it's earning someone 2 eth a day. Only joking, this game is well worth the money :)
This is not a beginners guide to mining. You already have a map full of stuff which is overwhelming, and the way you pop in & out and do a thousand mouse clicks,etc with no explanation is very frustrating. I do appreciate the time you take to do these, and I’m sure they’re helpful for a lot of people, but they are not for beginners.
Hmmm yes and no. I have been playing the game for like 10 hours and done missions and remote trading. I have never ever built or used a mining ship before. This explained to me everything that was needed.
It still took me a couple hours before to know where to remotely send ships, remote trade, dock/undock, craft, build stations etc etc.
Explaning everything needed to start the game is too much for a 20min video.
Begginner guide with fucking fleet at the beggining. :D OK i got nothing from this video :-)
You of course watched the previous videos in the playlist to see how the ships were obtained, being a full beginners guide. The concept of this video isnt to tell you how to get the fleets, its how to mine and its various systems in X4. If you need "how to get fleets" id suggest this video isnt for you.
@@TheRuggedGamer I don't know anything about our earlier videos. There nothing in title about it's second part. So how should I know ? 🤔
@@luxiet2518 its a part of a playlist, the playlist should be visible