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The space sim market is a crowded one, with numerous games clamoring for players' attention. Boots on the ground sci-fi shooting, FTL trade routes, interstellar diplomacy, and asteroid field piracy are available to gamers who want to take their chances amongst the stars.
X4: Foundations carves its own path with an immersive universe, reactive economy, deep faction system, and the opportunity to become the dominant force in a galaxy crowded with rivals. Even with all of these things going for it, some players will want to tweak the base game and make it more suitable for their playstyle. Thankfully, the modding community has come to the rescue. Here are some of the best mods for X4: Foundations.
8 Variety And Rebalance Overhaul VRO
X4: Foundations does an incredible job at presenting players with a massive, living universe that is directly affected by their decisions. Rising to wealth and power by manipulating the economy or through piracy can be a blast, but some players will be looking for a little more out of combat than the base game is suited to provide, giving players a reason not to play the pacifist.
The Variety and Rebalance Overhaul VRO by Shuul implements a variety of tweaks and changes to ships, engines, shields, missiles, and other weapons, with the goal of spicing up combat overall. In addition to tweaking content that is already there by adjusting parameters, this mod also adds new ships and ship components.
7 XR Ship Pack
What's interstellar sci-fi without plenty of amazing ships? Ship acquisition, construction, and piloting are already deep and dynamic aspects of X4, but the XR Ship Pack by modder Optimus Prime expands on the vanilla game's offerings with dozens of additional ships from X Rebirth.
There are plenty of available mods that add extra ships, change their appearance, or change their stats or mechanics, but the XR Ship Pack stands out as one of the best designed. Exhibiting a high level of polish and intelligent balancing that won't break the game and make otherwise exciting challenges trivial, the XR Ship Pack is the best of both worlds.
6 Extra Player Logos
With a massive universe to explore, influence, and conquer, it can be easy to feel overwhelmed and lost in X4. The player's influence over the universe and its many factions may be tremendous, but sometimes the sheer scope of it all can make the player feel like just another face in the crowd and wish for a bit more customization.
Muncha's Extra Player Logos mod is incredibly simple, adding more than 150 logos that players can use to represent their company and ship in X4. Given that many of these logos represent real-world icons from pop culture, music, and sports, they can be pretty immersion-breaking, so players looking to keep their heads in X4's canonical universe may want to steer clear. For everyone else, Extra Player Logos is a great way to personalize things.
5 X4 Cheat Menu
Whether it's a Big-Head Mode, Golden Gun, infinite money, flying cars, or something else equally outlandish, cheats have been a part of gaming pretty much since the birth of the medium. While they're rightfully frowned upon in competitive gaming, when playing solo they can be a fun way to break out of a sometimes monotonous gameplay loop and stir things up a bit.
The X4 Cheat Menu by fsnlan gives players exactly what it promises: a menu of cheats for players who don't want to grind or who just feel like injecting some instant chaos into their otherwise stable universe. It might not be fair or balanced, but that isn't really the point of cheats anyway. Anyone who wants to shake off the difficulty and jump straight into God Mode can do it here.
4 X4 Star Wars Interworlds
In any sci-fi discussion that goes on long enough, someone will eventually bring up Star Wars. When it comes to the modding scene, it often happens when someone decides to expand their favorite fictional universe by adding some Jedi and Sith action, tossing in a few Wookiees for good measure.
Mikska's X4 Star Wars Interworlds does just this, adding ships and locations from that beloved franchise into X4. For fans who love the trading and combat of this space sim but thought it would be a little better with the Millenium Falcon and Star Destroyers cruising around, X4 Star Wars Interworlds is just the fix, making a great sandbox game even better.
3 CrystalFinder
Deep space mining is a staple of sci-fi games. While players in the late game often have access to a variety of other options when it comes to making money, early on one of the best options is often grabbing a mining laser and having a go at some asteroids in search of valuable resources.
That's precisely the case in X4: Foundations, but players who want to make some easy money by mining may be frustrated by the difficulty of finding crystals to mine. They may be valuable, but if the player can't reliably acquire them, what's the point? Shuruna's CrystalFinder mod makes a small but very important change to crystals: adding a glow around them so that they can be more easily found.
2 Learning All The Things
Modder iforgotmysocks may not know where their footwear is, but they do know their way around X4: Foundations.Learning All The Things is a mod that allows player-controlled NPCs to improve their skills hourly. The main purpose of this change is to reduce the grind for NPC leveling, speeding up the process enough to make their growth more enjoyable without breaking the game with an automatic win.
This change doesn't apply to crew members who are docked at stations, so the player doesn't have to worry about their NPCs sitting around doing nothing and then getting rewarded for it. By improving the pacing of the NPC advancement system without violating canon or otherwise breaking the immersion of the game, Learning All The Things does wonders, especially for players still learning the ropes.
1 Sector Satellites
Satellites serve several roles in X4: Foundations, but in the vanilla game, they can be unfortunately limited in their application. Another mod from iforgotmysocks, Sector Satellites adds four new satellites to the game, allowing the player to pull prices from every station in a given sector, detect pirates, locate resources, and more.
This mod harnesses and expands upon the potential of satellites, making base gameplay more interesting without changing things in other areas too drastically. Straddling the line between quality-of-life upgrades and new features, Sector Satellites improves the base game experience in a variety of ways and shouldn't be missed by X4 players interested in mods.
X4: Foundations is available for PC and Linux.