In X4, piracy refers to both stealing cargo and stealing entire ships.
By the player
The player may, at the risk of angering target factions, engage in piracy by attempting to board L/XL ships or capture S/M ships.
The player may also attempt to intimidate trade ships to get them to drop their cargo. Once they start taking damage, trade ships will fairly soon jettison cargo in an attempt to placate the player and escape. You can then collect the dropped cargo and transport it to a station to sell normally (cargo is not marked as “stolen” in any way).
Attempting to capture or pirate a ship will turn it hostile, and shooting at a ship in any sector may draw a negative reaction from the owner of the sector as well as the ship itself. Unowned sectors have no police forces, and no owner to anger.
For information about boarding L/XL-size ships, see Boarding.
For information about capturing S/M-size ships, see Capturing.
Against the player
Pirate factions never attempt to board or capture player ships, but will demand that a player ship drop it’s cargo.
If your ship refuses to drop cargo, the pirate will become hostile and attempt to destroy the ship. At this point, dropping cargo has no effect. The pirate now wants to kill your ship, not steal its cargo.
Pirate factions include:
- Scale plate pact (SCA)
- Duke’s buccaneers (BUC)
- Yaki (YAK)
- Vigor Syndicate (VIG)
Your reputation with a faction will determine whether or not members of the faction will attempt to intimidate your freighters into dropping their cargo. You can view information about how factions will treat you (including piracy) in Player Information > Factions And Relations.
SCA is the most dangerous/annoying pirate faction, as it’s impossible to raise your reputation with them until late in the game. (See the SCA section for more information).
Response
All ships have a setting (Information > Individual Instructions) for how to respond when threatened by pirates. Unless changed, a ship will use the global default setting (Player Information > Global Orders).
If you do not configure the setting to be notified about pirate harassment, the ship will take the default action.
If you do request to be notified, you will receive a “video call” and have a short time to respond and pick a response for the ship. Note that once you choose a response, it cannot be changed (so you can’t tell a ship to flee and then change your mind and pacify the pirate by dropping cargo).
If you tell your ship to flee (or this is activated as the default response), then the ship will attempt to either leave the sector or fly to dock at a nearby station. The pirate will respond by going hostile and attempting to destroy the ship.
Note that X4’s flee behavior is known to make some poor decisions about the best direction and action for fleeing, so you may want to pause the game and change/override the orders the ship assigns itself to flee.
Cover Identity
SCA pirate ships have the ability to adopt false transponder signals, making them appear as members of another faction.
If you fire on a ship while it is “under cover” in this way, the false faction will respond as if it were actually one of their ships. Thus, even if you know it’s a pirate, firing on the ship while “under cover” will count as an attack on on the false faction.
Ships drop their false cover identity when they threaten someone, and it will remain dropped until the pirate moves away and hide again.
You can expose the pirate’s true identity by getting close and using your ship’s Scan Mode to scan the ship. This will cause the true identity to be visible to all ships, and any attack will now be counted against the true owner rather than against the cover faction.
Identifying pirate ships
Ships always maintain the same name, and pirate ships are given names containing one of the following words:
- plunderer
- pillager
- raider
Searching for these words in the map can help identify pirate ships.
Note that some ship (hull) models also contain “raider” as part of their name, so be sure to scan them and verify they belong to a pirate faction before attacking!