After learning the basics of how to operate the game UI and controls, exploring a bit, etc, a common question new X4 players ask is “what do I do now? how do I make money?”
As with most sandbox-style games, there’s no “right” answer. Instead there’s a laundry list of things you could do, if you find them entertaining. If you asked the developers, it’s likely that they would say that one of their goals for X4 is to provide a variety of game play features and mechanics, all of which can be used but none of which have to be used. What to do next therefore is extremely subjective, and depends a great deal on what you find entertaining.
That said, below is one possible approach.
Collecting drops
One way to make money early is collecting drops where factions are fighting. “Drops” here means the crates left floating in space when a ship is destroyed.
The X4 universe has several border-skirmish sectors where opposing factions frequently wreck each other’s ships. Borders between HOP and PAR space, as well as between HOP/ARG/ANT space are good choices. Any sector with a gate to Xenon space is also a good. choice (though more dangerous because the Xenon will also shoot at you, vs say HOP and PAR shooting at each other but ignoring you).
Drop result mostly in average-value items, but there are some high-value personal inventory items like Spacefly Eggs (which you can craft into Spacefly Caviar) and Programmable Field Arrays. Since your personal inventory is unlimited, you can pick up as many of these inventory items as you can find, then make a trip to a station’s trade counter to sell them.
You can also pick up valuable cargo (wares), but this is more limited due to the fact that you can only pick up as much as your ship’s cargo hold capacity, then have to go sell it and return.
Note: drops from destroyed ships auto-destruct after a while, so likely won’t still be there if you leave and return later.
Example: heading to Second Contact right from the start will let you arrive as the starting forces for HOP and ANT are turning each other into wrecks. Tens and tens of ships being destroyed, all dropping something you can sell.
See the Inventory Items section for more information.
Missions
Past that, missions are the next best early thing you can do that will pay money for effort. Miners, setting up stations, etc, are great once you have a slightly longer time horizon… but they’re investments, and money sinks until you have the time to wait for them to pay back the investment and start actually generating income.
See the Missions section for more information.
Priorities
Early, you need operating cash more than long-term investments.
Station building and trading the goods you produce will play a part, but later. At game start, you don’t have the resources to start large construction projects.
You also have the issue that your starting ship is not particularly well equipped. There are missions that may be impossible to complete without upgrading (or replacing entirely) your starting ship.
Finally, there’s the limit to what you can do based on being only one person. With only one ship, and no pilots working for you flying other ships, the only way you can make money or do any exploration is to personally fly your ship there and do it yourself.
…
Your starting activities should therefore be guided by “what produces credits?” Getting money from missions, pirating small ships, collecting drops, etc, will give you the credits you need to upgrade your ship, and start collecting more ships you can assign to your staff.
Getting an independent mining ship (or a few) working as Local Autominers (see Mining) can get your fleet making credits for you while you focus on something else.
Buying a cheap scout ship and setting it to auto-collect drops for you can help you harvest the bounty of various sectors without your having to collect every crate yourself (see Collectors).
Meanwhile, you can keep working on missions around the galaxy to help fund all this. Missions will be your main income source for a while.
Once you’ve accumulated some cash, you can start looking at setting up your first factory stations. Energy Cell production stations are a popular choice, since they make wares directly from sunlight and can be done by a station with just a simple S/M ship dock, a small container storage module and a solar production module. (You don’t need to add a “Pier” for L/XL ships until you’re producing in enough volume that those kinds of ships will be coming to buy.)
After that, maybe another solar plant somewhere. Then maybe add some refined metals processing, silicon processing. Start having your miners bring the resources to you instead of selling them to other refiners.
…
Crystal Mining
You may find older advice in internet searches about doing “Crystal Mining” as a good way to make money early.
This advice was good in circa 2.0 releases of the game, but the game has been altered and in current versions and now this is actually a pretty tedious way to spend your time, and significantly less productive as a way to make money.
That said, the crystal are still out there, still findable, still make money when sold. It’s just not as lucrative as it used to be.