There are two classes of illegal items in X4:

• cargo your ship is carrying (wares)
• items you or your pilot are carrying (inventory items)

This page is about items, and elaborates on the information in the main Inventory Items section.

Illegal inventory items (e.g. hacking tools) are generally illegal everywhere, to all factions. [Unlike ship cargo wares, which may only be prohibited in certain sectors.]

If the ship you’re piloting is scanned, your illegal inventory will be discovered. This can also happen while in your space suit, a common problem when trying to deploy EMP bombs at a station patrolled by police drones.

Acquiring

Illegal items are most easily found by collecting the dropped crates left by destroyed ships.

Lock boxes can also have useful items. These are boxes in space with glowing red locks on them that you have to shoot off without destroying the box itself.

Pirate stations, usually located in unclaimed sectors, have a “two crossed blades” icon. The trade desk at these stations will deal in some inventory items.

Finally, black market traders are shady types at stations that you can randomly find by scanning signal leaks at stations. They offer you a “bring me something I need, and we can do business” intro offer. If you bring them what they want, they become a permanent fixture at the Bar in the station, and you can return later to trade items with them.

Selling

Generally only pirate station traders and black market traders will buy illegal items.

Note that some items cannot be sold at all. [They are very expensive to keep you from simply buying an unlimited supply, making it an easily exploited loophole if you were able to sell them and easily make a fortune.]

For trade, spacefly eggs are the most valuable item once assembled into Spacefly Caviar. Note that there are a few story lines in the game that require space fly caviar as a gift, so while early on you likely want to sell all you come across eventually it’s worthwhile to hold one or two back for possible later use.

Construction

More valuable illegal inventory items (hacking tools, spacefly caviar) can be assembled from components at the workbench next to the trade counter on stations.

Note that once constructed, items can’t be de-constructed. Some parts are needed for more than one type of buildable item, so you may want to hold some parts back until you’re certain you need the assembled item (unstable crystals, for instance, are needed for more than one type of useful project).