X4: Foundations
X4: FOUNDATIONS brings our most sophisticated universe SIMULATION ever. Fly every ship, EXPLORE space or manage an empire; TRADE, FIGHT, BUILD and THINK carefully, while you embark on an epic journey. Experience tons of improvements with the massive 7.00 Update!
X4: Foundations is a space sim, simulation and sandbox game
developed and published by Egosoft.
Released on November 30th 2018 is available on Windows and Linux
in 14 languages: English, German, French, Italian, Simplified Chinese, Portuguese - Brazil, Spanish - Spain, Traditional Chinese, Russian, Korean, Japanese, Spanish - Latin America, Polish and Czech.
It has received 22,306 reviews of which 17,645 were positive and 4,661 were negative resulting in a rating of 7.8 out of 10. 😊
The game is currently priced at 49.99€ on Steam.
The Steam community has classified X4: Foundations into these genres:
Media & Screenshots
Get an in-depth look at X4: Foundations through various videos and screenshots.
Requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 10 (64-bit) or higher
- Processor: Intel i5-4590 3.3GHz or AMD equivalent
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: Nvidia GTX 780/970 or AMD equivalent (Vulkan support required)
- Storage: 35 GB available space
Linux
- OS: SteamOS (64-bit) or Ubuntu 18.04 (64-bit)
- Processor: Intel i5-4590 3.3GHz or AMD equivalent
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: Nvidia GTX 780/970 or AMD equivalent (Vulkan support required)
- Storage: 35 GB available space
Reviews
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
If you are lucky enough to be the kind of person this game is made for, you're going to have a lot of "I can't believe a game like this exists and I'm so happy it does" moments.
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X4's main strength is it's scale. From your spacesuit out in space you can board your tiny fighter, land it on a frigate, take that frigate and land it on a carrier. You can take that carrier and dock it at your station. You can look out over the docking ports from your observation deck and enjoy all your hard work. The universe is almost fully simulated, every ship, every battle, every resource. You could help a factions wartime production by building your own stations and selling to them for cheaper. You could tank an economy by jettisoning the ship building material of a station. You can even start major wars . I love this game, but it's not for everyone. The ship AI is still pretty buggy, the UI is clunky and not very intuitive, and mods are needed to smooth out some of the rough spots. The game isn't unplayable without mods, but there are a ton of QoL improvements that I'd say are a must. It's not the most well optimized game in the world, but it's getting better. With that said, my most notable experience in the game was feeling a little slighted by a super annoying (to me) faction. Despite tense but mostly peaceful relations they'd kill a cargo ship of mine here and there. At one point I added corvette escorts to combat the Xenon and Kha'ak. The escorts retaliated, the fight spilled over into the neighboring system, and we were headed for all out war. I barricaded myself in a system I claimed and slowly built an armada while fighting skirmishes around their gates. Then the armada was unleashed. They've been scoured off the map. I didn't even want their systems, but they're mine now. Nothing will be built there, ever. It is not a place of honor. Every so often they attempt to resurrect themselves and rebuild a station that I stamp out like a weed. My transports and miners are safe again.
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X:4 Foundations Egosoft's ship-building trade sim is one of the most intricate and rewarding management games I've ever played. X4 juggles an engaging and adaptive AI-managed galaxy with realtime strategy elements that makes for a tremendously engaging single player experience. A brief fore-word Just decided to put down the game after a 150hr save with a business worth around $6billion, which was my second (and much more successful) playthrough. Unlike a lot of other reviews I've seen on this game, I actually only played X: Rebirth, which was the previous game in the series. Rebirth is a little bit different from the other games in the X series from what I understand. It's more trade focused and places far less emphasis on actually piloting ships, and more emphasis on running the business. That's my experience and some bias going in to this review. This review is going to be some stuff I liked, some stuff I thought had room for improvement, and then whether or not I recommend it for you. This review is getting a thumbs up because I think X4: Foundations delivers exactly what it says on the tin, to the best of it's ability but whether or not that's actually for you... well hopefully my review will help. The Good Stuff X4: Foundations is probably the most intricate single player space trading simulator on the market at the moment. The galactic economy successfully walks the tightrope of being complicated enough to present a rich and satisfying economy that allows for endless back and forth with the AI players. The Sandbox I've seen come critique that Diplomacy in the game is very limited but I'm not sure that that's a fair description. The AI players are very economically free. They are pretty good at looking after their own economies (while leaving enough room for you to compete) but their foreign policy is almost completely static. The relations between factions at the start of the game will stay the same throughout if you don't complete the major quests. The quests allow for some really cool changes to the change in the galactic status quo and can radically change the state of play depending on your choices and when you complete the quests. Ship Combat Ship combat is really dang cool. The game has an amazing sense of scale and accomplishment. You can dock on stations you've built and on ships you've bough and there's a real sense of wonder and awe as you pilot truly enormous battleships or manage massive factory stations. I found progress to be tremendously satisfying. There's also a great sense of scale as you grow your business. Going from buying a single M sized ship early on to eventually buying whole fleets of L and XL ships is just very satisfying. Station Building Station building is pretty good. I think for a 3D module based building system the controls are alright and after getting over the learning curve of decision paralysis of where to start, I quite liked the puzzle of fitting together self-sufficient station factories. Menus The menu system isn't perfect but I think it does a really good job at showing you what you need to know. You can setup factories that are supplied by the AI, by yourself or a mix for individual parts in the chain. The factory and ship interfaces aren't perfect. There's lots of text and different features aren't always intuitive. Overall, I think you get plenty of tools to make your factories and ships operate in a way that is useful, once you learn to use the system. Room for Improvement Game pacing and the learning curve I played X4 almost entirely with a stationary ship making money by commanding other ships and trying to make my stations as profitable as possible. This made for a pretty painfully slow start but I used a lot of that time to build relations with different factions, explore the galaxy and find where in the galaxy I could begin to make some money. I've played a number of dense sandbox management games and I think it's safe to say X4 has one of the steepest learning curves, and many info-landmines which can make learning the game tremendously frustrating. Prior to playing, I had more than 100 hours in a previous X title, spent maybe 2 or 3 hours reading steam guides and played through the games tutorials. I still made mistakes which made my first 20-40 hours of play painful. I think fans would argue that "If I had just started in region X" or "If I had properly read popular guide Y" I'd have had a better time but I think realistically, a new player is going to make at least one mistake which will make their first game very hard or painfully slow. For example, I followed a guide on building a Terran Wharf and found that I was having to import far more energy cells than I expected. This was because I had failed to recognise that the guide built their wharf in a different region and that would mean that, because energy cell production efficiency is based on region (due to differences in sunlight for the solar panels) my station would not be self-sufficient. I learned this after spending more than 12 hours building the station. Another example: I built a number of profitable trade stations in split territory. I followed the major questline for the split, supporting the government in a civil war. I didn't know that this war would cause the neighboring stations to turn hostile, which destroyed many of my ships and effectively shut down a great deal of my trade. Mods are a must I think it's a weakpoint that the game is just straight up worse without mods. Galaxy exploration is mostly relegated to a chore, as is using satellites to stay up-to-date with available trades. Without mods, this will absorb hours and hours of your gameplay which would be better spent doing fun missions and reading through station information. Lockboxes are really awkward to break in to but doing so is vital for a lot of quests (including major plotlines) The ship AI behaves differently depending on whether it's fighting in the real sim (where you see the ships) or in the map (where they're largely just icons). Some ships are poor when piloted by even the best AI pilots in the sim because of their weapon placements and relative position to their enemies, so you may find that the battleship you spent your whole day grinding cash for got blown up because the AI can't handle the turret placement very well. Will you like it? If you like other X games, it's a strong recommend. If you like management games and don't mind 2 hours+ of pre-game research and tutorials and a slow start? I'd say it's a recommend too. The game is management first, battle sim second. If that's what you like, I can confidently recommend it. When starting the game... If I started my game again, there's a lot of information I could use to have a much quicker start but I found my first 2 playthrough to be quite a slog for large parts, and that's from a person who enjoys slow management games. Piracy is a massive source of cash that I just failed to exploit for most of my game. I'd also recommend finding a market for raw materials as they produce lots of cash with a minimal overhead. I would strongly encourage to play the tutorials and pick one of the pre-set starts for your first campaign. All the campaigns put you in the same galaxy, but differ in the amount of starting help you receive. I chose the Teladi start, which gives a factory but I think I would recommend a Terran start to get to grips with the game. I'd also strongly encourage getting some QoL mods, especially the cheat mods. Save yourself a massive chore and just instantly explore the galaxy and its stations. It'll give you a much better view of whats happening where and give you the tools you need to avoid being caught out by the fog of war.
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It looks like a lot of the more middling reviews of this game come from a before time that I simply didn't experience, because what I've seen of this game in this current day, plus all the DLCs, is surprisingly robust and I am frankly quite hooked. I love the way the game evolves the longer you play it. It starts as your typical No Man's Sky Freelancer Privateer type fair, you got your little ship, you fight your little battles and do little sidegig missions, but the longer you play the growth of your faction increases. Next you have a squadron of pals following you, or maybe you got a fleet of miners in your employ gathering resources for a steady income in a resource rich sector, or perhaps even a fleet of couriers running supplies to and fro. After that, you get your first station, some friendly NPC pals, and you start being able to buy property and build your own stations, then you're sourcing and refining your own resources, then you're just straight up colonizing new sectors. The game is a gradual transformation from singleplayer space sim to Sins of a Solar Empire style RTS. You can get *really* into this game. I find myself spending long stretches of time agonizing over flow charts, deciding how exactly I'm going to get a supply chain going that will allow for me to source my own resources. The "ultimate goal" in this game, or the closest thing, is the ability to construct your very own ships entirely from scratch, mining, refining, manufacturing parts and assembling them. At that point you just snowball, and the galaxy is your oyster. Whether you wanna be a lone trader eking out a living in a surprisingly organic galaxy or if you want to be the sultan of your very own trade empire fielding capital class ships and building megastructures without so much as paying a cent to another faction, this game is a solid choice, especially if you're particularly tired of every space game and it's mother being MMO these days.
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>Start the game for the first time. >Decide to explore around my starting sector. >Get called by some random guy as I fly past his station to go drop a prospector drone at some asteroids to check for hydrogen. >Make an easy 30k for barely a minute's worth of work. >Go up in one corner of the hex and get attacked by a pirate. >Remember my 5 minutes of training and manage to come out on top after losing a third of my hull health. >Head back to starter station to repair and buy a better shield and engine. >Get invited to a gate opening n the way back. >Sounds fun, why not? >Head on out to the highway, enjoy the view on my short roadtrip. >Overshoot a little bit and make a U-turn back to the gate. >Must have picked up a hostile hitchhiker on the way, enemy ship comes through behind me on the other side. >Friendly ships around the gate all open up on him, join in for an easy kill and some quick loot. >Explore around to find where I have to go next. >Find the right sector. >"Attention everyone, clear the area" >What? >New station warps in a few Km away. >*Happy squid man noises* >Mkay, let's put off the mission for 5 minutes and check this out. >Land. >"Sup two feet, this is yours now" >What. And thus ended my first session. 10/10, wild ride.
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Last Updates
| Steam data | 18 January 2025 00:31 |
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| SteamSpy data | 18 January 2025 15:25 |
| Steam price | 23 January 2025 12:48 |
| Steam reviews | 23 January 2025 15:50 |
Online players
2,448
Developer
Egosoft
Publisher
Egosoft
Release
30 Nov 2018
Platforms
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