Patch basis: 9.00, the “Empire Update”, released 10 June 2026. Written 2026-08-23. Nothing below requires an expansion.
The single most useful thing to know about your first five hours: you are supposed to end them owning two or three ships and one automated income loop, not an empire. If that sounds low, it is because X4’s marketing shows the late game and its tutorials show the first ten minutes, and nobody shows the middle. Players quit in that gap, convinced they are doing it wrong. They are usually doing it slowly, which is different.
This page blocks the opening into five hours with an exit condition for each. The exit condition is the point of the whole exercise: it tells you when to stop doing a thing, which is the information beginner guides never give.
Hour by hour
| Hour | Do this | Exit condition — move on when… | Do not do this yet |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Finish the in-game tutorials, then fly manually: dock, undock, scan a station, take one small mission | You can dock without using the autopilot and you know where the map, the encyclopedia and the property menu are | Buying anything. You do not yet know what is worth buying |
| 2 | Run guild and station missions in your starting region. Take delivery and small combat jobs | You have a credit reserve that is clearly more than one ship’s repair bill | Trying to trade manually for profit. Missions pay better per minute at this stage |
| 3 | Pick one income path — trade, mine, or fight — and buy the cheapest ship that does it | You own a second ship and it is doing something without you flying it | Buying one of each. Splitting your credits three ways is the classic first-save mistake |
| 4 | Learn the order queue on that second ship. Set it to repeat a loop and watch it fail at least once | You understand why it failed and fixed it yourself | Assigning a manager or building a station. Both add layers on top of a system you have not debugged yet |
| 5 | Add a third ship on the same loop, and start scanning for the things you will need later: wares, sector resources, faction standing | Your income continues while you are not looking at it | Committing to a plot chain. Plots are better once you have passive income |
Why the exit conditions matter more than the tasks
Everyone’s first save stalls the same way: the player keeps doing hour two forever. Missions are comfortable, they pay, and there is always another one. Six hours in, they have credits and one ship, and the game has not opened up — because the thing that opens X4 is not credits, it is the first ship that earns money while you are elsewhere.
That is the transition the table is built around. Hours one and two are about competence, hour three is a choice, hours four and five are about making the choice run without you.
The choice in hour three
You only need to decide between three things, and the decision has real trade-offs rather than a right answer:
- If your starting region is dense with stations and you like reading price data, then trade. Fastest to set up, most sensitive to your attention.
- If you want the lowest-skill, most predictable income, then mine. Slower per hour early, but a mining loop tolerates being ignored better than a trade loop does.
- If you enjoy the flying, then fight — but take missions rather than hunting freely, and accept that combat income is lumpy. Repair and loss costs are real.
- Else, if none of those pull at you, take mining. It is the least likely to be abandoned.
Do not run two of these at once in hour three. The full comparison, including what changes the answer, is in trade, mine, or fight first.
What 9.00 changed about the opening
Three things in the 9.00 update matter specifically to a new save, and older beginner guides predate all of them:
- Resource probes no longer improve mining efficiency. Egosoft’s 9.00 changelog lists both the removal of that effect and the removal of upkeep missions asking you to deploy probes. Probes now tell your miners where to focus. If a guide tells you to blanket a sector in probes for yield, it is pre-June-2026 advice.
- Resource areas are localised and must be discovered. The 9.00 resource distribution overhaul means a sector is not uniformly rich, and a depleted area can re-emerge somewhere else in the region. Prospecting is now a real activity rather than a formality.
- Priority Orders exist. 9.00 added a system for issuing immediately-overriding orders from the map instead of editing an order queue. Learn it in hour four alongside the normal queue, because it is what you will reach for when a ship is about to die.
I have not independently verified the default key bindings for Priority Orders in 9.00 — the announcement’s modifier keys did not survive intact in the text I retrieved — so check them in your own controls menu rather than trusting a number here.
Skip these until after hour five
- Station building. It is a genuinely large subsystem and it is much easier once you have seen how wares move. When you get there, the module-count question is answered by working backwards from a target rather than forwards from a blueprint.
- Large fleets. A fleet is a management problem before it is a combat asset. The scaling question — how much you actually need for a given target — is worked out in how big a fleet to kill a Xenon station, and the answer is an exchange rate, not a ship count.
- Expansions. Nothing in a first playthrough is gated behind one, and buying during hour two changes your start list for no benefit.
If your ships stop doing things
This will happen, probably in hour four, and it produces no error message. A ship sits in the right sector, crewed and fuelled, doing nothing. Do not reassign the whole fleet — that hides which setting was wrong. Work the configuration checks in order: idle ship triage is built exactly for this and refuses to name a cause until a check actually fails.
Sources
- X4: Foundations 9.00 “Empire Update” is Out Now! — Egosoft via Steam, 10 June 2026. Source for the 9.00 release date and changelog lines on Priority Orders, resource distribution overhaul, removal of resource-probe mining efficiency effects, and removal of probe upkeep missions.
- X4: Foundations on Steam — base game scope and release date.
