Nobody tells you what to do in a sandbox game. But this is a guide that specifically targets beginner frustrations; basically, it’s like teaching people build a torch in minecraft.

Before even running the game, install the official bonus pack, no ifs and buts. They are official and have no drawback whatsoever on your game. Please consider doing this or bunnies will die!
The guide takes the form of faqs but the problems I talk about are in the order of you encountering them.

TC. TC has a lot of cool plots and “official goals” aka plot missions that you can work on. Move to AP when you’re feeling you have nothing to do in TC. AP gives TC’s end game rewards to you really early in the game so you can fully enjoy them throughout a playthrough.

None. Don’t install any mods until you understand why you need them and stay specifically away from overhauls until you’re comfortable about diving into page 34 of egosoft forum.

And JESUS TAP DANCING CHRIST INTALL THY BONUS PACK.

First of all they don’t really matter. They decide you pilot’s name (which you may change any time), your starting ship (moderately important), your starting reputations with the races (which you may change any time), your trade and combat ranks (which you may change any time) and the sector you are in (which you may simply fly off).

However in AP your start decides which “side” you’re in. Starting as a terran means you will still participate in the plot event, but only as a terran.

There are hardly any points of no return in the game so it’s really hard to ♥♥♥♥ up something unintentionally. Bad rep with one of the races? Fix it right back. Lost your ship? Buy another one.

Some starts come with a mini plot that rewards you with a unique/hard to get cool ship when you complete it. But if you’re a beginner don’t bother.

If it’s your first playthrough please for the love of god and all that’s holy don’t pick the terran start.

First thing to do is to change your control scheme.

It’s a bad idea to play with a controller.

You need to bind an easily assessable key to each of the following commands. The letters inside the brackets are the keys I bind to.



player property (r)
freight/cargo (f)
autopilot dock (b)
communicate (c)
trade (d)
cargo exchange (z)
change ship (x)
seta (left alt)
sector map (space)
galaxy map (shift + space)
jumpdrive (,)
launch (l)
change missiles (k)
close menu (v)
increase amount to max (x)
decrease amount to max (z)

Additionally, you use wasd to strafe, qe to roll, up down left right to turn (or as most reasonable humans do, hold down mouse left and drag), and num 1235 to rotate camera, and +- to zoom in and out.

Press F1 repeatedly to go through main cockpit and turret views, press F2 to have an external view of your ship, and press F3 to have an external view of your target.
Then under options -> audio, turn on subtitles. under options -> gameplay, increase seta factor to 1000%, select left monitor to display auto target and right monitor to display automissile.
Now the setup is done!

It’s time to set up a goal! What do you want to do in X3?

Wanna be a rare ship hunter and collect ‘em all?

Wanna be the biggest spaceweed dealer in the galaxy?

Wanna build a dominating fleet and sweep across the universe?

Or, just be down to earth and follow through the plots?

However, these are things that can’t be done in the game, at least without the use of mods:

Taking over sectors – it’s like bombing the moon base and demand the human race to give up the solar system.
Diving into planets – dem atmosphere friction ain’t joke, bro.
Eliminating a race – same as taking over sectors.
Destroying planets – bruh.
Creating and customizing your own ship – sadly no, ships have prebuilt specs that can’t be changed. You can change weapon layouts however which drastically change how a ship fares in combat. Ship color is changeable. You can also pick up a few hidden easter egg crates to upgrade your ship beyond its maximum speed and turning rate.

But almost anything else is doable in TC or AP.

It’s time to work toward it!

If you’re not comfortable flying, there should be a XXX flight school ships with a white bubble nearby. Comm it and go through the flight and combat tutorial.

Then your goal should be acquiring the followings, in the order I wrote. Again, nobody tells you what to do, but like in minecraft, everyone needs a torch.

You can view the in-game description of a kind of ware or ship equipment by pressing the info button while highlighting it. The default key should be i or u.

If you don’t have enough money and don’t plan to starting shooting things, I suggest selling the weapons and shields of your starting ship.

First and foremost, you need several ship equipment to make your space journey less frustrating, starting with Engine Tuning (price may vary).

If you click on another ship and click info or press i, you get a window with lots of information. Somewhere it should show the ship’s “current speed” and “upgradable to”. A lot of fast ship will start with an abysmal speed until you spend money on engine tuning in Trading Stations or Equipment Docks, or Military Outposts.



Take a look at your own ship (either bring out the player property menu or click on somewhere on the left sidebar). Buy as many engine tunings as possible. That should help you get around much faster in the galaxy.



Then, you need Boost Extension (1k), Trading System Extension (9k), Docking Computer (20k), Triplex Scanner (10k), and Salvage Insurance (3k each) asap.

Boost Extension allows you to accelerate three times as fast.

Trading System Extension allows you to trade remotely. In other words, you can’t tell your other ships to dock at a station and buy something without it.

Docking Computer allows you to instantly beam to a station, skipping the autopilot docking flops, which you should find annoying now, if you tell your ship to autodock when you’re within 5km of the station. LIFE ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ SAVER.

Triplex Scanner extends your ship’s scanner range to three times its original value. If you can’t find one at least install Duplex Scanner.

And you should find out by now that you can’t save in space. No worries, you spend one Salvage Insurance to do exactly that.

As for where to buy them, refer to the last section “online resources”, if you don’t care about spoilers.

Ayyyye lmao. Now you regret wasting your money on engine tunings didn’t you?

Unless you started with Humble Merchant you should not have enough money to even upgrade your ship. Early game there are two ways of making $$$; either do generic missions or do some manual trades. That would be the next two sections.

There are many kinds of generic missions, I’ll list them and throw in my two cents but won’t go into details. If you want further information refer to the X3 wiki site in the last section.

White bubble – mixed missions:
Return ship – you are asked to find an abandoned ship, claim it, patch it up with your repair laser (which is your weapon when you’re in your spacesuit), and tell it to dock at the station of its owner. The class of the abandoned ship is scaled with your reputation with the race of the mission giver. At this point it’s mostly an M5 but time can be tight. Give it a try.

Return stolen ship – avoid those. You’ll need to force a pilot to bail. Not worth the effort.

Deliver a ship – nope.

Scan asteroids – is kinda good if you have Mineral Scanner. You don’t.

Transport passenger – not yet. First of all you need Cargo Life Support System, a ship equipment I’ll talk about later. Otherwise the dude won’t be able to breathe. Some even request a Passenger Transport explicitly. That’s a special type of ships that are used to make your passengers’ journeys as fun as possible.

Follow ship – hold your hand up, palm toward your face. Slowly curve back your thumb, index, ring finger and pinky. That’s our answer to those. Basically you need to follow a pilot through several sectors but you can’t get too close. You need to rethink your life decisions when you find yourself doing those.

Anti-smuggling scan – nope. You shouldn’t be reading this crap if you know how to pick out smugglers reliably.

Scan valuable goods – extremely good for money, will net you a good 500k at a time if you have Freight Scanner. It’s becoming a pattern isn’t it.

Red cross – combat missions:
Assassination – go for them if you want some actions. Before accepting take a look at your own ship’s info. If your ship class is M5 or anything that doesn’t start with an M, don’t. Because your ship is not built for combat. If the mission giver is not of the race the sector belongs to, like a Teladi in an Argon sector, he or she will always offer an assassination mission so don’t even bother to check.

Station defend – finally our favorite type of missions. It scales with your combat rank so right now the enemy should be a petty M5. You can sit there running on seta and wait for the ship to crash on the station, or just go do your things if police ships are doing their job.

Patrol – there are two types, patrol the current sector (our second favorite) or patrol to another sector (nope). In the first case you need to sit on seta for a while until the spawned ships are destroyed. In the second case you need to do the same thing, but in multiple sectors. Not worth the effort.

Yellow $ symbol – trade missions:
Marine transport – our favorite once we have a jumpdrive and Cargo Life Support System. As for now, you know the drill.

Bring X amount of goods – unless the demanded goods can be bought in the same sector and you have a large enough ship, avoid.

Dock at somewhere else and transport goods – until you can tell if you ship is large enough, avoid.

Green blocks – build missions:
Basically you’re asked to build a station at a certain location. It would be a good 10-20 hrs before we can attempt those.

So you said ♥♥♥♥ it after failing six missions in a row.

Economy is one of the biggest reasons why X3 is considered the best space sandbox game, besides of course EVE, is that the goods are not spawned.

If you see a 5mj shield in an Equipment Dock, it’s not spawned out of thin air but produced in one of the factories and transported here by an AI ship. Eventually though, it will disappear from the Equipment Dock.

The whole economy looks like this:

E-cells, which is produced from thin air (sunlight is freeeeeee).
Minerals, which are produced from mines at the expense of E-cells.
Bio, aka raw food. Consumes E-cells.
Food, aka cooked food. Consumes E-cells and bio.
And finally end products like missiles, weapons, shields, etc, whose only fate is being brought by you or AI ships, later disappearing into docks or put to use. Consume food and/or minerals, and E-cells.

We have AI ships transporting goods between stations, so what can you do? Problem is, AI ships are slow and prone to accidents. They also never use jumpdrive which teleports you across the galaxy.

So buy low, sell high. You can remotely check everything if you have some owned property in a sector, like a satellite, a ship, or a station. One advantage of the Humble Merchant start is you can fly in your Discoverer to explore the universe while do remote trades with your Mercury.

You should have the following equipment installed:

Bioscanner (let you detect how good a marine is)
Boost Extension
Cargo Life Support System
Fight Command Software MKI
Fight Command Software MKII
Freight Scanner (needs lv4 rep and a police license to make scans legal)
Mineral Scanner (optional)
Navigation Command System
Docking Computer
Jumpdrive (uses energy cells)
Trading System Extension
Transporting Device (exchange goods/ship in space)
Triplex Scanner

I installed these to every ship I personally fly.

Now you have an upgraded ship and also tried you luck in missions and trading. It’s time to go for an M3 if you don’t already have one. With Cargo Life Support System, Jumpdrive and Freight Scanner a lot of the mission I remarked as undoable should be a piece of cake now. Now aim to either pirate an M3 or buy one.

If you damage a ship enough the pilot MIGHT bail, and you get a free ship and a dude floating in space for target practice. However the bail chance is correlated with your fighting rank and pilots come with a hidden morale attribute which determines how likely he or she will bail. It’s far too unreliable to randomly find a ship and save & load until the pilot bails. If you are determined to do this I recommend targeting civilian ships as their pilots usually have low morale.

Or, do the boring way, just pay for one. A typical M3 is about 1.5m, plus equipment and shields/weapons you’ll be looking at around a 3m bill.

When you have an M3 you are officially “over the curve” in the X3 game. You still haven’t made your mark in the universe but the climb is almost over and my guide ends here. The future is yours.

PS: pro tip, start training marines NOW!

A wiki where you'll find most data on ships, wares, stations and also story and lore. [www.x3wiki.com]

Roguey's site, a great supplement to the link above. Also has ship pictures. [roguey.co.uk]

Reddit site.

The official forum. Not very active but certainly not dead. [forum.egosoft.com]

You can also yell at me that my guide sucks in the comment section. Or talk about, you know, questions and suggestion and stuff.