This guide was wrote in 6.2. I've looked over the recent changes but haven't found anything that would change the strategies lined out here significantly. The screenshots are from 6.2 so some of the icons for ships may have changed but everything lined out here should still work.

7.5 Changes appear to have added additional mining ships to NPC stations so you may not need follow the guide completely in making a full logistics chain. "Added mining ships assigned to NPC mineral and gas refinery stations."

7.6 Doesn't appear to change anything in the guide.

As always, if you see an error please let me know as not all version changes are always documented, and not all documented changes are caught by me.

In this guide I will be using the Young Gun starting scenario so that the steps I take can be repeatable by anyone. I have all DLCs but will primarily focusing on the Argon and Antigone economy for this guide. All steps can be used as a guideline to help set yourself up for success with any faction.

This is NOT a guide on how to make lots of money quickly. The goal of this guide is to explain how to create a stable AI economy in which the player can purchase ships and build stations. The amount of money I make will be limited to the method laid out, misc station missions, and finishing the HAT quest. This is in order to prove that the method works and isn't dependent on other forms of income. Using other forms of income will accelerate the method discussed in this guide.

Since this is a guide be aware that there may be spoilers depending on your game knowledge or mechanics.

This guide was made over several days so quality may be lacking in certain points. If you discover areas that need improvement please let me know and I will work on correcting the issue. I have attempted to create this guide as I go but games take time to fully flesh out. I will attempt to update this guide periodically with significant events / times.

X4 is a simulated economy in which goods have a supply chain starting at raw materials. These raw materials are mined, refined, and then sent to the next station that needs those refined goods. This chain continues until you reach the final product.

The main economic driver in X4, and where the majority of supplies end up going to, is ships. Ships are constantly being built because X4 is not a safe universe. There are wars between factions, and wars against galactic threats such as Xenon and Kha'ak. There are pirates who attack ships, and police that attack pirates.

The major producers of ships are Wharfs which produce Small and Medium sized ships, and Shipyards which produce Large and Extra Large capital ships. These ship builders and the production chains leading to them will be the major focus of any successful trade based playthrough.

Alright now let's finally get into our game.

The first order of business is finding the Shipyard and Wharf we want to supply. This is very easy on Young Gun as they are already identified for us.



If they aren't already identified then you will want to find them. This can be accomplished by asking a nearby ship to the closest Wharf / Shipyard or looking up where they spawn as they have a fixed location at the start of games. If the Wharf / Shipyard is destroyed the AI will rebuild it but may rebuild it in any sector owned by them or an ally if they've lost many sectors.

For Young Gun my first order of business is to get rid of my starting Nav Beacons, get a Trading Computer Extension software, and hire a backup pilot.



I'm now going to identify all the stations in my sectors. I'm going to long range scan then fly to them so I know what type of station they are. I'm also going to deploy a resource probe in sectors I pass through that have resources. This is all to setup a strong information network that will come into play in the following steps.

While I'm doing this initial information gathering I'm going to be keeping an eye out for easy missions that I can do. This will allow me to get the starting credits for my first ships.

Alright now hopefully you've accumulated enough credits to buy a trade ship. Small size will work but I'm going to focus most of my attention on Medium traders. We now take a look at our map:



What we're going to want to focus on is the demands of the Wharf and Shipyard. The trade filter will give you a rough overview of what is needed:


When looking at this though it's not immediately clear what our primary focus should be. There are multiple wares that have high demand but not all ships are going to be bottlenecked by those wares. So the next step in the plan is scanning our Shipyards and Wharfs to 30%. This will allow us the ability to look at the storage levels and truly figure out what is missing.




So first to understanding what we're looking at.
There are four colors that will show up on your storage screen that denote changes and levels of your storage.

Blue: The leftmost portion of the bar. This shows roughly how many you currently have in stock. It is also denoted by the left number. In the case of the Wharf it is 3,045 Hull Parts.
Black: The rightmost portion of the bar. This shows the space available for stock.
Green: This is a modifier to the blue bar that will show reserved trades that add stock. In the case of the wharf it is the (+1,232) to the right of the stock number for Hull Parts.
Brown: This is a modifier to the blue bar that will show reserved trades that remove stock. This will show up later as a (-) to the right of the stock number.

The following reasoning relies on a bit of Meta knowledge but bear with me:

As this is the very beginning of the game there are no true shortages yet but we can start to see the makings of a Hull Part shortage in the Wharf. As we want to focus on Medium ships we want to make sure the Wharf is always stocked so we can continue to buy ships. If we go to purchase a Medium trader right now the Wharf will actually acknowledge that it is waiting on Hull Parts to complete a basic Medium ship order.

We further want to focus on Hull Parts due to it being the lowest supply of basic necessities needed to make ships. When you make a minimum loadout ship you get only whats necessary to fly it out of the dock, the hull and engines. Between those two, Hull Parts has the highest demand as a large amount are needed to make basic chassis. Later screenshots you can see this play out. If you reach your ship building production later than I did it will most likely be even more obvious.

Hopefully you've been doing those missions on stations you've been discovering because now it's time for your first trader.


How I purchase ships is Minimum or Low Preset. Higher levels usually give you stuff that you don't really need. If you do want more items on your ships you pay less by building the ship so it just barely flies, then refitting that ship at an Equipment Dock.

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When we go back to our map view and enable the Trade filter we can filter out items to only Hull Parts. This will help us see the best offers that are in system.



From here we have a couple of options. We can manually order our ship to start doing trades or we can automate it. I prefer automating my traders as it allows my passive income to start coming in and I don't have to think about them after that.

To start automating our trade route we want to have a one star pilot. We can easily accomplish this by docking at any station, going to the Trade Corner, then buying a basic piloting seminar. When we give this to our pilots it will turn them into a one-star pilot and allow them to do the default behavior of "Repeat Order"

After I set my Default Behavior I'm going to choose a sector I know there are Hull Parts in, right click that sector and choose "Buy In", select Hull Parts, and then set my buy price. I will then do the same steps but picking a sector and "Sell In". If I want to get specific I can click on individual stations to have the trader focus buying / selling to those. In this example I want my trader to focus on feeding both the Shipyard and the Wharf so I'm choosing to do sector.





While my trader is going I'm continually exploring and doing missions to supplement my income and improve my reputation. As soon as I find Hull Parts factories I'm adding those to the list of places for my trader to find wares. My goal is for my trader to constantly be busy and bringing in passive income.

Now that we've set up a ship(or multiple ships) to supply Hull Parts we might start running into the stations not being able to keep up with demand. When this happens we want to give the Hull Parts station the same treatment we gave the Wharf. Scan them to 30%, drop a satellite, and look at the storage.



Here we can see that the Hull Parts production is running low on Refined Metals. So the next step in our chain is to find Refined Metals production and see what their issue is.



Looking at this picture there is plenty of Refined Metals in storage so yet again we're going to make Repeat Order traders to buy Refined Metals and ship them to our Hull Parts factories we're buying from.

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For the final part of the chain we want to make sure that Refined Metals is always running.



So for this station I need to make sure that I have adequate amount of transporters to keep the Refined Metals from filling up and I need to make sure there are miners to supply the station with the much needed Ore.

Once I have completed this I will have a constant supply of Hull Parts to my Wharf and I will be making money on every step of production.

After an amount of time your hull parts may no longer be the bottleneck in ship production.



Here we can see that there are Hull Parts scheduled to be delivered but Weapon Components are in short supply. To keep the ship production rolling, and the demand for Hull Parts high, my next trader is going to be for Weapon Components. Like my hull parts trader, I'm going to set up the Weapon Component trader to be Repeat Order behavior and buy / sell Weapon Components.

Using the steps laid out for Hull Parts I will continually find bottlenecks and assign traders and miners to eliminate those bottlenecks.

Once you have a single strong economy there are a couple of next steps you can take in any order.

Expand into other economies.
Transition Repeat Traders into Station Traders
Transition Miners into Station Miners

The first step is pretty self explanatory. You want to start following the above steps but for a different faction. So in addition to Argon my next target might be Teladi if I don't care about faction balance. If maximizing trades is my goal then I'll want to repeat the steps I made with Argon but do it with the Holy Order. This means that Argon won't take their strong economy and out produce the Holy Order. After creating a strong economy for the Holy Order I also want to do the same for the Paranid Godrealm so that they aren't overpowered by the Holy Order's strong economy.

For Station Traders my goal is to create a single trading station that will deal in all the wares my repeat traders are dealing in or separate those wares into different stations. This will allow me to easily scale the amount of traders in an area and relieve me of the tedious nature of promoting pilots and setting repeat orders. Trade stations also serve a dual purpose of storing cheap goods that I can later use for my player made stations.

For Station Miners my goal is similar to station traders but in the fact that now my miners can go to the most dense mining area and quickly fill up. They will then also be able to constantly make money by selling to the station paying the most. A mining station also serves the dual purpose of being able to supply any player made station station with raw resources.

Since there are already guides on how to make trading and mining stations I'll leave links to those. There are of course more guides out there but these should provide a good starting point.

Trade Stations:
https://gameplay.tips/guides/10148-x4-foundations.html
(New link to guide, Thanks Harlockin!)

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2426397291&searchtext=trade+station (Old guide link that was removed)

Mining Stations:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2786130190&searchtext=trade+station

So here I'd like to address some common issues that might come up and my thoughts on other mechanics related to trading.

Mining:
Nvidium - Although Nvidium mining can provide a short influx of cash it is pretty much a dead end after the initial demand is gone. There are ways to create more demand through Terraforming but that demand doesn't make much and still requires the player to manually interact with it. Given these issues I suggest not mining it at all or quickly moving on once the initial supply goes away.

Ice - Given the new Boron DLC many people may consider that Ice mining and refining is now viable. I disagree as Ice still has a very poor price per volume and easily gets filled by most factions. If you must help the Borons then stick with the process laid out above and transport water for them and only mine Ice if they run out.

Gas - Most gases and gas product demand seems to be easily met by the AI for the early game. As such I recommend focusing on Ore and Silicon until you notice an actual demand that isn't being met.

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Trading:
Food / Medical - Like gas products, food and medical seem to be easily filled by the AI. In some of my earlier pictures you may notice that the supply for food and / or medical supplies is low. A few hours in I doubled checked and those demands were no longer there. As such I recommend focusing on other wares and only coming back to Food and Medical when there is a high demand.

Energy Cells - Like Food and Medical, the AI seems to be able to meet this demand by themselves. You can keep an eye on it, and possibly assign small traders to Fill Shortages, but I personally don't worry about Energy Cell demand being filled.

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Station Building:
To me station building is used to fill the holes that the above method cannot fill. I find that if you try to use station building for profit ONLY, you will end up saturating the economy and not being able to sell wares. That means that if you make these for profit, it is best to use it when you have identified a hole that cannot be met by the already existing AI factories.

There is also the fact to consider that stations take a long time in order to pay for themselves. A basic Energy Cell factory takes on average seven hours to pay for itself if you can sell at average price. Hull Part production takes on average fifty hours to pay for itself if buying all the wares, fifteen hours if you buy raw resources and make everything yourself, and four hours if you provide raw resources and make everything yourself. These times aren't accounting for the price of ships or blueprints. The times also aren't accounting for station construction speed.

The main idea I want to express is to make sure that there is a high and constant demand for your wares before making a station that's sole focus is making money.

Instead of profit only stations, there are also stations used for player shipbuilding. I'd argue that you should be using the cheap wares from trading first and then use your own stations to supplement that. I consider this to be an endgame activity, along with Terraforming, in which money isn't an issue so the return on investment doesn't matter.

Solar:

http://www.x4-game.com/#/station-calculator?l=@$module-module_arg_stor_container_s_01,count:1;,$module-module_arg_dock_m_01,count:1;,$module-module_gen_prod_energycells_01,count:1

Hull Parts:

http://www.x4-game.com/#/station-calculator?l=@$module-module_gen_prod_hullparts_01,count:1;,$module-module_arg_stor_container_s_01,count:1;,$module-module_arg_dock_m_01,count:1;,$module-module_gen_prod_energycells_01,count:1;,$module-module_gen_prod_graphene_01,count:1;,$module-module_gen_prod_refinedmetals_01,count:1

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SETA:
Don't use this. If you have followed the steps laid out above then you should realize how fragile the AI economy is without player intervention. There are so many things the player can be doing at any point in time. When you fast forward your simulation the AI is stuck with the economy they have. Given how fragile and weak some of these are it can lead to unintended consequences such as Xenon invading or weak economy factions losing stations and sectors to factions they're at war with.

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X-TREME Trade Rank:
I figure I might as well mention this. Like it's name suggests, getting this rank requires extreme amounts of trading. If you want to work towards this you want to maximize trades with trade stations and mining. You also want to minimize the amount of production you create. When getting this, my production stations were just the items required to eliminate a bottleneck. On those stations, I imported all needed goods including food and medicine so that I was able to create demand in the food sector. The last thing you want to do is maximize wars. There are a few story states and here are my recommendations:
Split - Patriarchy
Terran - War with Argon
Paranid - Unification , fight all

As mentioned in the beginning I will try to update this periodically as my playthrough progresses. At time of publishing I'm sitting at 4 traders and 2 miners supplying my Hull Parts and Weapon Components and I'm at 10 hours playtime. This playtime is high compared to ships due to me focusing purely on the methods listed in the guide to make money.

Acknowledgements:
Patola [Linux]: QA , expanded explanation of trade reasoning and stock level colors.
Harlockin: Finding and providing a working link to the Trade Station guide that was changed/removed.

Other guides I've made:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2810269037&searchtext=scrap