When this game came out it was a mess - and that’s putting it nicely. After years of patching, though, it’s in pretty good shape and ready for playing. Unfortunately, tracking down exactly how the game works now instead of how it worked in early 2013 isn’t so easy. You can find guides from Egosoft (posted by Ketraar) that will tell you what’s new in versions 2, 3 and 4 but learning how a game used to work then learning how it’s changed is a weird way to go. Hopefully this guilde will reduce the pains of learning. The small talk mini-game is painful enough, you don’t need more. ;)

This game has different strengths and weaknesses than the old X series but, if you come in expecting to play X4 instead of X Rebirth then you’ll be playing to the wrong game’s strengths and avoiding weaknesses that aren’t around now. The end result being that you’ll hate it. You need to approach this as an all new game and, like any new game, figure out what its good at and what you need to avoid. This game is actually… uhhh… Elite Citizen! Yeah, that’s it! Ignore the Teladi behind the curtain.

Campaign - no doubt about it. Not only does this give you the main story of the game, it also acts as the tutorial. Once the campaign is finished then you might want to start all over again in one of the other starts to give yourself a clean slate but you can also just continue playing. The campaign is the only content that doesn’t appear in all of the game starts.

If this is a free weekend you might consider doing a little jumping around. There's no way you're going to be able to finish the campaign in a single weekend and still remain lucid. However, the other starts are going to drop you into the deep end before you know what you're doing (X-Vet or not). You might try doing the campaign until you get bored then try one of the starts where you get a bunch of stuff at the beginning. That will open up the universe for you and let you see everything before you decide to buy. (Of course, if you don't GET bored then you obviously buy the game and just keep going!)

The campaign really isn’t all that hard. Here are a few spots that confused/confounded me…

• Reiver Raids: there are a lot of gorram Reivers! Even on medium difficulty and throwing missiles out like they cost nothing, you’re going to find it difficult to beat all these guys. The squad you’re supposed to be assisting will probably get wiped out fast, too, so don’t expect any help from them. So what can you do? Well, first you try to beat them anyway, of course. Are you going to let some wussy guide author tell you that you suck too much to handle a dogfight!? Plus it’s good practice. If at first you don’t succeed, try try again. Then shoot a few and lead them off to that big station with it’s big turrets just a few KM away and let it take care of them for you.
  
• Build a Station: at one point you'll be asked to build a station. When you do, be very careful when picking how many turrets to give it! Every turret needs to be bought somewhere so check through your maps and try to figure out what you can and can't buy first. You can always upgrade later.
  
• Trojan ROV: I didn't understand how I was supposed to do this one at first (and second, and third, and...) so here's how. Fly your little drone toward the markers on the station. You’ll need to get within 100m of each marker. The drone steers pretty badly so expect to overshoot a few times until you get the hang of it. When you’re close enough, double click on the icon and you’ll get the mini-game slider thing much like in the small talk mini-game but moving much faster. You’ll need to pass the mini-game (3+ bars) three times and you’ll need to do several markers before the station is hacked. The whole time you’re doing this, you’ll need to avoid the cops’ scanners. Be sure to save before getting into the drone because you can’t save while doing the remote pilot thing.
  
• After X3:TC and it’s gargantuan HUB mission, I was pretty shocked when the campaign ended after a “mere” sixty hours or so. Unlike X3:TC, you’re left in a great big sand box once the campaign ends. You’re going to need to decide for yourself what you want to do. (Personally, I’m aiming for the billion credit achievement.)

As soon as you get into a highway, turn off the mouse steering! (That's the space key by default.) The strafing keys are all you need. Use them to try and avoid other ships and those big, orange plasma things in the big highways. Hitting them won’t really hurt you but they do slow you down.

When you want to leave a smaller highway you can do so by slamming into the edges but I found it a lot easier to just hit the backspace key.

Version 4 added a couple of important navigation features. Both require a lot of work to get so you might want to come back to this section later on if you're just starting out. It will only make you jealous. ;)

SETA is a hold over from the other X games. When you activate it, the entire game starts running six times faster. Enemy ships will have the parts you need to craft it. Unlike the other X games, SETA will turn off as soon as anybody tells you something over the radio or if you get close to anything. You can't use it while windows are open, either. It's still quite handy, though, when you've boosted your shields away and you're waiting to boost again or if you're waiting for some ships to dock.

There's a light blue ring in your ship display that will show up when you can use SETA. If it isn't there, you're probably too close to something. Move away until the ring pops up then press j.

The jump drive is a much bigger deal, and much harder to get. A quest will guide you through the steps but it will take quite some time to get all the jump coolant and rare engine parts. It's similar to the jump drive the capital ships use however:

• You can target jump beacons OR jump gates.
  
• It costs no fuel.
  
• It takes about ten minutes to recharge.
  
• Best of all, you can jump as far as you like. Capital ships can only jump to a next door sector but the Skunk Jump can take you from deep inside Maelstrom straight to the Heart of Albion shipyard zone!

I was a little confused on how to use it. You don't press a key and pick a target like in past X games. Instead, it happens the other way around. Go to the map and zoom in on the target zone. If the zone has a jump gate or beacon and if your jump drive has had a chance to cool off then a jump button will enable in the lower right part of your map window. Click the button, watch the fireworks, and there you are!

A little ring in the upper left of your ship display in the cockpit will turn red after jumping then will slowly erase itself. When it vanishes, it will be replaced by the normal light-blue ring which means you can jump again. You can also use any extra jump drive coolant to hurry the process along.

Docking at a station is pretty straightforward. Just select one of the docking ports, get within about half kilometer of it, and type shift-D. You can also click on the icon and chose to dock from the menu but the hot key is a lot easier. The same hot key will get you undocked again. By the way, if you’re sick of watching Ren walk in/out of the ship, you can press ESC to skip the animation. This is really handy if your ship is being attacked while Ren is moseying on over to his chair!

Stations have all the vendors of the game so you’ll be going to them a lot to buy and sell everything from huge capital ships to a box of chocolates. You’ll also find all the people you want to hire idling in the stations. (The ones you might be able to hire have circular icons over their heads while the vendors have squares.) If you aren’t sure what sort of vendor you’re supposed to sell an item to, just bring up your inventory and check the information for that item - it should tell you exactly what vendor will buy it and can even guide you to one.

You’ll also find a lot of loot on stations. You’ll find various cheap items in lockers and boxes all over the station. If you look carefully, you can find hidden crawlways (each one exactly alike) that have considerably more valuable - but often illegal - goods in them. Collecting all this stuff can give you some decent cash but don’t expect to make a living out of it.

If you spend much time in crawlways, you’ll soon run into parts of a temporary pass key. Most stations have one of these keys broken into three parts and scattered around the station. If you move away from the station the key will vanish but, if you stick close and find all three parts, you can craft the pass key and perform a hack on the station. There are a number of them you can do to attack the station but I think the best one is probably going to be the trade hack which you can perform in the station’s commerce section. That will open some deep, long term discounts for you. (That’s “long term” not “permanent” - there’s not much point in doing this before you’ve got the hang of the trading system.)

You’ll also find police around a lot of stations. In fact, in the Albion part of the galaxy, there are so many that the sirens can really get annoying! The police scan ships for illegal goods and, if they find any, they will demand that you drop them fast. Avoiding them seems to be pretty easy, though, just keep moving! They only scan you when you sit still and even then you have to sit still fairly close to one of the lines of traffic. Oh, and ramming one of them will likely get you scanned, too.

If you dock using the menu option you’ll notice another option: Info. This will give you a list of everyone in the station - or at least the parts that you’ve scanned. It’s a nice option but there’s a better way. If you look on your menu on the left side of the screen you’ll see an option to talk. That includes everyone in the whole zone! You can use this option to find people to hire and plot a course to them or you can buy and sell wares without even leaving the Skunk. Having wares delivered does cost a little cash but it isn't much and you get achievements for spending a lot.

Scanning stations is an interesting game mechanic. As you fly around the station, you’ll notice little “i” icons. Get close to one for a second or so and you’ll scan that part of the station. Assuming you don’t have anything else selected, you’ll be informed about how much of the station you’ve scanned. As you scan more of the station, you’ll unlock some temporary discounts. Do NOT get it into your head that you need to completely scan every station! It's only unlocking trade deals and, if you aren't trading, there's not much point. (Though it is excellent flying practice.)

The campaign gives you a brief introduction to scanning but, because you have the cheapest scanner, it probably won’t seem so useful to you. Perhaps you can use it to find the loot ships have dropped after a battle if it isn’t in a rocky area.

When you get the advanced or police scanner, though, scanning suddenly starts to get really profitable! Most lockboxes are found in rocky zones - especially the more remote ones like Dormant Bear. When you use the scanner, keep your ears open and listen for different pinging sounds. If you hear one, look around and you should see a thicker, colored ring somewhere. That will be a lockbox full of loot! (I’m not sure if the sounds happen with the advance scanner or not. The police scanner isn't that expensive so I've always skipped the advanced scanner.)

On the lockbox you’ll see 1, 2, or 4 locks (with a red padlock shape on them - you can see one at the bottom of the image to the left). The single-lock boxes have the lock on the side while the other two have the locks on one end. CAREFULLY blast the lock(s) and out pops loot! The more locks, the more loot. Just be aware that a lot of the loot consists of illegal goods.

If you miss the locks you'll do damage to the box which can easily destory it and the loot inside. If the loot box has a bomb on it like the one on the left then hitting the box will mean losing the loot and taking a lot of damage. Be even more careful if the box looks like this!

Oh, and do please remember to turn off the scanner if something attacks you. Otherwise, attempting to shoot missiles will just result in an annoying buzz.

Some items can be merged together to form other, (mostly) more valuable items. You can tell these from other items in your inventory (shift-I) because they are listed first along with other things needed to craft an item.

The first one of these that you’re likely to find is scrap metal. If you check your inventory, you’ll see it’s in its own little section and it also tells you that you’ll need 1000 of them to craft the item. Once you finally get that many, all you need to do is select the item to be crafted and click the craft button. Poof! You’ll have an item that can sell for half a million credits!

Once you craft one, you'll also see some options to craft weapon modifications. For other items in the game you'll find pieces of things you can craft to make an item but weapon mods are a little different: those you find fully formed already. You'll find quite a few that you won't want and you can disassemble those into component parts. Those parts can then be crafted to make a new weapon modification.

The weapon mod window is a little hard to find. Bring up your owned property list and look in the upper left corner. There's three buttons there. The third takes you to the weapon modification window where you can select modifications and disassemble them.

Hiring can take some time if you want quality people working for you. If you just ask a person what their stats are, all you get are ?’s. To find out what stats a person has, you need to go through the small talk mini-game then ask about hiring a person for the job you want done. You’ll then be directed to somebody in that section of the station that can do the job you’re asking about. When you find that person, you will see his/her stats. Note that the person you’re talking to will never direct you to themselves so, if you small talk the only pilot in a station section and want to know about pilots, then you’ll find the option disabled.

If you finish the mini-game, give the person a gift, continue the mini-game and win it, then you’ll be given the option to find the best person for a job. This will actually look over the entire station (even sections you haven’t explored, I believe) and find the best candidate for the job. I have no idea what happens if the person you won the mini-game with actually is the best candidate for the job. Gifts are quite expensive so this is really just an option for the rich.
Personally, I found this to be the worst aspect of X:Rebirth. There aren't even remotely enough possible conversations you can have to make this fun and, even if there were, it takes far too long. Fortunately, there's a mod that will make it so people will tell you their skills without having to go through the small talk mini-game at all - or even land! See the Resources section for my favorite mods.

If you’re employee isn’t the best at everything, it’s possible to make them better via training materials. Another reward choice for the second level of minigame is training materials. I'm not sure on the specifics but it looks like NPCs with 3 stars or more in a statistic can provide training materials for that stat. Chat with your employee, check their stats, and give them the training materials to add another star to their level. It's even be possible to get training materials from an NPC, hire that NPC, then have him/her learn from their own training!

Pilots fly the smaller ships like fighters and M-sized cargo ships. If you have a pilot on board and an enemy fighter bails out of their ship, you can take their ship from them by getting close to the ship, double clicking its icon, and selecting the “claim” option.

Engineers fix up ships. Engineers on board the Skunk can repair damaged components but, if that’s happening, there’s a good chance that you’re going to be dead in a few seconds anyway. Engineers really earn their hiring fee when placed on ships that you’ve captured. You can burn the capital ship's engines, blast the jump drive, destroy every turret, mangle the drone bay, demolish the shields, and even bring the hull of a ship down to 1%. If you pop an engineer on there after capturing it, s/he can have it back in fully working order after half an hour or so.

Marine officers manage all your marines which are used in capturing ships. If you want to know how many marines are at what level, s/he is the one to ask. Once you find a good marine officer, you’re set for the whole game! There's no need to get one until you're ready to do some boarding, either, so take your time and get a really good one.

Captains are used to fly the bigger (L and XL) ships. If you buy a capital ship there will be a captain on board but his/her stats are likely to be pretty bad. No biggy for a construction ship that’s only going to fly one place but you should find better for your other ships.

Defense officers run the defenses of big ships and stations. No defence officer means those weapons just sit there and look menacing.

Managers run stations by buying wares the station needs and (hopefully) selling wares that are created. Having a good manager increases productivity, too. They’ll even send mining ships out to mine goods that are needed.

Specialists come in many flavors but they all do just one thing: increase productivity of a station. Check your station’s upkeep missions to see which one(s) you need.

Each job requires different skills. The first skill you see listed for an NPC is the most important, the second is somewhat important, and the third only has a small affect. Only the skills in bold matter at all. So all an engineer needs is a good engineering skill while a captain's leadership, navigation, and morale all matter with leadership being the most important. Marine officers have a special 'skill' called boarding experience which is the most important stat for them.

It’s rare but, from time to time, a big cargo ship will dump its wares when it gets blown up. (Well, it’s rare assuming you aren’t doing the blowing up!) The process to pick this stuff up isn’t real obvious. First, you need a large size cargo ship that can actually hold the wares (your energy/container Rahanas isn’t going to be able to pick up water cargo) and has space for them. The cargo ship also must have some cargo drones on it to transport the wares. Put the cargo ship in your squad but do NOT give it any orders - let it just fly to your zone.

Once the ship is in your zone, use the scanner option for cargo. If the ship has what’s needed, is in your squad, and isn’t executing any orders (even ‘hold position’ counts as an order) then the scanner mode will engage. After that, simply double click on each cargo item you want and the cargo ship will send out a drone to pick it up and fly it back on board. Easy profits! Floating cargo seems to last about 15 to 30 minutes before self destructing.
Mining rocks can be done in a similar fashion. Instead of cargo drones, though, you need surface minors. I’m not sure why the drones are called that - all they really do is grab small rocks and haul them into the bulk cargo ship. Again, you’ll need to get the ship in your zone with no orders. Set your scanner to mining then cut down some rocks to the smallest size and double click on them. The cargo ship will send a drone out to pick up each rock and pull it back into the ship.

But honestly, you probably don’t really want to do mining that way. It’s a lot easier to just tell it to mine a resource in a given zone. It will call in once it finishes. At that point you can go to the trade menu and have it sell its cargo or use the transfer option to stuff the wares into a station.

If you’re wondering what rocks and gasses are in what parts of space, check your sector map. The description for each sector says what resources each of them has. Mining does reduce the resource but it jumps back up almost as quickly as you’re likely to mine.

Note that, if you are hanging around to watch the mining happen, the game needs to display the correct type of rocks getting blasted. If you aren't around, the game can skip that part and just look at the sector stats to see if you can mine there. So, if the sector has only a little of a resource, your ships will be able to mine it just fine when you aren't around but will take a lot longer when you're close as they have to actually find the right rock type. Also, if you're not around, the game forgets to check to see if it has a mining laser!

Little ships (size M or smaller) have just a single pilot on board. They fly around via the highways just like the Skunk but don’t have boosters.

Big ships (size L or bigger) have a captain, an engineer, and a defense officer. These do have boosters but, unlike your Skunk, they don’t burn up the shields. When they want to go from zone to zone, they simply point in the right direction and boost until they get there. Instead of superhighways, they use jump drives to move from sector to sector. Each system has a jump beacon where the capital ships appear. Each jump costs 100 jump fuel.

If you need to go a long distance, a capital ship will typically get you where you want to go the fastest. You can park your Skunk on a ship you own then have him/her fly you to whatever zone you like. You can even explore this way by having the captain fly to a particular position.

Keeping big ships fueled gets to be a bother pretty quickly. If you check the details for the ship then the details for the captain, you should see an option to automatically re-fuel. If that's turned on, your ship will go get more jump fuel whenever they run low (300?). This is great for trade ships, though it could be trouble if you send a fleet of warships only to have some of them stop for gas half way to the target.

Getting your ships (other than the Skunk, which doesn’t carry cargo) to trade is easy stuff. Just bring up the trade menu with shift-T, select the ship you want to trade with at the top, select the item you want to trade at the bottom, tell them how many to trade, and off they go! What’s more, unlike previous X games, you don’t have to worry about some other ship getting there just before your ship and trading the stuff you intended to trade but that's only IF you’ve got up-to-date information on what the station is selling.

The first thing you need in this information quest is what a station is buying/selling. You can find this out by flying near the trading docks in the earliest parts of the game but that gets tedious quickly. If you buy any trading software at all for your Skunk then it will automatically scan all the trading docks at a station as soon as you get close to any part of the station.

The problem with scanning is that information changes while you’re away. So the second part of the information quest is keeping your information up to date. You can do that by flying close to a trading docks again or, if you’ve got trading software, simply getting near the station again. You’ll soon find that there are far too many stations to keep tabs on, though. What you need is somebody to tell you what the prices are at any given moment. That’s where the trade agents come in.

The good news is that trade agents are free. Just ask any of the vendors or permanent station personnel nicely and they will gladly tell you these prices for the rest of their lives (well, as long as you don’t annoy their faction too much, at least). The bad news is that you have to go through that thrice damned mini-game in order to ‘ask nicely.’ The mini-game is actually a neat way to let you in on some of the game’s lore and tell you what people are thinking… or at least is is the first few times you hear a conversation. There must be 100 stations in this game, though, and in all the hiring you’ll do and believe me, you will be sick to death of talking about VR and AI. Luckily, there's a mod to let you just pay for a trade agent.

Don't be too agressive in getting trade agents. Some stations (particularly the Overwatch station in the Teladi expansion) are not safe places for trading so their prices get to be very good. That will put them right at the top of your trading lists and, if you aren't paying attention, you'll send your barely-armed freighter into a war zone or to a station where they have to go through a dangerous zone to do the trade. Unfortunately, while it's easy to set up a trade agent, about the only way to remove one short of hacking your save file is to really annoy the trade agent's faction. It's good to set up a lot of trade agents but do so blindly!

There are several different types of cargo wares. Bulk cargo holds big things like rocks and bushels of wheat, liquid cargo holds water and gases, energy holds energy cells, and all the rest go into container ships. When you play the campaign, Ren quickly gets a cargo ship that is listed as energy/container. This means half of the ship is set up to handle energy while the other half handles containers (which you can see if you simply look at the ship). If you fill the ship completely up with energy then you’ll find that only half the space on the ship is being used! There are a few ships with “universal” storage that can carry every type of cargo but you won’t see those for sale until fairly late in the campaign. The Titurel freighters have it but you’ll need to capture one of those - they aren’t for sale.

Big 4.0 Update: There is now a second trade menu you can use. Instead of listing off all wares being bought or sold at all stations, it simply finds the best combinations of bought/sold wares and lists those. You pick the deal you want, OK your way through it, and your trade ship runs off to execute the trade.

The original trade menu is still there and is still very useful, particularly for container ships. For instance, if you want to buy a few types of drones in Omicron Lyrae and sell them in Albion, the old trade menu will let you buy all the drones, fly to Albion, then sell the drones. In the new menu, each drone type is another deal so your ship has to go back and forth between OL and Albion for each type. You're still going to make a profit, just not as quickly or safely. For non-container trades, you'll likely be filling up your cargo bay anyway so the new menu is a huge time saver.

Keep in mind that both trade menus are little spreadsheets. Like spreadsheets, they are able to sort by whatever column you click on. You can limit trades to the current sector, too, and even filter by text you type into the box in the upper right.

Beholder drones will scan station parts. Most station pieces can be scanned simply by flying close to them but a few require the specialized scanners of a beholder drone to see. You’ll only need this if you want to get a station that has protected sections up to 100% scanned. {Note: stations with protected sections seem to be very rare. I'm not sure if I've even seen one!}

Trojan drones can be used in hacking. Stations and ships can be hacked to get them to release cargo. Ships can also be hacked to assist your marines in a ship capture attempt.

Surface miner drones are used by large cargo ships to mine rocks with. Scoop drones are used to mine gasses.

Cargo drones move cargo and can also be used to snag free-floating cargo after a ship/station gets hacked or the ship gets blown up. Many stations have cargo drones but I’m not so sure all of them do so make sure your large and XL cargo ships have a few at least. (The more you have, the faster trades will happen.)

Construction drones are used to make stations. Having them operational on a big ship can also help the engineer repair the ship.

There’s also a bunch of combat-related drones. I’m afraid I’m more of a trading type than a fighter so I don’t know much about them.

Now we’re talking! Making stations is a serious challenge. Just dropping one down somewhere is easy enough but figuring out what to drop and where to drop it? You better get that brain churning!

The campaign guides you through the basics of getting a construction ship, putting it in your squad, and selecting a build location. What it doesn’t do is tell you that construction ships from different galactic systems make very different stations. A construction ship from DeVries will only have a few basic stations available but one from Albion can make many advanced stations. You're free to build those stations anywhere but keep an eye on the food. The folks in Omincron Lyrae stations insist on eating BoFu.

There are many costs to building a station and some of them aren’t obvious. You need an architect, you need a construction ship, you need materials for the construction ship to build the station with, you could use a few cargo drones to help get those materials off the trade ships and into your construction ship, you need construction drones to put the station together, you need a manager and probably a defense officer on the station, and you’ll need a bunch of resources for the station to start working with! Needless to say - you had really better make a save before you start this process just in case it turns out the station isn’t working out.

Not only do you need to consider the cost of one of these stations, you need to consider just where it’s going to get its resources and where it’s going to sell what it makes. You can tell any freighter to trade anywhere in the galaxy but managers will only tell ships you assign to them to work within the sector. If you add radar to the station then they can trade/mine anywhere in the whole system - which may or may not be a good thing depending on the system the station is sitting in! (You do have to tell the manager to actually start trading system wide. They won't switch automatically when the radar is built.)

All this information can be found in your encyclopedia. For instance, when buying a construction ship you can click on the information button to find out what stations that construction ship will be able to make. When going through those stations, you can look at what pieces make up that station. When you check a station piece that produces things, you can find out what resources it requires. It’s all there - you just have to wander around a bit to find it. (Roguey’s website[roguey.co.uk] has good info, too!)

Station building is a long term investment. Buying all the parts needed to build it, particularly if you give it a lot of weapons, is very expensive. Once it gets going, though, the money will keep rolling in and you'll come out ahead.

As of version 4.3 there's a bug in station building where most of your construction drones will sit idle, making the station piece take a longer time to build than the architect says. It seems to happen if you're near the station (as in, close to the same zone) either when a section finishes or you start adding on to an existing station. I've never had the problem if I'm nowhere close to the station when a section finishes and I request the next section I want.

Construction ship trading is a little weird. You can cram a LOT of wares onto a construction ship and I guess players of the early game were using them as a kind of floating warehouse. Now, if you put wares on a construction ship, the wares stay there until used in construction.

There’s an option you can have your ships use called “transfer wares” that’s quite handy. It allows you to move cargo from ship to ship, ship to station, or station to ship. It’s good for passing drones between ships and very useful for cramming more raw materials onto a space station than they are asking for through the trade menu. If you’ve got 15,000 ore on your ship and your URV forge only wants 2,000 via the trade menu then simply use the transfer option to move all 15k over! Just don’t stuff the station so full that there’s no room for product.

Pay close attention to the window for this command when working with drones. You can move them as cargo (presumably for selling) or as operating drones.

This isn’t as trivial as it once was but it’s still a fairly easy way to make money and build up a fleet. You’ll be guided through the process in the campaign but be aware that it’s artificially easy in that mission. Even with 50 rookie marines, you’re going to have a time taking a trade ship.

You’ll always need to destroy a ship’s engines and jump engine. For your first captures, you’ll need to destroy pretty much everything else, too. Every turret, every shield, the drone bay (which is unfortunate - drones are expensive to replace), and even most of the hull will need to be torched. You can check what a ship’s boarding resistance is by checking its information in the top section. You can check your own ship’s boarding strength by checking the Skunk’s information. You want the Skunk to be higher than the ship you’re trying to take - preferably by a good bit.

If you’ve got a Trojan drone on board then you’ll be prompted to use that to help while boarding is happening. Other than that, though, you’ll just be keeping the hull level down and maybe blowing up an engine if it gets repaired.

Once the ship is captured, drop an engineer on board. You’ll want a captain, too, and probably a defense officer but get that engineer on there for sure. S/he will start repairing the ship. It will take quite some time (longer, it seems, if you stay in the same zone) but eventually the engineer will get everything on the ship repaired except for a bit of the hull. A five star engineer will even get all the hull repaired. Destroyed drones won’t come back but all those turrets will! You can then sell the ship or use it as you see fit.

Oh, and your marine officer will now be on the ship you captured. Check the ship details, pick your marine officer, hit the communicate button. You'll get an option to bring your marine officer back on board the Skunk.

There are actually a few large size ships that have been abandoned. To take those, simply land on them and tell one of your captains to come aboard. Undock and you'll see the ship is now yours.

You can steal station goods using a Trojan drone but it takes some preparation. The station is NOT going to like it so you’ll need to hack station defenses for sure. Egosoft made a nice tutorial video of how this feature works when it showed up in the game:

https://youtu.be/cvm8nnnoPvs

Capital ships can be hacked, too, though I haven't tried it yet.

Missions are a nice way to make cash but not all of them are good things for your character to be doing. I would strongly suggest saving your game before grabbing a mission! First, it will save you if a mission turns out to be something you can't do or (more likely) if it's something you don't want to do. Second, you need to read a mission which often times means just sitting there outside of a station - right where the police can scan you.

After the objectives, the first line of the mission briefing shows what faction you are working for. That's an important line! You're probably not going to want to work for just any faction. What you can't see is exactly who you are working against. Some of your friends are probably fighting so, if a missions is against them, you'll want to either abort it or reload that save game you made.

Obviously you need to be smart about what you're doing. Taking a mission (or two!) to defend a station against attack while your own transport is coming in to dock is not a real good plan.

Link missions are actually a bunch of missions strung together. They have much higher rewards but don't count on the mission steps that are displayed as being the only missions. You may turn the "last" mission in then get a whole new set to complete!

Station building missions are a bit special. I really wouldn't treat them as missions. Instead, look at them as discounts if you agree to make the station the NPC wants in the location the NPC desires. The reward for these missions isn't likely to be larger than the cost of the station but you do get to keep the station afterward. If the station is a good one to have in that location then you'll earn a lot more than the mission reward. If not, you could spend far more completing the station than it will ever earn you, even with the reward!

The easiest way to pick up missions is to simply check the bulleten board. Most missions are listed there. Some of the more shadey missions must be found by driving around the station and scanning mission markers. Missions scanned will appear on the board, too, in case you don't want to get yourself scanned by the police while reading it. Missions don't stick around forever, though. If you're reading one and it suddenly vanishes then that means the mission expired.

The Teladi expansion adds a couple of sectors to the game. One sector is fairly normal, though the highway setup is a bit strange. The other is not so normal - its highway setup is non-existent other than the super-highway leading to the sector! You’ll need to explore it yourself.

If you’re playing the campaign, the gates to the Teladi won’t open up until sometime late in the campaign - possibly not until the campaign is completely done. You can get to the Teladi from the Exhaustless Mines in Albion’s Far Out sector or Drippy Ascent in OL’s Eclipse Clouds. I would suggest using the Omicron Lyre entrance as it leads to the more normal sector of Teladi space.

In the highway-less sector there’s a big station called Overwatch. It has a huge number of wares to buy and sell and also sells Teladi style ships. Teladi ships are fairly interesting but don’t go in expecting to find super ships. There are no Teladi construction ships so you can’t make Teladi stations. Also, the Overwatch station is under constant (?) attack from Teladi cartels. While the pirates may not shoot at you they will not take kindly to your trade ships giving Overwatch any trade business. Think twice before sending a trade ship here. Unless you plan on using armed trade convoys, I would suggest not putting a trade agent there, either.

The Rising Tide is a sequence of missions you can get from some not-so-ethical Teladi businessmen. I’ve only barely started it so I can’t guide you much on how to run it. I found it in the big ring station - and no that’s not Overwatch.

There's some trouble with the DLC, though. As mentioned above, the Overwatch station is very dangerous for trade ships to enter. However, the shortest path from Omicron Lyrae to the southern parts of Albion is via Teladi space so your trade ships will try to use it. There's a mod to keep trade ships out of Fields of Opportunity that fixes this issue.

This is an even bigger (and, IMHO, better) expansion than the Teladi DLC. It adds three new systems:

• The Home of Light - this is a system of four sectors all arranged around one circular highway system and run by Terracorp. It has roughly as many stations as Albion and they are in the same style. They do have a new Warehouse station that produces nothing but allows for quite a bit of storage for all types of wares, which has some interesting uses.
  
• Cold Star - quite a nice system for mining. There are only super highways, though, no normal highways so smaller ships will be slow there. Two of the sectors have quite a few hazards, too.
  
• Toride - a single sector system designed specifically for exploration. There's more to find there than in Teladi space and it's a lot prettier, too.

Cold Star's hazards bring up a problem: ships flying blindly flying through them. To help guide AI ships through the hazards, Egosoft set up something called nav paths in the northern and southern sectors. You can't see them on the map but all AI controlled ships will try to follow these paths whenever they can. It can cause some strange behavoir (like telling a ship to fly north and having it turn to the south so it can get to the start of a nav path) but ships get to where they need to go without hitting the hazards.

Like the Teladi expansion, there's a navagation hazard caused by this DLC. One of the nav paths leads straight to a Xenon station! Ships trying to go from Cold Star to Toride will overshoot the jump gate and end up right on the Xenon's front door, where they will likely be destroyed. Also like the Teladi expansion, there's a mod to fix it - this one made by me. See the resources section.

Alternate section name: A Place Where Zloth can Drop In Random Stuff

• Auto-save isn’t terribly reliable. It happens only when leaving a station and even then it only happens if you haven’t made any other saves recently (I think - I’ve never quite figured out the exact rules). Basically, don’t trust it. Use quick-save often and make proper saves from time to time, too, just in case your quick-save turns out to be a really bad spot.
  
• You can turn off the opening cinematic for the game. Right click on the game in your Steam list, select properties, and click the ‘SET LAUNCH OPTIONS’ button on the general tab. Put -skipintro into the box and OK your way out. No more intro! Egosoft has a guide here on Steam showing all the possible launch options.
  
• If you've built a station in an "empty space" sector, you can name that sector from the details of your station.
  
• If you're not quite able to get on top of something by jumping, trying doing a crouch just after you jump. That will move your feet up higher so you can scramble on top of whatever-it-is.
  
• Modding the game does not turn off your achievement awards. (I presume modifying your save game doesn't, either, given that more people have the billion credit achievement than have finished the campaign.)
  
• Not all loot boxes are floating out in space. Some of the best are actually welded right into space stations! These won't show up on your scanners at all - you've got to look for them. See my X:Rebirth videos for some samples.

Drow has created an awesome (and beautiful) map on Seizewell[seizewell.de]. Obviously, there's all manner of exploration spoilers but it's great to have mid-game when you know most of the places anyway but haven't played enough to memorize them yet.

Egosoft's Wiki[www.egosoft.com] is a superb source of information. The station section is particularly nice as it will tell you exactly what resources you need to build a station. If you're rich enough, you can gather them all up, put them on the construction ship, and never have to worry about giving your architect any wares again. (Well, unless you go and get your station damaged.)

Roguey's X-Rebirth[roguey.co.uk] website listed in the station section is also super handy. The lay-out of that website makes it easy to see what a given station needs to produce what it makes, then find a station that makes those wares, then click on those wares to find stations that make them, and so on down the line.

Mods have gotten quite good for this game, too.

Show Skills: https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=265986059
If you've been playing for more than a couple of hours then you need this. Instead of having to play the mini-game multiple times to find a good hiring prospect, you can just ask for the person's skills and you'll get them. Not only does it save time, it keeps you from going insane because you've had to hear the same conversations repeated hundreds of times.

Trade Agents Forever
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=262382979
Another small talk killer. Put it in when you've decide you need a bunch of trade agents. It will let you simply pay the person 80,000 credits instead of going through the small talk mini-game. There is a little strangeness going on with vendors that sell ships so I would suggest not selecting one of those people as your trade agent.

Avoid Fields of Opportunity
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1398380878
If you're doing any trading and you have the Teladi DLC, you'll want this mod. There are a lot of pirates near the Albion gate to Teladi space and, without this mod, your trade ships will happily try to drive right through them to keep from going into DeVries. Many won't survive the attempt. This mod keeps them from going there. Note that you'll want to remove the mod if you need to do some trading inside the Fields of Opportunity system. Just turn the mod off, do your trade, get everyone out, and turn the mod back on again. (Or use something more appropriate for trading with pirates all around.)

Navpath Fix
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1441345157
The Home of Light DLC also has a trade ship death trap which this mod fixes. The southern path (green in the picture) in the Natural Expansion area takes AI guided ships trying to go to Toride right into a Xenon station, often killing them. This modifies the path a little so ships trying to go to the jump gate will actually get off the path near the jump gate while Xenon trying to attack colonist stations can still get to their destination without being roasted by a radiation zone.

It also removes the nav paths in Toride completely. The ride through Toride on a capital ship is really pretty so I would suggest taking one or two trips through there without this mod just to see the pretty rocks. After that, though, put the mod in so your trade ships get back to making money instead of taking the scenic route.

Capital Ship Bridge
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1381766944
The bridge for capital ships is basically just a bubble plopped down somewhere on the ship. Sometimes the view isn't terrible but this gives a FAR better solution! I do miss watching drones flying overhead when delivering goods to a construction ship while I'm on the bridge, but it's well worth having this mod. (The maps could be a little spoiler-y for exploration but they are pretty easy to ignore.)