Latestupdate (April 5th, 2025) 0.99.2: Tweaked AI scripts for better collision avoidance and faster docking at a ship moving quickly. Increased potential flee distance for AI when attacked. Feel free to comment below if you have any issues/feature requests.
I've been playing with this mod and it's fun but my only complain are the plasma weapon. In a big fight the whole area will be swarming with plasma projecting flying all over the place not hitting anything from distance.
Probably a small increase in projectile speed would improve it
Thanks! I’ll see what kind of tweaks I can do without making it too OP! Seeing lots of projectiles from a distance is one of my favorite part of this mod.
I play with the XRSGE mod - REALSPACE GALAXY EXPANSION and there are huge distances, I wanted to find a mod that would speed up ships in drive mode, but I liked your mod for other changes in combat, but flying on scouts at a speed of about 6000-7000 is sooo slow for this mod
Btw interesting, how about adding patches for this mod? It seems having some cool Terran ships: https://www.nexusmods.com/x4foundations/mods/1488?tab=description
Also this one seems cool too (I wish if there was a mod which makes this and K and I capturable pilotable though with cool bridges and such): https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3295176237&searchtext=xenon
Also interesting it is possible for you to tweak Turret orders and maybe release them as separate mod? Make new or tweak existing one for anti-station and anti-capital role, which attacks large turrets firsts, disabling enemies, then smaller, and when no turrets of selected ship is visible attack its hull. Chill Turrets seems do something like that, but its doesn't work on 7.00 and author seems inactive for now. I just annoying that only ship which I personally control can knock out turrets, but my AI controlled ones rarely shoot at them which heavily reduces their performance in combat.
I can take a look at adding support for those packs. The Xenon E looks a lot easier to add first; CPSDO is quite a big ship pack with numerous things that would will need adjusting.
I probably won't be tweaking turret orders since I have no experience doing that. I would ask around on Egosoft modding channel on discord and someone might be able to help.
Speaking of other ship packs, these ones seems cool to add, and they seems working fine, at least VRO versions: https://next.nexusmods.com/profile/Lint4/mods?gameId=2659
Btw if you add support for CPSDO it would be great.
Tried this mod out, thought it sucked at first but stuck it out and the improvements/(global npc nerfs including xenon) in combat range and logistics actually make the game feel a lot bigger and slower yet more engaging at the same time.
If I were to critique it,
- having massive droppable bays even on small fighters only promotes gate small laser tower cheese even harder than before. I appreciate they are less accurate but stemming the tide of sub-capital xenon has never been easier. (though they make any mission with pre-placed hostile laser turrets hilariously more dangerous in a tedious 'gotta sit here and spew plasma in that direction from 10+ km until the threat is gone' kinda way)
- all the ships base attributes being hyper normalized is really disappointing and while I do understand the conceptual 'balance' you might be going for, it takes away a lot of the cool uniqueness of it and that also applies to many different platforms. A lot of the oddball ships and equipment in x4 got that way for lore or cool story reasons yet now you can basically get the same experience going with any race. There are still some gems in all of this that stand out a little but they are far fewer than in vanilla.
(For an example the alligator is infamous in the base game for being a paradoxical platform that would work better as a racing hotrod or a makeshift combat ship, but now its no faster or better than any other miner. The Moreya being nerfed down to the speed of any other fighter of its class is probably warranted from a stats standpoint but makes the platform a lot less interesting to get ahold of and causes the Yaki equipment to be just another flavor. Plus, while the base game's 'Torus Eternal' mission's Moreya always made the Terran Sensor net seem clownish, your changes make them seem actually competent? Interesting, certainly more 'dangerous', though it does make an otherwise straightforward mission need positioning cheese and maybe even null sig mods to accomplish and doesn't really BENEFIT from the changes due to the devs never expecting to add any supporting stealth elements to the mission. For example, maybe the terran ships comprising the sensor net go on patrols or can be distracted by nav beacons or attacks or activity elsewhere? None of that exists so it feels like a cheap 'dangerous'. )
- Some quests break or have weird outcomes or difficulty spikes that come from the base game relying on travel drive or highways being a thing. An example for me was the boron highway project in sanctuary of Darkness; no construction ships or carrier seem to actually be in place to trigger mission progress. As previously mentioned, Torus Eternal. There's a whole bunch of story missions that make assumptions like this and a sweeping mod like this can touch on a lot of triggers or situations that the devs never really expected to have to address. (or at least if there are then I'm too much of a dumbass to see them)
- You might consider making SETA a standard start item for characters created with this mod enabled, especially for some of the starts with now slow and ponderous medium starter ships. Better first impression for players trying this mod out and finding out the hard way why the devs added travel drive to X4 in the first place, and what X3 feels like if you forget to buy your seta drive.
-I don't understand the logic behind removing environmental damage? I mean I'm not going to complain but unless there's some critical flaw in AI pathing that gets exposed by the lack of travel drive it seems a bit of a strange choice in a mod called 'x-dangerous'?
If I were to throw out an uneducated guess, I suppose increasing the combat range has the side effect of involving environmental danger zones and messing up stuff?
Thanks for your feedback! I can address some of your comments.
1. I don’t like the laser tower concept and would like to delete them from the game like Star Wars Interworlds has done. Currently laser towers have significantly less health than vanilla. Giving ships significantly smaller inventory is also something SWI did to combat deployment spam.
2. I did this to emulate Elite Dangerous’ A class through E class performance ratings. I do plan on giving factions more differentiating stats, but the differences will be smaller than vanilla.
3. Each ship’s top speed and acceleration is dictated by their weapons, shields, and storage amount. I ignored lore descriptions for in-game balance. I can definitely tweak stats some more.
4. I found sneaking past the Terran defenses to be do-able with activating engine boost and turning flight assist off and coasting; especially when heading ‘down’ or ‘up’ from the ecliptic.
5. Interesting that removing the superhighway broke that quest for you. I had the quest appear for me when starting a new game as a Boron to test. I can add back the Boron superhighway or learn tweak the quest. This mod is supposed to work with the entire vanilla quest line.
6. I can take a look at getting SETA installed by default. I actually never use SETA so I don’t even think about that. I always feel like time is money since the Xenon take so much territory.
7. Large civilian ships would not survive if player is IS with environmental damage since they travel too slow.
For the boron thing it might be other mods I have or it might just be a wild random bug. I don't know for specific that its this mod, just the bug only occurred (with a test sample of one time) with this mod installed.
How do you not use SETA with this though? You must exclusively pilot onboard small ships because I just don't see how you could possibly get anywhere in this mod in larger ships without seta. Unless you have a lot of spare time/alt tab frequently.
And yeah but that's sort of the reason those zones exist isn't it? AI avoids it for the most part.
I guess maybe I conflated the name of this assuming it was meant to be a difficulty mod rather than trying to imitate elite:dangerous
And yeah i did complete the TA mission eventually it just was just a significant difficulty spike because it requires a large bit of ai positioning luck (that you can't really scout out beforehand) combined with cutting things fairly close on the timer even with boosts and angles. I'd say it felt like it needed cheese to bypass but honestly that's the sort of stuff you'd do IRL to avoid sensor nets so the only cheese here is that the AI doesn't know what to do with it. The larger sensor nets on the larger ships also didn't help.
I don't know how moddable the system is but you could probably replace the laser with a projectile of some sort
Restoring the superhighways for the Boron requires deleting xdangerous\extensions\ego_dlc_boron\maps\XU_ep2_universe\dlc_boron_zonehighways.xml and reloading the save If that fixes the quest, then I can fine-tune that .xml.
I have never liked using SETA in this game or speedhack in other PvE RTS games. Just a player preference. I don't mind traveling around at ~1 km/s either. This mod originally released with ships moving at 0.5x the current speed!
I don't like the idea of the hazardous damage regions simply not existing when the player isn't in the system and when they are there, it effects all ships. This can result in some cheesy gameplay behavior without travel drives. The Tide does function wherever the player is, but it is too hazardous even at lowered damage values since large ships are too slow to escape in time. You can go into xdangerous\libraries\region_definitions.xml and remove lines pertaining to damagefield in the region of your choice to see it in action.
This mod has several features that make it more difficult than vanilla; especially if you play without engine boost. I don't want to make it too challenging where it becomes frustrating. You might be after deadair's script package on Github if you want a bigger AI threat.If you have any suggestions for increasing the 'dangerous' level, I'm all ears.
Sneaking past the Terran defenses is mostly RNG due to ship positioning. I've done that mission about 6 times and the latest attempt I had the worst luck where I just waited an additional 3 minutes and restarted my attempt. I can probably learn to increase the timer if enough people have issues with it.
Changing the laser tower beam to a pulse laser should be do-able!
One thing you might be able to try is something similar to Realspace Engines Mod by Eucharion, where there is no upper limit to how fast you can go (but you still have to worry about the physics based complications that causes)?
That mod is highly recommended if you end up rescaling your sectors to be huge. I do not have plans to make ships move any faster; there are already issues with AI combat past a certain speed before resorting to near-hitscan weapon speeds which I do not like.
Got around to testing that highway thing. Removing the file doesn't fix the mission on an existing save (And weirdly the Sanctuary of Darkness highway is already completed despite the mission to construct it being in perpetual limbo.)
Starting a new game after removing that file causes the 'highway construction site' mission area to actually spawn and seems to work.
I think this mod's weapon/engine/view distance/fps changes ontop of realspace galaxy expansion (maybe with a x2 speed multiplier) would be amazing but idk. You like elite dangerous and the size of its map? It'd kinda end up feeling like that a bit (though I suppose without the cool slingshotting around the universe)
The main issue with doubling ship speed again would be the AI will struggle at hitting any ship moving at its peak speed in a straight line. There should be some tweaks to fix that; but even an XL battleship moving at ~2 km/s would suddenly no longer get shot by fighters.
I like Elite Dangerous' giant map but I never liked the FSD; especially for combat and for moving around a local system. I much prefer a FSD-free game. If the mod gets updated for 7.X, you might also be interested in ReScale by MarcusInVR who also rescales the X4 universe but to a smaller scale than what Eucharion was after. The syntax to hand-tune your own scale is pretty simple, but the process looks time consuming.
I might try this mod later, interesting speaking of ship mods, which exactly ones are supported? Like ArgonMatt's ATF Valkyrie is supported? Description says about XL ships only.
Inside xdangerous/extensions is also a list of all the supported ship mods. Many of which no longer work since the ships themselves needs to have updated meshes. I am not supporting ArgonMatt's ships as of 7.X since they all need updating. Hopefully he updates them all soon.
Since we are on 7.X now, All of Lc4Hunter's ships are supported as well as mods that allow DLC-exclusive ships to be encountered easier in-universe (Erlking unlock, timelines faction ship use).
I tried ArgonMatt Valkyrie, it works, it for 6.00 version but also I recall was asking Lc4Hunter about ship mods he didn't updated yet - he said that most of 6.00 mods works fine in 7.0
Oops, now I see! So it looks like I will add his ATF Valkyrie and all his ships should be supported in X - Dangerous for 7.X! edit: Added ATF Valkyrie support and improved description for 3rd party supported ships.
Скажите совместимо ли это с обновлением x4 foundations timelines ? если не совместимо будут ли обновление мода ? Tell me, is this compatible with the x4 foundations timelines update? If it's not compatible, will the mod be updated?
I added support for several XL battleships/carriers that people made. 6.0 broke a bunch of user created ships, so I am kinda glad I didn't add more. To add support for more ships, download X Tools. I use XRCatToolGUI.exe to extract the macro files needed. I recommend downloading 'Ship Test Site' on Nexus so you can quickly reload to see your changes.
76 comments
0.99.2: Tweaked AI scripts for better collision avoidance and faster docking at a ship moving quickly. Increased potential flee distance for AI when attacked.
Feel free to comment below if you have any issues/feature requests.
Probably a small increase in projectile speed would improve it
Also this one seems cool too (I wish if there was a mod which makes this and K and I capturable pilotable though with cool bridges and such): https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3295176237&searchtext=xenon
Also interesting it is possible for you to tweak Turret orders and maybe release them as separate mod? Make new or tweak existing one for anti-station and anti-capital role, which attacks large turrets firsts, disabling enemies, then smaller, and when no turrets of selected ship is visible attack its hull. Chill Turrets seems do something like that, but its doesn't work on 7.00 and author seems inactive for now. I just annoying that only ship which I personally control can knock out turrets, but my AI controlled ones rarely shoot at them which heavily reduces their performance in combat.
I probably won't be tweaking turret orders since I have no experience doing that. I would ask around on Egosoft modding channel on discord and someone might be able to help.
Btw if you add support for CPSDO it would be great.
If I were to critique it,
- having massive droppable bays even on small fighters only promotes gate small laser tower cheese even harder than before. I appreciate they are less accurate but stemming the tide of sub-capital xenon has never been easier. (though they make any mission with pre-placed hostile laser turrets hilariously more dangerous in a tedious 'gotta sit here and spew plasma in that direction from 10+ km until the threat is gone' kinda way)
- all the ships base attributes being hyper normalized is really disappointing and while I do understand the conceptual 'balance' you might be going for, it takes away a lot of the cool uniqueness of it and that also applies to many different platforms. A lot of the oddball ships and equipment in x4 got that way for lore or cool story reasons yet now you can basically get the same experience going with any race. There are still some gems in all of this that stand out a little but they are far fewer than in vanilla.
(For an example the alligator is infamous in the base game for being a paradoxical platform that would work better as a racing hotrod or a makeshift combat ship, but now its no faster or better than any other miner. The Moreya being nerfed down to the speed of any other fighter of its class is probably warranted from a stats standpoint but makes the platform a lot less interesting to get ahold of and causes the Yaki equipment to be just another flavor. Plus, while the base game's 'Torus Eternal' mission's Moreya always made the Terran Sensor net seem clownish, your changes make them seem actually competent? Interesting, certainly more 'dangerous', though it does make an otherwise straightforward mission need positioning cheese and maybe even null sig mods to accomplish and doesn't really BENEFIT from the changes due to the devs never expecting to add any supporting stealth elements to the mission. For example, maybe the terran ships comprising the sensor net go on patrols or can be distracted by nav beacons or attacks or activity elsewhere? None of that exists so it feels like a cheap 'dangerous'. )
- Some quests break or have weird outcomes or difficulty spikes that come from the base game relying on travel drive or highways being a thing. An example for me was the boron highway project in sanctuary of Darkness; no construction ships or carrier seem to actually be in place to trigger mission progress. As previously mentioned, Torus Eternal. There's a whole bunch of story missions that make assumptions like this and a sweeping mod like this can touch on a lot of triggers or situations that the devs never really expected to have to address. (or at least if there are then I'm too much of a dumbass to see them)
- You might consider making SETA a standard start item for characters created with this mod enabled, especially for some of the starts with now slow and ponderous medium starter ships. Better first impression for players trying this mod out and finding out the hard way why the devs added travel drive to X4 in the first place, and what X3 feels like if you forget to buy your seta drive.
-I don't understand the logic behind removing environmental damage? I mean I'm not going to complain but unless there's some critical flaw in AI pathing that gets exposed by the lack of travel drive it seems a bit of a strange choice in a mod called 'x-dangerous'?
If I were to throw out an uneducated guess, I suppose increasing the combat range has the side effect of involving environmental danger zones and messing up stuff?
1. I don’t like the laser tower concept and would like to delete them from the game like Star Wars Interworlds has done. Currently laser towers have significantly less health than vanilla. Giving ships significantly smaller inventory is also something SWI did to combat deployment spam.
2. I did this to emulate Elite Dangerous’ A class through E class performance ratings. I do plan on giving factions more differentiating stats, but the differences will be smaller than vanilla.
3. Each ship’s top speed and acceleration is dictated by their weapons, shields, and storage amount. I ignored lore descriptions for in-game balance. I can definitely tweak stats some more.
4. I found sneaking past the Terran defenses to be do-able with activating engine boost and turning flight assist off and coasting; especially when heading ‘down’ or ‘up’ from the ecliptic.
5. Interesting that removing the superhighway broke that quest for you. I had the quest appear for me when starting a new game as a Boron to test. I can add back the Boron superhighway or learn tweak the quest. This mod is supposed to work with the entire vanilla quest line.
6. I can take a look at getting SETA installed by default. I actually never use SETA so I don’t even think about that. I always feel like time is money since the Xenon take so much territory.
7. Large civilian ships would not survive if player is IS with environmental damage since they travel too slow.
How do you not use SETA with this though? You must exclusively pilot onboard small ships because I just don't see how you could possibly get anywhere in this mod in larger ships without seta. Unless you have a lot of spare time/alt tab frequently.
And yeah but that's sort of the reason those zones exist isn't it? AI avoids it for the most part.
I guess maybe I conflated the name of this assuming it was meant to be a difficulty mod rather than trying to imitate elite:dangerous
And yeah i did complete the TA mission eventually it just was just a significant difficulty spike because it requires a large bit of ai positioning luck (that you can't really scout out beforehand) combined with cutting things fairly close on the timer even with boosts and angles. I'd say it felt like it needed cheese to bypass but honestly that's the sort of stuff you'd do IRL to avoid sensor nets so the only cheese here is that the AI doesn't know what to do with it. The larger sensor nets on the larger ships also didn't help.
I don't know how moddable the system is but you could probably replace the laser with a projectile of some sort
I have never liked using SETA in this game or speedhack in other PvE RTS games. Just a player preference. I don't mind traveling around at ~1 km/s either. This mod originally released with ships moving at 0.5x the current speed!
I don't like the idea of the hazardous damage regions simply not existing when the player isn't in the system and when they are there, it effects all ships. This can result in some cheesy gameplay behavior without travel drives. The Tide does function wherever the player is, but it is too hazardous even at lowered damage values since large ships are too slow to escape in time. You can go into xdangerous\libraries\region_definitions.xml and remove lines pertaining to damagefield in the region of your choice to see it in action.
This mod has several features that make it more difficult than vanilla; especially if you play without engine boost. I don't want to make it too challenging where it becomes frustrating. You might be after deadair's script package on Github if you want a bigger AI threat.If you have any suggestions for increasing the 'dangerous' level, I'm all ears.
Sneaking past the Terran defenses is mostly RNG due to ship positioning. I've done that mission about 6 times and the latest attempt I had the worst luck where I just waited an additional 3 minutes and restarted my attempt. I can probably learn to increase the timer if enough people have issues with it.
Changing the laser tower beam to a pulse laser should be do-able!
One thing you might be able to try is something similar to Realspace Engines Mod by Eucharion, where there is no upper limit to how fast you can go (but you still have to worry about the physics based complications that causes)?
Starting a new game after removing that file causes the 'highway construction site' mission area to actually spawn and seems to work.
I like Elite Dangerous' giant map but I never liked the FSD; especially for combat and for moving around a local system. I much prefer a FSD-free game. If the mod gets updated for 7.X, you might also be interested in ReScale by MarcusInVR who also rescales the X4 universe but to a smaller scale than what Eucharion was after. The syntax to hand-tune your own scale is pretty simple, but the process looks time consuming.
Since we are on 7.X now, All of Lc4Hunter's ships are supported as well as mods that allow DLC-exclusive ships to be encountered easier in-universe (Erlking unlock, timelines faction ship use).
edit: Added ATF Valkyrie support and improved description for 3rd party supported ships.
Tell me, is this compatible with the x4 foundations timelines update? If it's not compatible, will the mod be updated?
ps - I’m also dreaming of a mod that will finally remove traces of dirt from the ship’s control panel. )))) L and XL ships..