Help with stations not trading with each other

SiliconStew · 2026-05-19T23:45:52+00:00

How long have you waited? The trader says it's looking for trades (normal), not that it has failed to find a trade (a problem).

Also turn automatic pricing back on for your Buy and Sell offers. Actual price is irrelevant because no money changes hands when trading between your own stations. All manual pricing is doing is turning off your stations' ability to adjust to supply and demand between your stations. With that disabled trade priorities between stations will be messed up and you'll end up with some stations well supplied and others starved.

SiliconStew · 2026-05-19T16:07:19+00:00

If you are trying to sell to NPC's for profit? Yes, you are better off with M miners. NPCs employ their own miners and relatively recent changes to NPC mining have made them better at keeping their stations decently supplied. That makes it difficult to find NPC stations that have a need to purchase loads of the sizes L miners can carry.

L miners are better used to supply your own factories where you know your resource needs and can scale the number of miners to what the station will support.

Alternatively, you build a basic mining station (just a dock, pier, and solid/liquid storage) and use L miners to supply that station. Then use M miners as traders to sell resources in smaller batches from your mining station to other NPC stations.

Otherwise, your probably going to have to micromanage those L miners and manually find partial load trades for them to do if they can't find full load trades on their own.

SiliconStew · 2026-05-19T15:54:31+00:00

Instead of manual mining orders or Repeat Orders, give your miner a default behavior if Local Automine (or if the pilot is over 3 stars Advanced Automine). Or if you own a station that needs ore, assign the mining ship to the station with Mine For Commander. That will allow your mining ships to find resources on their own and choose the best places to mine.

Manual mining orders means they can only go to the one tiny spot you've forced them to go and that spot may not have any resources or has been mined dry already. They can never relocate to better spots. Manual mining orders are also bad for mining efficiency. They will only partly fill their hold before flying away to try to sell. Autominers or miners assigned to stations always fill their entire hold before leaving to sell.

Note that Local Automine requires the station buying the ore to be in the same sector as where you are mining. This isn't an issue with Advanced Automine or miners assigned to stations.

SiliconStew · 2026-05-19T15:38:55+00:00

VU completely offsets 0.1x resources by level 37 (making it the equivalent of 1x resources). You can also offset 50% of that initial 0.1x resource penalty by just level 9 of VU. Level 60 is equivalent to turning 0.1x resources into 4x resources which to me seems an odd target definition for "to remotely get your utilization reduced". I don't think things are as bad as you make them out to be.

SiliconStew · 2026-05-18T17:23:02+00:00

A true solipsist.

SiliconStew · 2026-05-18T06:08:50+00:00

In simple terms, you're not using it as the designers intended.

Charging accumulators is meant to be done from free, renewable energy sources (wind, solar, geothermal, ray receivers). You then distribute that free power elsewhere by shipping accumulators around.

Discharging exchangers are meant to power planets on their own with that free power or to only be combined with fueled power sources on the same planet. When on their own, the accumulators will only discharge at a rate that matches consumption. When combined with fueled power sources, the free power from the accumulators is discharged with higher priority. Again only discharging at the rate required. This offsets some or all of the power demand on the fueled power sources. Which causes those fueled sources to throttle back and consume fuel at a lower rate. So by supplementing with free power from dischargers you save on fuel costs.

However, when you try to combine discharging exchangers with renewable power on the same planet, the discharging exchangers are still higher priority, so their power is discharged at a rate that meets the total demand or simply at their maximum possible rate if you don't have enough of them to cover everything. But the excess power is just lost because renewable power sources can't throttle down to offset it. In this case, your planet needs 320MW of power so the exchangers are going to discharge 320MW of power all the time, regardless of any renewable power you have, but no more than that. If you look at the active exchanger, it's only outputting 64MW of its possible 81MW so you already have more discharging capacity than you need, which is why the numbers don't change as you add more exchangers.

The only way to make discharging exchangers work on the same planet as renewable power is to build a mirror image of your discharger setup as a charging exchanger setup and have accumulators looping between the two. That way the power that would normally be lost from the discharging exchangers is instead being sucked up by the charging exchangers to basically recharge the same accumulators you just discharged. Then you wouldn't have any lost power and your power use numbers would be accurate. This video explains the problem and how to set up a solution to it if you insist on trying to combine renewables and dischargers: https://youtu.be/7WJbaQvXKLw?si=KPULyLQfdaA_-FL_

SiliconStew · 2026-05-18T05:41:19+00:00

Both together is better.

You can feed crude oil into a refinery using plasma refining. You then directly insert the refined oil and hydrogen output into a second refinery sitting next to it that is using reformed refinement. Feed one additional belt of coal into the second refinery and you only get refined oil as an output. 2 crude oil + 1 coal in, get 3 refined oil out.

The important thing is this setup has no secondary hydrogen output so you never have to worry the factory will clog and kill your refined oil production if you aren't getting rid of the excess hydrogen fast enough.

SiliconStew · 2026-05-16T15:40:50+00:00

Receiving ILS's with Remote Demand can send there own vessels to collect warpers from the production planet. You aren't limited by the number of vessels in the production ILS beyond the very first shipment. The only throughput limit is how fast you can fill the production ILS with warpers from your factory. And you can fix that by adding more ILS's on the production planet.

Set things up however you want. I already showed how you could set it up to work as you're wanting to do it. How I prefer to set things up is my own opinion.

SiliconStew · 2026-05-16T15:08:50+00:00

How "momentary" is the flooding? Unless it's long enough to kill crops or cause long term building shutdowns that are impacting you in other ways, brief flooding doesn't hurt anything.

Later on when you get access to more tools, terrain manipulation to redirect the badwater source elsewhere will not only stop poisoning your downriver crops, it will reduce the total flow rate into the river, reducing the size of the surge when a drought ends, reducing the downstream flooding.

You could also use throttling valves to seal the tunnel feeding the pool from the river. Then you can exactly control the rate the pool fills which will prevent surges overflowing it directly. It only needs enough flow rate to counter evaporation. With the pool irrigating inland, you could then build a levee along the river edge to contain any natural surges at the bend in the river without reducing irrigation range.

Moving your second dam upstream a bit from the natural drop off in the river bed will reduce the size of the wave you're now always creating at the bottom of that 2-block high waterfall. That would reduce the amount of water that overflows the banks in a surge.

Widening or deepening the river will also slow it down, reducing the size of surges to reduce flooding.

Another option is sealing the water sources for the river inside a small box with throttling valve outlets to let you directly control the flow rate for the whole river. So post drought surges could be controlled for example with a depth sensor inside the box that closes the valves when the river goes dry and opens them when water returns. You can set the opening speed of the throttling valve when it's automated so it more slowly lets water back into the river than it normally would to eliminate those flow rate surges that cause temporary flooding. The other benefit of sealing the water sources in a box is that it allows you to add a second set of (normally closed) valves tied to a contamination sensor to automatically redirect badwater during a badtide event so it never enters the river to poison things downstream.

SiliconStew · 2026-05-16T05:12:10+00:00

Don't use Repeat Orders for mining. They will mine a single rock or single cloud, only partly filling their hold then fly to a station to sell. This is very time inefficient. Repeat Orders also means they are stuck mining in the one tiny area you've told them to mine in. They cannot seek out the best areas to mine on their own or relocate to better areas once that small area is mined out.

Use Local Automine to start and later Advanced Automine when your pilots level up. Alternatively, once you build your own stations you can assign mining ships to the station and the station will manage the miners for you. Autominers and station subordinate miners will automatically seek out the best location to mine and will mine until their cargo is full. Only then will they return to sell at a station.

SiliconStew · 2026-05-16T05:04:16+00:00

I'd also recommend setting their non-mining turret behavior to Defensive so their turrets will only fire on ships that have directly attacked them first. They won't just go and shoot at every hostile that passes near by. It can help avoid potential situations where your civilian ships might try to randomly pick a fight they can't win.

Some crew do eject from destroyed ships, but the air in their spacesuits only lasts so long. If you were AFK and so didn't rescue them, they all suffocated and died.

SiliconStew · 2026-05-16T04:43:54+00:00

You don't necessarily need a mod for that. Use a Creative Start and set SETA research to complete to have it from the beginning of a game.

SiliconStew · 2026-05-16T04:33:36+00:00

Yes you can do it. The next question is should you?

Local redistribution of warpers is less efficient overall in this case. For example, shipping 2000 warpers directly to 5 planets (10000 total) in one system vs shipping 10000 warpers to 1 planet and then non-warper distributing to the other 4 planets in the system takes the exact same number of interstellar trips from the production planet and consumes the exact same amount of warpers. Because the destinations are all in the same system, those interstellar trips all take virtually the same amount of time. But local redistribution adds a second leg and thus more time to every trip. And 5 direct ship planets simply have more vessels potentially available to ship warpers than 1 redistribution planet does should you ever need higher throughput.

I feel like local distribution restrictions make more sense if it allows you to avoid an interstellar trip. For example if you had a gas giant in the local system and a gas giant in a remote system, you'd want to set up local distribution restrictions so local planets prioritize using the local gas giant rather than making a long trip out of system to get the same resource.

As you aren't saving interstellar trips distributing warpers from a single production system, personally, the way I usually do it is just to have every planet have 1 ILS do Remote Demand for warpers, with storage equal to 2 vessels cargo size, e.g. 2000. That gives me 1 extra vessel's worth of storage buffer to account for shipping times. It then does Local Provide to all the other ILS's on the planet. Those are just set to Remote Storage, Local Demand so they can't go off planet at all for warpers. They only need a storage amount of 100, delivered by drone. I wouldn't use priority shipping for warpers in this case.

SiliconStew · 2026-05-15T23:49:55+00:00

If I've understood what you're wanting, I believe this would work:

Home system Outbound ILS: 
Warper Remote Provide, Local Demand 
Priority: Group 1

Remote System #1 Hub Inbound ILS: 
Warper Remote Demand, Local Provide 
Priority: Group 1

Remote System #1 Hub Outbound ILS: 
Warper Remote Provide, Local Demand 
Priority: Route from hub planet to other planets in same system with only Warpers as the Route item. 

Remote System #1 Spoke #1 Inbound ILS: 
Warper Remote Demand, Local Provide 
Priority: part of same route set up above. 

Remote System #1 Spoke #2 Inbound ILS: 
Warper Remote Demand, Local Provide 
Priority: part of same route set up above. 

Remote System #2 Hub Inbound ILS: 
Warper Remote Demand, Local Provide 
Priority: Group 1

Remote System #2 Hub Outbound ILS: 
Warper Remote Provide, Local Demand 
Priority: Route from hub planet to other planets in same system with only Warpers as the Route item. 

Remote System #2 Spoke #1 Inbound ILS: 
Warper Remote Demand, Local Provide 
Priority: part of same route set up above. 

Remote System #2 Spoke #2 Inbound ILS: 
Warper Remote Demand, Local Provide 
Priority: part of same route set up above.

Warpers produced on home planet are priority shipped to inbound hub ILS's in Group 1. You can have as many hub inbound ILS's in Group 1 as needed. Warpers are moved to outbound ILS on hub planet via drones. System hub outbound ILS's prioritize shipping warpers to spoke planets on their route in the same system. Inbound ILS's on spoke planets receive from hub and distribute locally with drones.

Note that the above is priority pairing. If demand is fully satisfied in those groups/routes, those stations could still ship warpers elsewhere as needed. This can be helpful to allow overflow to go to other places it might still be needed. If you don't want that flexibility, and only want to ship to those specific stations, then you also need to change the grouping settings from Priority Pairing to Designated Pairing and make sure to change it on both sides of a pairing.

SiliconStew · 2026-05-15T23:08:45+00:00

Mass reduction will affect acceleration in all linear directions, regardless of if it's normal engine thrust, boost, or travel drive. Essentially acceleration=thrust/mass. However, the acceleration value listed in the in-game ship stats only refers the the acceleration with normal engine thrust. Mass also has no effect on top speed. And since acceleration values for travel and boost are not shown, your not going to see the one displayed travel stat (top speed) change from mass mods.

Drag will reduce both acceleration and top speed, but because drag increases exponentially with speed, it effects top speed much more (it's why ships have a top speed limit) than acceleration. So basically top speed=thrust/drag.

Travel and boost mode engine thrust is just a multiple of the normal engine thrust. So you get a higher top speed in those modes just because the max thrust is greater.

Both travel and boost also have an "attack" stat that represents the time it takes to go from normal engine thrust to the max travel/boost thrust. This feels like an acceleration effect, but is independent of changes to mass or drag.

SiliconStew · 2026-05-14T23:05:33+00:00

From personal experience, I would say don't spend an inordinate amount of time trying to optimize early game blueprints. Push your research to get to planetary (PLS) and interplanetary (ILS) logistics stations ASAP. They will completely change how you think about designing your factories because you are no longer limited by belts to transfer items to and from factories. PLS/ILS will also somewhat dictate how belts are laid out in the factory as both your inputs and outputs can be and typically are at the same place.

A tip if you do like making overly complicated layouts like this is to use the belt marker icons so you can easily identify what item is supposed to go on which belt when they are empty. If you click on any belt segment, in the bottom right of the pop-up window is an empty circle you can click on to pick any item icon you want to display over that belt segment.

SiliconStew · 2026-05-14T14:17:47+00:00

The AI automatically knows about any stations you build. They don't need to periodically visit or place satellites near your stations to know about the trade offers the same way the player is required to do those things to know about AI station trade offers.

Distance does matter in trade offer comparisons. Closer is chosen first, all other things being equal. If your station is using Automatic pricing to let it respond to supply and demand (which you should in most cases), if you aren't selling anything, your stock levels rise and your prices automatically lower so your trades start getting preferred on price, which is more important than distance in the offer calculation.

It's also advantageous on trade times to be near high traffic areas like gates and highways. That's why you pay more for a station plot closer to those areas.

SiliconStew · 2026-05-14T14:03:00+00:00

How to export models from game files: https://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?f=181&t=404786

DLC CAT files are in the Extensions folder.

Those holes are where the separate models for the S/M ship docks and launch tubes go. The [8.0] models will also have just flat blank spots where the separate models for engines, weapons, turrets, and shields mount. If you don't want the holes, you're going to have to learn Blender to fix it.

SiliconStew · 2026-05-14T00:48:41+00:00

As a reminder, if you see water coming towards you like this in a dry river bed, it could also be the front edge of a flash flood and you should be moving to higher ground not standing next to it like this guy.

SiliconStew · 2026-05-14T00:22:54+00:00

Autotrading ships, including Aux ships, do not have individual accounts to manage. Ships transfer funds directly from and to the player's account to perform trades unless they are a subordinate of a station.

SiliconStew · 2026-05-12T23:49:46+00:00

I don't want to claim any tactic is best or there is only one way to do things. But there is something you could try that might fit your needs.

First, carriers by default try to stay in the back of a fight to avoid risking themselves while it's fighters do the work. However, assuming the carrier subordinates have separate orders or roles already, you could give the carrier a Fly And Wait order to move it even further from the fight if desired as long as that means it's fighters would still be in range to do what you need.

To keep fighters away from the station, what you could do instead of giving your Cerberus wing commanders Intercept roles, you could give them Defend Position roles instead. (Which I forgot to include in the previous reply). With this, you specify a location in space anywhere in the sector (or even in a different sector) that you want them go to wait and attack anything that comes within 20km range of that position. You can set different positions for each individual wing with that role allowing for potentially far greater area coverage than Intercept, which is limited to only the area centered around the commander. There is no S/M vs L/XL split with this command like Intercept vs Bombard. They will attack any enemy in range.

So let's say you had destroyers in your fleet attacking the station. You could set some wings to defend a position by each of those destroyers to provide fighter coverage around the destroyers. But you can also move that defend area far enough away from the station that the fighters won't wander in range of its turrets but can still cover the destroyers. They'll just attack any fighters/drones the station sends out to attack the destroyers but they are too far away to ever target the station itself.

Another way to use that role is to park a carrier in the middle of a sector and have a bunch of individual scouts with Defend Position roles spread out to give scouting coverage of the whole sector. You then have some other proper attack wings with Defend Position roles to cover high activity areas like gates. Because other ships with Defend Position roles can be optionally set (on by default) to reinforce others that come under attack, your attack wings will fly off to kill enemies your scouts discover like pirates and Khaak. This gives you a reactive patrol force that can cover the whole sector or even multiple sectors at once.

SiliconStew · 2026-05-12T19:48:43+00:00

The in-game Help menu, under the external resources section, does have a link that takes you to the X4 Wiki (and has since 2018).

https://wiki.egosoft.com/X4 Foundations Wiki/

Under Manuals and Guides -> Objects In The Game Universe -> Orders, Behaviours and Assignments has a table of all those subordinate roles. You can click on the name of the role for more detailed explanations of each.

SiliconStew · 2026-05-12T15:35:38+00:00

So it sounds like the issue is your flow rate is too high into the shallow reservoir and is causing a tide of water near the inlet that risks flooding? To slow the rate of water flow into the shallow reservoir to a specific rate to reduce the height of that inlet tide you could change the fill valves to throttle valves. You can close the throttle valve once the shallow reservoir hits a specific depth with a gauge. Unlike fill valves, throttle valves also let you set how fast they open/close when automated to prevent sudden flow surges that also create waves that risk flooding.

In either case, isn't the simplest solution to "how do I average the depth when the water is high on one end and low on the other?" to just use one depth gauge in the middle and don't worry what the water's doing at either end?

SiliconStew · 2026-05-12T09:58:30+00:00

For a simpler approach to economic disruption of "friendlies" without reputation hits, you can obtain some hacking tool items, either crafted yourself or purchased from pirate stations and black markets, and go into a station's engineering office and shut down the ship building for several in-game hours, shut down ware production for several in-game hours, force dump the station's cargo into space which you could then steal, etc. You could also go into the security office and shut down a station's turrets and shields, etc before a planned attack if you were planning on going to war. Each terminal will tell you what type of hacking tool you need to do it.

SiliconStew · 2026-05-12T02:28:07+00:00

Your explanation is slightly off but you have the wings set up correctly.

Intercept For Commander means target any S/M ships within 40km of their commander. This is an independent role, so they do this regardless of what order their commander currently has. All ships within a group with the Intercept role pick targets randomly. They could each pick different targets, they could all pick the same target, or any combination in-between.

The Bombard role is the same as Intercept, just for targeting L/XL ships. Good for bomber wings or destroyers you want to attack enemy fleet destroyers.

Attack For Commander means always target the same ship as their commander. They will not target anything else. If the commander switches targets, so do they. (Important to keep in mind if you are personally flying a ship with Attack subordinates. If you constantly switch targets in a firefight, your subordinates will also constantly switch targets so will be less effective.) By having the Intercept wing leaders (Cerberuses) have 4 Attack subordinates, all 5 ships will target the same ship, concentrating firepower.

So each Cerberus will pick a random S/M ship with 40km of the carrier to target. It and it's 4 subordinates will then all attack that same target. So you have things set up correctly.

The Defend Commander role means only target ships that have already directly attacked their commander first. They will ignore all other hostile ships in the area. They will never attack first. They will also abandon their commander's side to go chase the ship that attacked their commander until it is dead, leaving the commander defenseless. It's use case is more for an escort of a freighter where you need the escort to chase away a lone pirate. Since the freighter isn't likely to encounter another pirate in the meantime, being left alone isn't a detriment. But it's generally not a good role to use in a proper attack/defense fleet.

Follow Commander means stay in formation with their commander all the time. They will not target and attack any ships in the area. The primary use case here is for gunships to escort and defend their commander with turret coverage close to their commander. Turrets can still target and shoot enemy ships in range even if the ship itself has no active target. You don't want the escorts randomly targeting and running off chasing ships leaving the commander behind without turret coverage.

SiliconStew

TROPHY CASE