Hey GOG, a while back I picked up X3 on gamersgate because it was $8, and I just recently went to play it only to jump in and not know what to do... I don't even know how to move, does it control like EVE, or is it more of a space sim like wing commander? If you guys could point me to a good tutorial, or even help me yourself that would be great, thanks guys.

EDIT: I don't only need help with "moving" I also need help with actually getting started, in case some people thought I only needed help moving my ship.

It's pretty simple. Firstly, if you complete the main story you get a massive boost. Personally I like to trade my way up. So that asks the first question - how are you playing this? Trader, pirate, bounty hunter?

Is that Reunion or TC?

I was kind of wanting to be a trader, maybe a bounty hunter Reunion

Ok, thing about trader is that you need to setup your own trader workforce.

You start of with a standard hauler (mercury I think), but you want to work up to a split camain. That's the best vessel for trading. That means getting in good with the split, trading with them eventually gets you the rep to play.

Starting up, just do energy runs. You can go across a couple of sectors with a load of power cells bought at $12, and sell them at $16. It doesn't take long. Then you want to head up 3 sectors from Argon Prime where they get the silicon wafers. That's the trading ideal, buy a load of them when they're cheap, and sell them to the factories in Argon Prime when they're in demand. The money flows in, and you're ready to buy your automated trader workforce.

Report back when this is done...

Find solar power station, dock. If energy cells are at 12 or 13, buy them. Undock. Find anywhere else, if energy cells are at 15 or 16 sell them.

Make sure to read the manual about the time speed up thingy (SETA), otherwise you'll get bored.

OH - and go through those gate things.

Here is a trading guide that really helped me with X3:TC. I am pretty sure it should still apply to Reunion (in fact, it may have been written for Reunion and I just used it for TC):

http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=121043

Here is a guide on building stations:

http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=279332

I was very big on trading and creating a vast economic empire. If that sort of thing is for you, then those links should be very helpful.


More generally, this is a link to a mod pack for Reunion. I used the one for TC, and the scripts and such were very useful:

http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=151502

big X3 fan here....

First time i played it, i could not do anything either, and i had already played X2!

You just need to study the keyboard layout, it is the quickest way to discover everything that is available to you.

It is quite slow getting started but it does teach you about the trade goods.

The best thing to start with in X3 are universal traders rather than stations

You can go to the Egosoft website and download a list of the locations of all the free ships and loot in the game. claiming and selling the free ships will put you in the game much faster than personal trading.

Ive fallen in love with TC, i wish targeting and flying in Reunion was like it is in TC.... I've become spoiled :p

I always thought getting the abandoned ship locations off the internet and then selling them was a bit...unethical...within the universe of X3.

My experience is only with Terran Conflict, but I think the concepts should be universal.

The basic gist of the whole thing, as a trader, is that you want to buy low (price) and sell at a high price. This can be done based on how much supply the stations have.

So go to each station, and check the supply of the goods they're producing. If they have a lot of goods, the price for the goods will be low. Then buy everything you can afford, and then find some station that will buy those goods. Check if they have a low supply, because then they'll pay more for it.

Eventually, you can buy trading software that will check the prices in the entire sector for you. But they start getting expensive, so when you start you're going to have to do these manually.

There's a logic to what station will produce and what goods they'll need. A good track to start might be buying ore from mining stations. Buy it as cheap as it goes. Ore is a great commodity because a lot of stations need it. Your in-game encyclopedia should have the lists of buy/sell goods, but if not you could check online.

It took a while before I figured out that you can check the amount of supply the station has. After that I started making the big spacebucks.

Edit: You can of course trade a lot of stuff. I guess I just started with ore, and kept doing ore runs until I had enough to buy the software + automated trader.

On this website it shows ore to range from 50 to 206 bucks. So you buy at 50 and sell at 206. Again, apologies if this is massively different from TC in Reunion.

http://eng.x3tc.ru/x3_tc_factories/factory.php?c=NTU3ODg2NTE

Here is a guide to Reunion: http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=98222

It mentions Ore as something like 100%+ profit.

Not when considering how big the x universe is - it is totally unreasonable to expect every individual person to find them by chance. It is a team effort when the game is first released. Then there is the challenge in collecting them!! (with a few easy ones for beginners). Also selling them means you can never reverse engineer them which is a serious trade off in some cases.

If I have the Superbox will I miss anything if I skip the first games entirely and just jump in one of the latest? Which would you recommend for a beginner?

Another question. Keyboard and mouse or Joystick?

if you like nice graphics go for x3 first, if not and you have lots of free time to kill, start from 1st XD
And joystick! I found it rather easy to fly with it

Play from X2 if you want. X2 has the best and probably only tutorial in the whole series. You could just play the tutorial and go on to X3, though the changes in X2 and X3 are pretty vast.