Starting Scenario: Terran Defender
Official Bonus Pack: Installed
Experience with the X series: Zero

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After that incident with the maple syrup and the cucumbers at my older sister's engagement party the family had Officially. Had. ENOUGH. I found myself thrown out of the house. Disinherited. The works. Seeing as I've no actual life skills and homelessness isn't very appealing, I had no choice but to try to join the military. Somehow I got accepted. They really will take anyone these days.

In any case, that's all in the past and the past is boring. Today I am a Terran Defender and soon I'll be receiving my first mission. Probably a patrol or something, oh joy of joys. They've given me a Sabre and 1000 Credits for expenses. Let's see how it goes.

Smooth sailing to you on the star tides, my fellow explorer!

(Also, aren't you just a little bit curious how much maple syrup you could stock up on with those 1000 credits?! I'm sure there's space stations out there where they've never even heard of how you can combine those with cucumbers, so you could make an absolute fortune being the first to market!)

Hey, cool! Nice to see another TC player. Ima bout 2/3 through or so TC by my own estimate. By that, i mean completed game plots, as I build my empire. The Hub is one serious plot to get through (no worries for you right now...that'll be muuuuuuch later, if you decide to tackle it, and you should, lol). I am on the very last part of it, supplying a shit-ton of Micro Chips to it. Anyway...the nice thing about this sandbox space game is that, with most of the main plots you can do, you can work on the missions as you wish....as in, most of them, after you complete a part, you can just take a break from it, and go about exploring, buying, trading, ect., and return and do some more later at your leisure..or not!. I am 19 days-10 Hours in, and still enjoying the hell out the game. One thing I'd like to suggest for you beginning, is to try and dock at stations fairly often to keep your current game saved. Early in the game, you won't have the credits, or access to buy Salvage Insurance (which lets you save your game anywhere, and anytime....even in space). So to save yourself some frustration and heart-ache from losing a lot of progress, try to save somewhat frequently by docking, as the game will use "auto-save" in one of the 3 available Auto-save slots. Once in a while, while you are docked, it wouldn't hurt to hard save your game manually as well in one of the 10 other manual save slots the game provides for you. I mention this, because the game will recycle the 3 auto-save spots and over write them as the game goes on...so if there is a particular spot you'd like to go back to, that occurred quite a bit prior, it won't be in your auto-saves anymore...only the last 3 most recent station dockings. Just wanted to mention this, as it can be frustrating and heartbreaking to play for several hours, especially as a beginner, only to lose all that progress because you didn't get out of menu while flying your ship, in time to steer it clear of an asteroid or station....or perhaps, you just made a small mistake in your ship controls and plowed into some capital ship by accident, and BOOM, your back to a save from 8 hours ago....that sucks, trust me I know, I learned the hard way, lol. At any rate, sorry to be so long winded....have fun, and welcome to the X universe :D

Just a friendly reminder: You know you can play the add-on, Albion Prelude, if you like. I myself picked X3TC instead of that but everyone should choose as they please. There is a big mod to add the plots from X3TC to X3AP if you are interested.

Also, Egosofts forum is a good source of information:

gameplay: http://forum.egosoft.com/viewforum.php?f=2
technical: http://forum.egosoft.com/viewforum.php?f=93
mods & scripts: http://forum.egosoft.com/viewforum.php?f=94

Those links above are for the Terran War pack! (X3TC & X3AP)

DAY 1
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Today is almost over and despite my initial fears it's turning out to be quite profitable. I'm now the hella proud owner of 5 ships and I didn't have to buy a single one of them, ha! Take that awful beginner's luck. On the other hand trying to max out the speed on all of them has left me too broke to afford new weaponry but, eh, I'll manage. Getting ahead of myself though, aren't I?

Well, it's just me bragging and complaining to myself, so let me start again by saying, first of all, that I'm an idiot who only figured out how to properly aim 8 hours ago. It's a miracle how I survived while only acceptiing combat missions. And just thinking of all the profits I could have earned if I had only paid attention during simulation training at the academy makes me want to rip my hair off! Except, I probably wouldn't have earned all that much anyway, because I started with The Absolute Worst Ever luck when it comes to available missions. It's as if perspective employers had conspired to troll me.

After the first mission was over (and yes, it was patroling - an endless snoozefest of one and to add insult to the injury the pay was peanuts) they send me all the way to freaking Mars to bring back an M5 Rapier and did I see a single credit for my work? Hell no! Oh sure, they let me keep the ship (still have it by the way) but at the time it had no weapons, current maximum speed was 80something per second compared to over 200 on my Sabre and it didn't even have a SETA. Like, are you serious? Are you fucking kidding me? They then wanted me to tail a Xenon collaborator aaaaaaall the way to his hidden beyond the PTNI headquarters pirate base and his at least half a dozen comrades with their maxed out weapon slots and missile collections, who I would have to somehow avoid so as to get within around 500 meters from the base in order to scan it, probably with equipment the Terran military never bothered to provide me in the first place.

So I left the pirates to their own devices and went sightseeing in Argon territory instead, hoping to find some proper paying work. Well I found work alright. A whole bunch of peeps asking me to build factories for them or to sell goods to them in quantities bigger than my poor ship could ever hope to carry, unless it spontaneously mutated into some sort of mini freighter. But no chance of that happening so, sorry folks, you can't have your stupid crap delivered in 7 minutes. And what's that? You want me to go out of my way to fly you to random place that's nowhere near my planned route but you can't be arsed to walk into the docked ship, instead you want me to somehow produce a Transporter Device out of thin air so as to beam you up, never-mind that it's not for sale anywhere in your race's part of the universe and even if it was you wouldn't be able to breath in here anyway, because this is NOT a fucking personnel Transport Ship? Yeah, fuck you too buddy. Middle fingers all around. When actual combat missions finally started appearing I just sat there and had a good cry.

But yeah, after that I learned the hard way that a) I should be firing in front of a ship and not on the ship itself unless I'm directly and perfectly in front of/behind it, and b) tailing requests are bullshit. The gates always spit me out 8-9 kilometers away from the target who then accuses me of stalking and belly up goes the mission. But if I hang back a reasonable 20something km the employer will randomly message me that I'm an idiot who has lost the target and he's not paying a single credit for this. Hey! Excuse you smartass! The target is still in my sights. Not the ship's sights. Mine. And my ship is 100km/s faster than whoever it is I've been following, without taking the SETA into account. So how about you fuck off and not tell me how to do my job, huh? Wanker.

Luckily for me there are always patrols that need to happen and pirates brainless enough to try attacking mining facilities with Discoverers, Novas or whatever other tiny thing is popular in pirate circles these days. Not that my ships are any bigger, but still. I'm not the one playing mosquitoes vs the elephant. Each of these missions by itself isn't very lucrative but there have been quite a few of them and they stack up. Plus there's no time limit for them so I can do both types at the same time. Also it turns out that as cumbersome as it is trying to steer the ship with the sector map open in front of me, it actually pays off. I managed to spot and claim a Buster Sentinel and an Advanced Perseus which I'm currently flying. It's not as fast as the Sabre, though still quite fast, and the weapons' range is criminally short (only 1km? Do you want me to blow the pirates/Xenons/Kha'ak up or kiss them?) but the shields are on a completely different level, there's far more compatible weaponry than before and now I can even mount them at the rear end of the ship to foil sneak attacks.Yay! I also managed to... ahem... persuade that one pirate into giving me his Nova Raider. I have been trying to do this during every fight but after I learned how to aim they die off far too quickly. I'll look away from their hull & shield meters for a moment to check that I'm not running out of weapon energy and boom! So that was cool. Of course I then had to rebuy the Fight Command Software and Triplex Scanner, plus the speed and maneuvering upgrades for all the new ships so I'm not exactly swimming in credits right now, but they will pay for themselves soon enough. Double also, I got myself an Argon police license and I'm 2 ranks away from the Paranid version.

Oh yeah, I stumbled into a half-built Goner Temple a while ago. The people there wanted me to bring them ore (in the thousands too! Hello? Do I look like I can carry that much to you? Do I really?) so they can finish building it, but there's no time limit for once. Blindness excused. Maybe I'll look into this if I ever want a break from combat. It will be a long while before I can afford the short of ship required for it though and I doubt I'll find anything with 3000+ cargo capacity just idling about behind some asteroids or whatever.

For now I'm going to sleep. I've fucking earned it.

PS: Noone sells maple syrup. :(

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Phew! You guys were right, the game is addicting. :D Thank you for the advice! So far space has been mercifully filled with stations, factories, etc and I haven't had to buy a single Salvage Insurance thingy. I make sure to dock somewhere every sector. I saw it in Hardrada's diary before I started, but decided against it in the end. Figured I'd give both parts a fair chance.

Do not forget about the aility to remote control other ships.
Do not forget about the repair laser.
The pay and difficulty of missions will rise as your combat and trading ranks increase. Peanuts turn into multi-million pays.

Nice first day bud. Sounds like you're really getting the hang of it. I don't do those "Follow" missions either. They're too much of a pain in the ass IMO. You're probably gonna want to pick up some type of trading ship before long; who knows, maybe you'll come across an abandoned one at some point....your powers of observation have proved useful your first day :). Also, some of those "transport person" type missions can pay decent....maybe someplace sells a cargo life support unit to install in ships? Hmmmm, maybe.... You do like Proffitttttssss don't you?

It can also earn you thousands if you repair and sell the ships you capture. Glad to see you've already started your space diary :).

DAY 2
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WTF I just saw a flying saucer. "Unknown Object" to be precise. Looked just like those ufo things people used to rave about before we colonized the solar system. I tried to follow it but it completely disappeared after passing the gate to Omicron Lyrae. Too bad. I wanted to capture it.

Anyway, I'm currently up to 6 million credits. Right on time too. I should probably stop taking all those pirate busting missions before I make enemies of the Yaki. I want to see if they have anything interesting for sale. If only I could stumble on a base of theirs sometime soon! This of course means I should start trading already. I've got those two super freighters I bought for dirt cheap a while ago since their previous owners wanted to buy new ships and didn't need them any more. After some quality repair time with my trusty laser they're as good as new. I've given them orders to go to Boron space, if they survive the journey, I'll equip them with jumpdrives and see about planning trading routes. If they don't survive, I'll only have lost 300000 credits.

Oh yes, the jumpdrive! Best ship upgrade I got so far. It really helped with all those "You've got 13 minutes! Go!" assassination missions. The Boron didn't want to sell it to me at first, they wouldn't even allow me to dock at their stations. Same with the Split. I wonder why? It's not like I ever went out of my way to hunt their ships. Still, they became more cooperative after I offed some pirates for them. Though like I said, I really should stop that for now. *sigh* A pity. I liked those missions. But before I give them up I'll go see what happened with that Nova Raider ship Jackson keeps pestering me about (he always pops up while I've got the SETA on trying to keep a deadline. Damn asshole, I bet he does it on purpose). Maybe I'll have better luck now with nine active lasers and my own missile collection.

The Exterminator has invited me to take part in something called Operation Final Fury to wipe out the Kha'ak. Sounds too dangerous for me right now.

Hitting regular pirates during missions or otherwise won't affect your reputation with the Yaki, so don't worry about that. The only way you can make the Yaki angry with you is by attacking them directly.

Sounds like you need a TM to ferry ships across :).

The ships I'm talking about are named "Yaki Something" not "Pirate Something" though. They pop up a lot during patrol and station protection missions and I have claimed four such ships due to that. Does this fall under attacking them directly?

A TM huh? Interesting.

SETA does not make one go any faster, everyhting goes faster including timers.

Yes, it does :). Yaki ships will occasionally raid other sectors, as will regular pirate ships. They're not allies however, so you can still attack regular pirates without angering the Yaki... and not attack any Yaki ships you spot if you want to keep them friendly (same rule applies for missions).

It does mean however that my already faster-than-the-target ship will reach said target in even less seconds. So why are those mooks complaining fss....

Definitely no more fighting Yaki then! Incidentally do the plain pirates also have a foe-friend gauge? They're missing from the list in the Shift+C menu. The Kha'ak however are there. Funny. Is it possible to have good relations with these two as well? Buy their ships, dock at their stations, get missions?