X4: Foundations – Crystal Mining Guide: How to Identify Valuable Crystals

This guide explains how to find and mine crystals. Crystals can make you a lot of money in the game.

How to Find Crystals

Crystals are in asteroid belts. Fly into an asteroid belt and stop your ship. Look at the asteroids on your screen. Wait a few seconds. Some asteroids will blink. The blinks mean there are crystals on the asteroid.

Fly closer to a blinking asteroid. You will see a small crystal on the asteroid. Shoot the crystal with your ship’s weapons. The crystal will break into pieces. Collect the pieces by flying through them. You can also use your tractor beam to collect them. Press and hold the “O” button to use the tractor beam.

Crystals have different colors. Some crystals are very valuable. Collecting crystals is a fast way for new players to make money.

Crystal Colours, Value and How to Identify Them by Their (Ping) Frequency

There are five types of crystals:

  • Purple: Bandannite – Very common – Price 1k cr
  • Blue: Menelaene – Common – Price 10k cr
  • Yellow: Aguilite – Rare 20k cr
  • Orange: Mitonene – Very Rare 30k cr
  • White: Burnite – Super Rare 250k cr
  • All prices are average and will change randomly at stations.
  • All crystals are inventory items and cannot be remotely collected.
  • Crystals can be sold at station traders.

Frequency

Legend: Im using signs to describe the cystal” ping” frequency.

Imagine a morse code for easyer understanding.

  • (-) = single ping followed by a long pause
  • (*) = fast ping (usually followed by a second fast or very fast ping)
  • (.) = very fast ping (usually followed by a Fast or very fast ping)

Every crystal has a blink frequency (i called em ping):

  • Purple: Bandannite: – – . .
  • Blue: Menelaene: * * . .
  • Yellow: Aguilite: – – * * *
  • Orange: Mitonene: – – – * . .
  • White: Burnite: – * *

When Watching an Asteroid field and focus on single “pings” you can determine the valuable Crystals by their ping-frequency and save alot of time by only collecting the most valuable ones.

This works in theory but there are a few difficultys ill explain in the last guide chapter.

How to Use This Info to Effectively Hunt Valuable Crystals

There are two problems with cystal identification that make it hard to use this info properly to get only the most valuable crystals:

First: All of the asteroids rotate with different speed! So you may be unable to see the full cycle of pings because the roid has moved and the crystal has moved to its non visible side.

Second: The Ping frequency of the most valuable crystals are very similar to the frequencys of the cheapest ones! To Confirm the frequency you have to watch for multiple cycles and even then there is a good chance you will find a purple one instead of a white crystal. Spotting whites requires some experience and even i still have a success rate of aproximately 33% spotting the right crystal.

Tipps: Despite the two difficulties, how can i save time and still make money quick?

  • Activate the scanning mode by pressing shift+2 for easy spotting. 
  • Go for Tripples! If you see a tripple ping go for it! Its either a yellow or orange crystal and those are quite easy to spot and spawn in decent numbers = easy cash. 
  • I think the more dangerous sectors have a higher density of high value crystals. I checked it and it may be true but ive also had good finds in the central sectors as well. A good place to mine is the sector Faulty Logic I after you breached through the entrance there are belts with high desity in the north western part of the system.

There is another way to find crystals, but it might be cheating. If you don’t want to cheat, stop reading now.

You can park your ship in the middle of an asteroid belt. Then, teleport to a different sector. Teleport back to your ship. Now, all the blinking asteroids will blink at the same time. This makes it easy to find the common purple crystals. Look for crystals that blink at a different time than the others. These crystals are rare and valuable. Try it and you’ll see how it works.

I hope the above information was helpful. Happy gaming!

Volodymyr Azimoff
About Volodymyr Azimoff 8018 Articles
I love games and I live games. Video games are my passion, my hobby and my job. My experience with games started back in 1994 with the Metal Mutant game on ZX Spectrum computer. And since then, I’ve been playing on anything from consoles, to mobile devices. My first official job in the game industry started back in 2005, and I'm still doing what I love to do.

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