X4: Foundations – How to Stop The Xenon from Taking Over at Game Start!

Learn how to stop the Xenon in their tracks when you first start up a new character.

No Xenon at Game start

All credit goes to Master David !

Do you ever wish you could contain the Xenon so they don’t take over the Void or Hat Choice 1? Well, get ready, this guide is for you.

The most stressful part of my playthroughs of X4 has been deciding not to care about the Xenon and them eventually taking over or trying to build a defense station right outside the jump gate and praying I can get it finished in time. If I build in Hat Choice then the Xenon gank the Void. If I build in the Void then the Xenon launch a full invasion of Hat Choice. I can’t do both at the same time and protect both. It has been frustrating.

But then I found a solution. Incidentally this is also a solution for anyone who wants to be able to move around their HQ without researching teleportation each time.

First, in order to pull this off you need a lot of money in your budgeted game start. I have a guide you can follow to get your budget over 130 Million. My other guide teaches you how to turn that into over 800 million at game start but for today we don’t want to do that, not entirely.

Here is what I propose to do instead. Go to the station editor and build a defense station using only Argon defense disk. You only want ONE kind of defense thing because it will cost you money in blueprints. Build a defense station with the cheapest dock and Argon Defense discs around it. On the Argon Defense discs you want to put L size Plasma turrets and M size flak turrets. Also you need shields, the big ones and the medium ones. Take note of what you used.

Save your creation and give it a name.

Go to budgeted game start. When making your character go to property and add a station. You can then see your creation in a drop down menu. After selecting it there is a square with a plus sign in it to the left. Click on that and you can edit things like which sector the station is in and what kind of manager it has. At first it might seem like the station will just go to a fixed point on the map and you can’t move it. But it is not so. If you click on the number of points for the manager (the number next to the red human icon) then your station now has four corners around it. Now wherever you click on the map the station will move there.

So, add a station and then move it to right in front of the gate in Hat Choice. Add another and move it right in front of the game in the Void. Or even better, stop the Xenon from even getting into Frontier Edge in the first place.

Now this means that by clicking in the right stop during character creation, you can move the HQ around too! I thought it was stuck in that top right corner of the sector but actually you can put it anywhere, even right in front of a jump gate.

Two really good defense stations should set you back about 50 million. That is a lot taken out of our budget. But use the rest to give yourself loadstone, remote detonators, and secure containers and you can make EMP bombs. Sell them all and you can get close to 500 million. Sure, that is not 800 million but I’ll gladly take the 300 million setback to finally just let my mining ships have peace.

Remember when creating your character that you need to give yourself the blueprints for everything you used. Likely the defense platform and dock blueprint is already there but you also need the turret and shield blueprints if you want those to work when you start the game.

For making money to recoup my lost 300 million I set a fast ship on repeat orders to collect the drops and then drop them off at HQ. I set a ship to land at a Hat Free Port. When I need more cash I teleport to HQ, grab stuff, teleport to Free Port and sell it all.

Bonus: How to Move Illegal Wares

Many players might have noticed that if you have illegal inventory items but you are standing and your pilot is actually flying then you don’t get caught by police. Did you know a similar trick seems to also work with illegal wares.

Buy illegal stuff with an S ship. Dock it on a Cerberus. Put it in storage. Fly the M ship to your destination. Right outside, undock the S and do the sale. This made doing the Paranid plot a lot less legal hassle. At least for me.