X4: Foundations on Steam - User reviews, Price & Information
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Thrilling space battles meet deep strategy. X4 invites you to explore, fight, trade, and build an empire in a dynamic, fully simulated space sandbox, where every decision shapes your journey. Now featuring the 2025 flight model overhaul.
X4: Foundations is a space sim, simulation and sandbox game
developed and published by Egosoft.
Released on November 30th 2018 is available on Windows and Linux
in 14 languages: English, German, French, Italian, Simplified Chinese, Portuguese - Brazil, Spanish - Spain, Traditional Chinese, Russian, Korean, Japanese, Spanish - Latin America, Polish and Czech.
It has received 23,847 reviews of which 18,951 were positive and 4,896 were negative resulting in a rating of 7.8 out of 10. 😊
The game is currently priced at 49.99€ on Steam, but you can find it for 8.16€ on Gamivo.
The Steam community has classified X4: Foundations into these genres:
System requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 10 (64-bit) or higher
- Processor: Intel i5-4590 3.3GHz or AMD equivalent
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: Nvidia GTX 780/970 or AMD equivalent (Vulkan support required)
- Storage: 35 GB available space
Linux
- OS: SteamOS (64-bit) or Ubuntu 18.04 (64-bit)
- Processor: Intel i5-4590 3.3GHz or AMD equivalent
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: Nvidia GTX 780/970 or AMD equivalent (Vulkan support required)
- Storage: 35 GB available space
User reviews & Ratings
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
I'm an RTS gamer and I'm hoping my review talks about this game from a different angle for people interested in the game. TLDR: This game is amazing, it is part Mount and Blade, part (but VERY LIGHT) Starfield and basebuilding. It is jam packed with features and systems that might turn away a lot of casual or semi-hardcore gamers, but if you give it the time it needs, it is freaking amazing. The Fun stuff: - You start small, but then you CAN decide what you want from it. Get a bigger ship, command a fleet, create a base or multiple bases, create a Galactic Empire with fleets, stations etc. - It has dynamic missions so factions will always look to enlist your help which can improve your relations with them granting you access to their technology (ships, weapons, etc.) - The scale is insane. You can walk on foot in your ship and stations. Once you start to buy or earn bigger ships, you start to see how small you fighters are in comparison to destroyers and capital class ships. - You can have a fleet and almost all, if not, all ships can be controlled by you personally OR buy the crews you hire when you are in stations. - The economic systems in game is crazy...a good SMALL example is building ships. ALL ships require resources (Silicon, ore, etc.) which trade vessels (From different factions or yours) will deliver them to a station to be turned into chips, electronic parts, etc. WHICH IN THEN is delivered again to the WHARF (small ships) or SHIPYARD (Big ships) to finally build your ship. IF ANY OF THESE SYSTEMS ARE INTERRUPTED, it affects your ship building (or your allies and enemies), your other supplies like weapons manufacturing, food, medical supplies etc. - You can steal ships and be a pirate. The NOT SO FUN stuff: - It may feel janky. NO, not the bad janky, but the noticable janky. Because there's so much systems, something is bound to jank up. - Takes TIME. The game isn't hard to learn, but it's not for people who are impatient. There's so much menus, you need time to know where stuff is and what stuff does, other than that, you basically learn the game like any other game. - The larger your fleet or empire the more time you'll be spending in the "spead sheet" because at that point, you're just commanding ships. Early game you're basically piloting the ship itself, later when you own a bigger ship or fleet or stations, you're practically the boss. You'll be driven around (you can always fly yourself, but your crew will drive you anywhere you want) and all actions you used to do in early game can be done for you but the crews you begin to amass so you're just in the menu commanding everything, unless you just automate everything and drive yourself if you trust the AI that way. and that's it, hope this review helps you.
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If you are lucky enough to be the kind of person this game is made for, you're going to have a lot of "I can't believe a game like this exists and I'm so happy it does" moments.
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X4's main strength is it's scale. From your spacesuit out in space you can board your tiny fighter, land it on a frigate, take that frigate and land it on a carrier. You can take that carrier and dock it at your station. You can look out over the docking ports from your observation deck and enjoy all your hard work. The universe is almost fully simulated, every ship, every battle, every resource. You could help a factions wartime production by building your own stations and selling to them for cheaper. You could tank an economy by jettisoning the ship building material of a station. You can even start major wars . I love this game, but it's not for everyone. The ship AI is still pretty buggy, the UI is clunky and not very intuitive, and mods are needed to smooth out some of the rough spots. The game isn't unplayable without mods, but there are a ton of QoL improvements that I'd say are a must. It's not the most well optimized game in the world, but it's getting better. With that said, my most notable experience in the game was feeling a little slighted by a super annoying (to me) faction. Despite tense but mostly peaceful relations they'd kill a cargo ship of mine here and there. At one point I added corvette escorts to combat the Xenon and Kha'ak. The escorts retaliated, the fight spilled over into the neighboring system, and we were headed for all out war. I barricaded myself in a system I claimed and slowly built an armada while fighting skirmishes around their gates. Then the armada was unleashed. They've been scoured off the map. I didn't even want their systems, but they're mine now. Nothing will be built there, ever. It is not a place of honor. Every so often they attempt to resurrect themselves and rebuild a station that I stamp out like a weed. My transports and miners are safe again.
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Honestly, I would rate this game as "Mid" despite the fact I gave a recommend, but there is no option for that. Please prepare yourself for a long review, because there is a lot to cover. The reason why I rate this "Mid" is because while it's very appealing and fun, there are some glaring issues. As a newcomer to the series, X4 being the first game, I think my review will be very fair without fan-bias. In addition to that, I began X4 during Cradle of Humanity at version 4.0. I'd also like to mention that the only reason I found this game is because I was searching for an "offline version of Eve Online", "space RTS games", and "single-player space shooters". This just happen to check the boxes I was interested in. However, I didn't do much research, I just wanted to play. Now, after over 1400 hours of playing, I will share my own research with you. As I begin, I must absolutely ask you to be wary of the reviews with extremely high hours played. The reason why is because, X4 is a type of game where things happen in real-time. This means, a second spent in the game is a second spent of your real life, so it is a serious time waster. Now, I'll give an example, there is a ship that takes roughly 30 minutes to build. This means that people with extremely high hours played are actually spending most of their time "waiting" around until things get completed so that they can actually progress forward in the game. And it's not just building ships, it's literally everything you do, it takes so much time. So, if you truly value your time, "Do Not Buy This Game." The above reason is why I am "Mid" and wouldn't recommend it to the average person just passing. X4 is a game where, if you are new to the series, it demands a lot out of you and in return, you may not get a lot back. Now, X4 checked some boxes, as mentioned above. With that, X4 does try to be a game that allows you to do a ton of things. While it can do a lot of things, it also will NOT do a very great job at it. Keep that in mind. As a sandbox game, a "session" doesn't really end until you simply get tired of it. That said, you have to find your purpose to actually play. When X4 launched, there was only 1 gamestart, you are given 1 *terrible* "newbie" ship, a small sum of money, and then yourself. You figure out the rest by piddling around. Later on, and with the DLCs, better gamestarts were added to speed up the pace of "getting into the game" and helping provide guidance to your purpose to play the game. Purpose, in X4, you can become whatever you want. Be a Trader? Pirate? Smuggler? Or your own Faction leader? You can do that. However, there are some things to keep in mind no matter what you choose, you have to be aware that the economy and state of your game session is largely impacted by you, the player. X4 is a universe that is resource starved, despite the fact it's a huge sandbox. Part of the reason is because of lore, though, it's mainly attributed to the fact that the "simulation" of X4 demands a huge amount of CPU resources. So, make sure your CPU is very strong because X4 will run very poorly if not. -- Your impact? X4 is resource starved. While NPC miners, traders, stations do exist, they cannot do much alone to sustain themselves. Eventually, the factions will spiral downwards until they stop functioning, literally. They exist to give the player some kind of foothold until the player can get strong enough to supplement the NPC factions, and thus the entire universe. -- In addition, there's a constant threat called the "Xenon" which is akin to Earth's mother nature. Xenon exist to "force" things to happen. Most players will wipe Xenon, but when this happens, the NPC factions will break down, eventually. That is because they don't really have anyone to fight. NPC factions do have war with each other, but it's not major enough to "force" things to happen. So, if you eliminate Xenon, you practically "won" the game, breaking down the NPC factions in the process. -- Why do the NPC factions break down? The economy of the game runs on war, more importantly, stuff blowing up. You have to let Xenon exist for that reason, if you want to keep your game "alive". This also means, don't allow the factions to ally up, create as much division as possible between the factions, even though Xenon is their common enemy. By allowing stuff to blow up, you enable jobs for Miners, Traders, Stations, and obviously the Military. If nothing is blowing up, you disable the need for those jobs. You have a big factor in the game's Economy. I better speak on the AI. The AI is rather troublesome to deal with. Firstly, the player AI and NPC AI operate at different levels. One example is responding to enemies. When NPC AI gets into trouble, like a Miner being attacked, an automatic distress beacon is sent and nearby forces will respond to it, saving the Miner. For the player, this isn't a feature, so you must manually locate them and send a security force. -- X4 is a game that requires extreme micromanagement because everything is explicit. I'll give an example. Most ships have a natural command of "Hold Position". So, if one of your ships was being attacked, it will do absolutely nothing against the attacker. Turrets will respond to enemies, if properly set, and I do mean that they have to be properly set, otherwise, they won't. Regardless, you must manually tell your ship to fight back. -- So you see, there are extreme layers to everything which requires extreme micromanagement and as mentioned, this eats a ton of people's time. Due to that, there are tons of buttons and commands everywhere for that reason. Everything takes so much just to get functioning the way you "expect" it too. Even then, sometimes they simply don't function the way you "want" them too. There are more things I could mention, however, there are more than enough reviews that speak on the AI, and trying to manage it. Time, time is precious. If you want to even think about playing X4, then you must set aside extreme amounts of time. One of the biggest culprits, in addition to what I've already said, is the sheer amount of time needed to "learn" this game and how the "mechanics" of the game work. For a first-timer, it took a long time to learn the basics just to simply play and start having fun. The game DOES NOT do a good job of introducing you, as a new player, to the game. The learning curve is extremely high, even some "veterans" have struggled, if that tells you anything. -- This is the TOP reason why I "Do Not Recommend" to just the average person. I would only recommend if they are a hardcore fan of the X games. Also, I would only recommend if you wanted a game like FreeSpace or Elite Dangerous, but wanted something much more. Again, the learning curve is very high, and the time required to do anything in the game is excessive that it would turn off a large majority of people. -- Speaking of time, there is a device called "SETA" which speeds up the "in-game" time by 6x. Let that sink in for a second. This game requires so much "Time" to do anything that they decided to invent a function to "speed up time" so you won't get too bored "waiting" around for things to happen so that you can progress forward in the game. Think about that. That just sounds really weird, doesn't it? -- Now, there's a special caveat I have to point out about that SETA. You have to "craft" it first. So, that means you have to find "materials" to "craft" it. Those parts required have a low drop rate too. But, there's more to it. You need to farm those parts from Xenon and Khaak. Khaak are like Xenon, except they don't ever disappear, they simply respawn after a while. Regardless, you have to burn a lot of time farming for SETA, and that can take hundreds of hours. Just get mods to greatly improve the game I had more to say but Character limit reach
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X:4 Foundations Egosoft's ship-building trade sim is one of the most intricate and rewarding management games I've ever played. X4 juggles an engaging and adaptive AI-managed galaxy with realtime strategy elements that makes for a tremendously engaging single player experience. A brief fore-word Just decided to put down the game after a 150hr save with a business worth around $6billion, which was my second (and much more successful) playthrough. Unlike a lot of other reviews I've seen on this game, I actually only played X: Rebirth, which was the previous game in the series. Rebirth is a little bit different from the other games in the X series from what I understand. It's more trade focused and places far less emphasis on actually piloting ships, and more emphasis on running the business. That's my experience and some bias going in to this review. This review is going to be some stuff I liked, some stuff I thought had room for improvement, and then whether or not I recommend it for you. This review is getting a thumbs up because I think X4: Foundations delivers exactly what it says on the tin, to the best of it's ability but whether or not that's actually for you... well hopefully my review will help. The Good Stuff X4: Foundations is probably the most intricate single player space trading simulator on the market at the moment. The galactic economy successfully walks the tightrope of being complicated enough to present a rich and satisfying economy that allows for endless back and forth with the AI players. The Sandbox I've seen come critique that Diplomacy in the game is very limited but I'm not sure that that's a fair description. The AI players are very economically free. They are pretty good at looking after their own economies (while leaving enough room for you to compete) but their foreign policy is almost completely static. The relations between factions at the start of the game will stay the same throughout if you don't complete the major quests. The quests allow for some really cool changes to the change in the galactic status quo and can radically change the state of play depending on your choices and when you complete the quests. Ship Combat Ship combat is really dang cool. The game has an amazing sense of scale and accomplishment. You can dock on stations you've built and on ships you've bough and there's a real sense of wonder and awe as you pilot truly enormous battleships or manage massive factory stations. I found progress to be tremendously satisfying. There's also a great sense of scale as you grow your business. Going from buying a single M sized ship early on to eventually buying whole fleets of L and XL ships is just very satisfying. Station Building Station building is pretty good. I think for a 3D module based building system the controls are alright and after getting over the learning curve of decision paralysis of where to start, I quite liked the puzzle of fitting together self-sufficient station factories. Menus The menu system isn't perfect but I think it does a really good job at showing you what you need to know. You can setup factories that are supplied by the AI, by yourself or a mix for individual parts in the chain. The factory and ship interfaces aren't perfect. There's lots of text and different features aren't always intuitive. Overall, I think you get plenty of tools to make your factories and ships operate in a way that is useful, once you learn to use the system. Room for Improvement Game pacing and the learning curve I played X4 almost entirely with a stationary ship making money by commanding other ships and trying to make my stations as profitable as possible. This made for a pretty painfully slow start but I used a lot of that time to build relations with different factions, explore the galaxy and find where in the galaxy I could begin to make some money. I've played a number of dense sandbox management games and I think it's safe to say X4 has one of the steepest learning curves, and many info-landmines which can make learning the game tremendously frustrating. Prior to playing, I had more than 100 hours in a previous X title, spent maybe 2 or 3 hours reading steam guides and played through the games tutorials. I still made mistakes which made my first 20-40 hours of play painful. I think fans would argue that "If I had just started in region X" or "If I had properly read popular guide Y" I'd have had a better time but I think realistically, a new player is going to make at least one mistake which will make their first game very hard or painfully slow. For example, I followed a guide on building a Terran Wharf and found that I was having to import far more energy cells than I expected. This was because I had failed to recognise that the guide built their wharf in a different region and that would mean that, because energy cell production efficiency is based on region (due to differences in sunlight for the solar panels) my station would not be self-sufficient. I learned this after spending more than 12 hours building the station. Another example: I built a number of profitable trade stations in split territory. I followed the major questline for the split, supporting the government in a civil war. I didn't know that this war would cause the neighboring stations to turn hostile, which destroyed many of my ships and effectively shut down a great deal of my trade. Mods are a must I think it's a weakpoint that the game is just straight up worse without mods. Galaxy exploration is mostly relegated to a chore, as is using satellites to stay up-to-date with available trades. Without mods, this will absorb hours and hours of your gameplay which would be better spent doing fun missions and reading through station information. Lockboxes are really awkward to break in to but doing so is vital for a lot of quests (including major plotlines) The ship AI behaves differently depending on whether it's fighting in the real sim (where you see the ships) or in the map (where they're largely just icons). Some ships are poor when piloted by even the best AI pilots in the sim because of their weapon placements and relative position to their enemies, so you may find that the battleship you spent your whole day grinding cash for got blown up because the AI can't handle the turret placement very well. Will you like it? If you like other X games, it's a strong recommend. If you like management games and don't mind 2 hours+ of pre-game research and tutorials and a slow start? I'd say it's a recommend too. The game is management first, battle sim second. If that's what you like, I can confidently recommend it. When starting the game... If I started my game again, there's a lot of information I could use to have a much quicker start but I found my first 2 playthrough to be quite a slog for large parts, and that's from a person who enjoys slow management games. Piracy is a massive source of cash that I just failed to exploit for most of my game. I'd also recommend finding a market for raw materials as they produce lots of cash with a minimal overhead. I would strongly encourage to play the tutorials and pick one of the pre-set starts for your first campaign. All the campaigns put you in the same galaxy, but differ in the amount of starting help you receive. I chose the Teladi start, which gives a factory but I think I would recommend a Terran start to get to grips with the game. I'd also strongly encourage getting some QoL mods, especially the cheat mods. Save yourself a massive chore and just instantly explore the galaxy and its stations. It'll give you a much better view of whats happening where and give you the tools you need to avoid being caught out by the fog of war.
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Frequently Asked Questions
X4: Foundations is currently priced at 49.99€ on Steam.
X4: Foundations is currently not on sale. You can purchase it for 49.99€ on Steam.
X4: Foundations received 18,951 positive votes out of a total of 23,847 achieving a rating of 7.81.
😊
X4: Foundations was developed and published by Egosoft.
X4: Foundations is playable and fully supported on Windows.
X4: Foundations is not playable on MacOS.
X4: Foundations is playable and fully supported on Linux.
X4: Foundations is a single-player game.
There are 13 DLCs available for X4: Foundations. Explore additional content available for X4: Foundations on Steam.
X4: Foundations is fully integrated with Steam Workshop. Visit Steam Workshop.
X4: Foundations does not support Steam Remote Play.
X4: Foundations is enabled for Steam Family Sharing. This means you can share the game with authorized users from your Steam Library, allowing them to play it on their own accounts. For more details on how the feature works, you can read the original Steam Family Sharing announcement or visit the Steam Family Sharing user guide and FAQ page.
You can find solutions or submit a support ticket by visiting the Steam Support page for X4: Foundations.
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Last Updates| Steam data | 14 June 2025 16:30 |
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| SteamSpy data | 07 June 2025 17:45 |
| Steam price | 14 June 2025 12:47 |
| Steam reviews | 13 June 2025 20:04 |
If you'd like to dive deeper into the details about X4: Foundations, we invite you to check out a few dedicated websites that offer extensive information and insights. These platforms provide valuable data, analysis, and user-generated reports to enhance your understanding of the game and its performance.
- SteamDB - A comprehensive database of everything on Steam about X4: Foundations
- SteamCharts - Analysis of X4: Foundations concurrent players on Steam
- ProtonDB - Crowdsourced reports on Linux and Steam Deck X4: Foundations compatibility
Game modes
Features
Online players
2,234
Developer
Egosoft
Publisher
Egosoft
Release
30 Nov 2018
Platforms
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