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X4: Foundations on Steam - User reviews, Price & Information
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Your journey to building a vast space empire begins behind the controls of a single ship. Explore, trade, fight, and build as you rise to command fleets, stations, and entire economies in a living, fully simulated universe that reacts to every decision.
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 5.65€ on Gamivo.
The Steam community has classified X4: Foundations into these genres:
Media & Screenshots
Get an in-depth look at X4: Foundations through various videos and screenshots.
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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 1060 or AMD RX 5300 or equivalent (Vulkan 1.4 support required)
- Storage: 35 GB available space
- Additional Notes: Minimum: 8 GB RAM (base game) / 16 GB RAM (with all expansions installed)
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 1060 or AMD RX 5300 or equivalent (Vulkan 1.4 support required)
- Storage: 35 GB available space
- Additional Notes: Minimum: 8 GB RAM (base game) / 16 GB RAM (with all expansions installed)
Steam Price & Best Deals
User reviews & Ratings
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
There's no game that can scratch the itch of a space sandbox the way X4 does. Despite all the combat jank and having to fight against the terrible UI to get things done, I can't stop myself from loving and recommanding this game. I'll start with the main positive : the scope of the game is incredible. The fully simulated wares/resources economy and logistics is the backbone of the whole sandbox, and will give you the opportunity to rise as a trader, a miner and/or a fighter. The usual flow of the game makes you start from humble begining by piloting a single small ship, to eventually rise after a lot of time and grind to the owner of massive autonomous network of ships covering these three aspects. The "endgame" will mix these aspects with stations building, becoming your own economic powerhouse by producing wares that you can sell or use to feed your own shipyards to produce ships. Threats like piracy, relentless Xenon incursions and potentially other factions you may have angered will also make you rise as a military powerhouse, having several strike groups with specialized compositions to adress those threats. The whole military side has great things going on, you can build your own carrier strike groups with a fleet carrier as a command ship and capital ships/frigates/small crafts/supply ships having specific orders around that carrier. Each ship you order to build can be customized with the weapons, shields and engines you want to specialize them. Every ship has an interior you can walk around, with bigger ships having large command bridges filled with your crew, great for immersion. The strength of X4 is you can play and immerse yourself on any component of the fleet you've designed: The admiral walking in the main bridge of the carrier giving orders, the captain of one of the escort destroyer engaging an enemy capital ship, the pilot of one of the interceptor scrambling from the carrier to intercept incoming bandits. But there's also some criticisms to be made there, which i'll adress later. The game has 6 main races to interact with, divided between subfactions. Some of these divisions are open civil wars, some are peaceful but fragile status quos. This is where the main quests/missions come into play. They will make you fly and walk around to acquaint yourself with the various factions and cultures, and will end up with you being the decisive factor to their future. You can choose to be a space UN diplomat and ultimately fix every conflicts, or think about your profits by picking the warmongering option, creating more wars so more demands for weapons, ships and wares to build them. Or any mix of decisions that will fit to your roleplay rules, this is a sandbox after all. I'll now talk about one of my experiences that I hope will highlight the best side of this game. As a long time Terran enjoyer (best faction in X3:AP by far, and beautiful ships all around), my main motivation was to roleplay as a Terran loyalist using his growing influence and power to shape the whole sector favorably to secure the future of Earth. The Terrans can be described as active isolationnists focused on fighting the Xenon threat by any means necessary, their methods giving them a terrible diplomatic standing with most factions. My goals led me to undermine the Argon Federation as they're the biggest threat to Terrans, completely boxing them from interacting with the rest of the galaxy. The Argons in this playthrough managed to secure decisive victories against the Xenon, the Holy Order and the Zyarch Dominion, snowballing them into a superpower. So my plan to curb them led me to secure my standing with Zyarch and use the entire might of my carrier strike groups to secure their territories against the Xenon who wiped 3 of their sectors. Once the Xenons were kept at bay, I started to fix Zyarch's struggling economy by continuously filling their wares shortages with my freighters, and eventually securing contracts to build them new defense stations. After a lot of time, Zyarch managed to build back a strong military and take back all the territory lost after a few decisive victories against Argon incursions. I was so happy to see how I influenced a whole war outcome to my favor without firing a single salvo. The whole operation was aslo very profitable as Zyarch was willing to pay a lot more for wares because of the shortages. Now the bad part. First the UI is a hard wall that fill filter a lot of player, very understandably so. It will take anyone playing this game a lot of effort and searching to familiarize themselves with the various menus to make something out of this game. Even when you get to the point of understanding most of it, it won't get any more confortable to use them. I'll give an exemple there: If you want to rotate out your fighter pilots from the carrier to train a new batch of pilots (which is the only serious way to train new captains), you will have to switch each one individually. That means selecting the fighter you want to change the pilot, pressing "c" to communicate, select 2 dialogue options to reassign him elsewhere, go to your crew menu, select the crew you want to promote and assign him to that ship. Great, it's done! Now imagine when your proud Tokyo-class fleet carrier hosts more than 50 small crafts and you want to rotate everyone... fun times indeed. The second bad point is the jankiness around combat. While the combat is good at every level as mentioned previously, it won't be as good in each aspect as a space game specialized on combat. It will be hard to explain with words, so watch a few videos to judge for youself (Captain Collins on youtube is a good reference). For me it does the job well enough considering the scope of the game and the fact you can operate a whole carrier strike group to begin with, which is very rare for a video game. The REAL jank comes from the unavoidable frustration you will experience with the AIs of your ships. You WILL experience again and again your anti-cap destroyers with elite captains rush under a Xenon K and get destroyed instead of using its superior range to engage it safely. You WILL see your fighters slam on your carrier when coming back after a sortie. You WILL lose bombers due to them not attempting to dodge enemy fire at all. If you have a mindset of not reloading saves and live with the consequences instead, it will be an infuriating experience. Another minor criticism i'll give about combat is the general lack of capital ships compared to X3. Only one faction has an escort carrier, most factions lack an XL battleship. There's a gap between M frigates and L "destroyers" in every faction (the current destroyers we have are definitely cruisers based on modern Navy roles, and we're lacking ships that would fit as proper screening destroyers). There's a lot of mods hanging around to fill these gaps, but I would love Egosoft to adress this at some point. I'll even forgive them for not bringing back my beloved X3AP Kyoto-class Battlecarrier if they fill the ship roster gaps. Finally, a brief summary of the points i've not talked about: - The graphics are okay, not stellar (heh) but does the job well considering the scope of the game and Egosoft's available resources - The music is great, "Rise of the Protectorate" is now one of my favorite video game tracks - The performance can dip a lot with big stations or when lots of ships are involved. Considering the scope of the game again with how big battles can be and how busy sectors can be, this is acceptable but more optimizations would be welcomed. - The sound design in general is uneven, good sounding weapons and ship engines, bad voice acting and overall arguable sound mixing - The vanilla "grind" is real, expect to throw dozens of hours of repeating the same actions before reaching the point of getting a carrier strike group or a proper tycoon empire going on - Lots of mods going around to customize your game the way you want
The negative reviews aren't wrong, I just happen to enjoy games that have vast scale and complexity, and I'm no stranger to UI that defies comprehension. You should still call out the problems and vent your frustrations of course. I've played StarQuest Online, Shores of Hazeron, and Star Citizen, so I'm well acquainted with games that aim high but at the cost of a casual streamlined experience. This game does have pretty extensive tutorials though, do them. You really need to stop, take a deep breath, and buckle up. Enjoy the strengths and forgive the shortcomings, there isn't a single game in existence with similar scale that doesn't have problems, it's like some kind of curse that has plagued the genre as a whole for decades, and any developer attempting it themselves will either have to narrow their focus or face the exponential complexity of having thousands of different systems come together and still work as intended.
X4 Foundations is a rather unique game in the space sim genre. It's main draw is that it is a fully simulated universe. By universe, I don't mean a literal universe like Elite Dangerous or No Man's Sky. Instead, the entire game world is fully simulated on your computer. Every ship that you see was built somewhere and will be doing something even when it leaves the sector you're in. Other factions will mine, trade, and build all on their own regardless of whether the player does anything to help/harm them, even if the player isn't present. Even more enticing is the dynamic real-time economy which is not based or influenced by arbitrary values, but is based on real-time supply-and-demand. If you see a space station in dire need of components, it's not because the game did some calculated RNG, it's because that faction actually built a crapload of ships (which are flying off somewhere in space even if you don't see them) and are now in a resource shortage. This makes for lucrative opportunities if a particular faction is in dire need of resources to rebuild a fleet (which going back to the fully simulated universe bit, they WON'T be able to resupply their fleets if they don't have the resources at their wharfs/shipyards). This also means that if you're trying to take one faction out, you can cripple their supply lines and leave them wide open once you whittle down their main fleets. Speaking of attacking other factions, I will admit that combat is one of this game's weakpoints. While there are hardpoints on ships, it's not as versatile as Elite Dangerous. Most of the time you'll be outfitting a ship, even the large and capital-size ones, with only one or two main weapons. The rest will just be auto-targetting turrets mainly used for defense. The ship AI also is nothing to ride home about as small ships rely on fly-by jousting while larger ships tend to fly themselves into the line of anti-capital firing range (even with some of the attempts to fix this). Story-wise, the game's main plotlines aren't 10/10 writing by any stretch of the mile, and some of them have borderline-cringe-worthy dialogue, but in my opinion that actually works in favor of this already-unique title as it makes the characters and plotlines more memorable. You'll be given a couple of choices throughout the major plotlines which can offer one of two or more endings, and these endings in turn shape the landscape of the universe map. Some will culminate in pitting factions against each other, while other plotlines may see the rise of entirely new factions that you can choose to help support or go to war with. Personally, I love the visuals and music. While it's not an absolute masterpiece, I'm always awestruck whenever I stand on the bridge of my destroyers and capital ships, look out the cockpit, and see the sheer scale of other large vessels flying by, or walking through a shipyard's concourse and seeing the medium transport vessels flying in knowing it's not just some randomly-spawned NPC but has an actual crew flying it to destinations unknown. The music as well is DEFINITELY amazing and really adds to the ambiance. Lastly, this game is GREAT as an empire manager. Once you start building your income, you too can build your own fleet of ships, or even better yet, make a network of your own space stations which can help fill shortages in the economy and eventually becoming your own self-sufficient empire that can single-handedly wage war against the others! The only major complaint I have on this front is that the universe can be a bit static; factions won't dynamically adjust relations or go to war with each other unless you the player step in and do so. With the recent 8.0 Diplomacy update, however, there is an option you can eventually unlock to make their interactions more dynamic. With over 2,000 hours sunk into this game already, I DEFINITELY would recommend picking it up.
Tried X3 years ago. Hated the tedium. Walked away. Since then, I’ve tried just about every other space game. EVE is 99 percent boring, 1 percent panic. Too social, too expensive. Elite looks great but has no purpose. Star Citizen is still just a tech demo. Space Engineers is a brilliant builder that never becomes the strategy game it promises. A few years back, I bought X4. IMMEDIATELY refunded it. The UI, AI, and controls were a mess. Tried again recently. Glad I did. It’s finally a real stable game. And it’s good. You can play however you want. Builder, pirate, admiral, trader. You make a real impact on the universe. This is EVE without the RL politics, and a Star Citizen that actually works as a game. The UI and controls are still awkward. Weirdly, using a throttle and stick here makes things worse. The devs need to study how other games do things. But Egosoft pulled it off. Respect.
This game is a genre you definitely have to *love* in order to appreciate. its a very slow burn, with barely any handholding in terms of tutorials, and it has layers upon layers of complexity and gameplay mechanics. But! no other game accomplishes what X4 does. This game offers so much, its hard to stuff it all into a single review. From small time trading, lone mining ops or the occasional mercenary job to building large factory stations, managing production lines, running mining fleets and conquering enemy sectors, this game allows you to do it all. Along with the base gameplay mechanics comes unparalleled customisability, every ship you can customise its loadout, and custom modifications. each station you own is built how *you* design it. And visually, the game still holds up, with recent upgrades to many of the old ship designs, bringing them up to par with their newer DLC counterparts. This comes paired with a fantastic soundtrack, with some sectors where you want to simply stay a while just to listen to their themes. And if all that isn't enough it offers mod support from the get go, allowing to even further customize, fine-tune or even expand your gameplay. Of course, this game is not without its flaws, especially in later stages of the game performance starts to suffer because of the immense quantity of things being simulated, and sometimes the ship AI acts like dunces, but overall this game is solid. Would i recommend this to just anyone ? probably not, but if you are patient, like space games, and *really* love space sims you should definitely check it out.
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Frequently Asked Questions
X4: Foundations is currently priced at 49.99€ on Steam.
No, X4: Foundations is currently not on sale. You can purchase it for 49.99€ on Steam.
Yes, 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.
Yes, X4: Foundations is playable and fully supported on Windows.
No, X4: Foundations is not playable on MacOS.
Yes, X4: Foundations is playable and fully supported on Linux.
X4: Foundations is a single-player game.
Yes, there are 15 DLCs available for X4: Foundations. Explore additional content available for X4: Foundations on Steam.
Yes, X4: Foundations is fully integrated with Steam Workshop. Visit Steam Workshop.
No, X4: Foundations does not support Steam Remote Play.
Yes, 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.
Data sources
The information presented on this page is sourced from reliable APIs to ensure accuracy and relevance. We utilize the Steam API to gather data on game details, including titles, descriptions, prices, and user reviews. This allows us to provide you with the most up-to-date information directly from the Steam platform.
Additionally, we incorporate data from the SteamSpy API, which offers insights into game sales and player statistics. This helps us present a comprehensive view of each game's popularity and performance within the gaming community.
Last Updates| Steam data | 17 July 2026 02:00 UTC |
|---|---|
| SteamSpy data | 25 July 2026 06:30 UTC |
| Steam price | 28 July 2026 18:46 UTC |
| Steam reviews | 26 July 2026 03:49 UTC |
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
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Game modes
Features
Online players
3,356
Developer
Egosoft
Publisher
Egosoft
Release
30 Nov 2018
Platforms
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