How to get the MOST out of a Budgeted game start

In my other guide I talked about how to start the game with zero resources and showed that it was possible to start the game (and survive) in just the spacesuit and zero cash.

In this guide I want to talk about how to start the game with the MOST resources.

(Easy, use the cheat mod).

WITH NO MODS!!

Now you could choose one of the standard starts with the most cash available or pick the one where you start with a station but we can do better than that. You can start the game with 100 Million from the very beginning. Let’s take a look at how.

In budgeted custom game start edit your ship so that you have NOTHING on it. Only engines and thrusters. Find the cheapest ship you can. Elite Sentinel is what I go with. You won’t need it very long since it only exist to get you from point A to point B. I choose the sentinel because it allows me to get service crew with higher stats from the beginning. The good thing about custom game start is that different aspects of the game have a different budget. We want to maximize cash so other stuff that doesn’t touch cash you can fix how you like it.

You can mess around with personnel or knowledge if you want to but those things don’t really make a difference in the long run. Very importantly we don’t want to have anything touching our money. So do not check the box to put satellites in sectors. If you want to know about a sector then you can use knowledge points to show stations but don’t use your cash on satellites.

No satellites
No spacesuit stuff
No cash
No stations
No blueprints

Don’t use cash on ANYTHING!

Reader: Hey, what’s the big idea? We want to start with a lot of resources, not with nothing.

Have faith. In the player area you want to open up the wares and give yourself some spacefly eggs. Then change the number from 1 to as many as you can get. Once you have that slide the number down to a multiple of 25. Once you have the multiple of 25 you can add cash back or other items until you max out.

For one spacefly egg you will have to pay about 10,000 credits. If you want to sell one spacefly egg then you might make a profit or you might lose money in the real game. Plus they are an illegal item so you can’t just fly around with them forever looking for a station where you can make a profit. I want to start the game and get rid of the illegal items as fast as I can.

Once in the game, (Hat 1 is a great place to start) immediately fly to a station and go to the trader. Go to the crafting bench. Turn the 25 spacefly eggs into one spacefly caviar. You can use the slider to do the entire batch all at the same time.

Why do this?

Let’s look at the numbers.

25 spacefly eggs at 10,000 credits a piece is about 250,000 credits. But the same 25 spacefly eggs can be turned into caviar which sells for one million each. That is 300% profit. So make all the caviar you can. If you gave yourself a perfect multiple of 25 then you can get rid of the all the illegal items all in one go. Just sell all the caviar to the trader and walk away with your money.

Tip: Save your game.

BONUS TIP: If you do this at the Hat 1 trade station then you can use the elevator to visit the four different traders in a loop until they are offering the max amount of money. Each time you do a loop the traders reset and a new random trader is behind the counter with new prices. If the price offered is dark green then it is close to the max. In order to force them to reset visit the opposite trader from the one you are at. So if you are at the 6s1m trader go to the other 6s1m trader. After visiting the second trader go to the 8M trader and then the other 8m trader. After that just go back to either of the 3s1m traders and then the other. By doing it this way you can make sure that you visit each trader at least once in the loop though you won’t be sure they are in exactly the same order. Either way, it doesn’t matter. Just keep going around until you can get the most money from them.

Now, did you get to 100 million? Maybe not if you haven’t done anything in the game yet but certainly it was a lot. Now you can fix up that starter ship, or just buy a new one. You can build your first station right away, put MK2 laser towers around a Xenon gate so you can collect drops, or build a fleet to go attack pirates. More cash means more options.

X4 budget start is one of the greatest things in gaming and is truly a unique treasure that I have never seen in a game before. Not only does it allow you to customize your character, which is common enough in games, but it allows you to restart the game multiple times and keep your progression.

Side Comment: I like to name my Argon Male characters “Conan” cause they look like Arnold.

I restarted Shenmue II many times to find a way to optimize my run so that I could skip staying at the “Come Over Guest House” by getting to ManMon Temple on day on while keeping as much money at the start as possible. I restarted Kotor II many multiple times to see all the different ways to get the max XP out of Peragus station. I have restarted TES V perhaps over a thousand times just to see how efficiently I can chain my quests. I’m that kind of gamer. Now imagine you die in Skyrim and decide that this character isn’t working out for you so you want to start a fresh one but you had the option to start already being Dragonborn with all three shouts of Fus Ro Dah unlocked at the beginning. Yes, sign me up for that.

So playing X4, did you have a play through where you unlocked all the research but for whatever reason started a new character? Of course. We all have. X4 is a great game and there are lots of reason to replay it. But that grind of doing all the research again … Yeah, no thanks. I mean, it wasn’t me doing anything, just having the station buy materials and then I got a benefit from it.

Or faction relations. Did you improve your reputation with the Terran Protectorate from negative 15 to positive 30 and don’t want to have to do ALL of that all over again?

Or did you have trouble finding Neptune and don’t want to have to be lost looking for those gates again?

Budgeted Game Start has you covered. You can start the game fresh but skip the past grind. Now, to be clear, you have to do the grind yourself at least once to begin with. However, once you do that then all future characters have the option to skip it. And to be clear, it is an option. If you really want to do all the grind all over again, then the game will let you. The only time (to my knowledge) the game forces you to skip something and takes any missions away is when you install the Kingdom’s End DLC.

(The Kingdom’s End DLC removes all the missions for finding and building the PHQ and will just gift it to the player at the very beginning even without custom game start. Very annoying because the only way to play those missions again is to uninstall the DLC, start a character, do the missions, and then install the DLC again. I like options, not choices taken from me.)

Anyway, with budgeted game start you can set the story state to start with the PHQ and then whatever research you already unlocked so that you don’t have to do that ridiculous timed racing thing again. There are so many other things to do in the game and thankfully you can spend your time doing them instead of redoing a PHQ mission again for the hundredth time. Start with Teleport already researched and then park a ship at a pirate base and another at a base you want to steal blueprints from. Teleport to the pirate base and buy what you need for EMP bombs. If they don’t have everything, it is ok. Teleport back to HQ and the back to the pirate base to reset the trader. Eventually you’ll be able to buy what you need or they might just have EMP bombs already available, though it is cheaper to buy the crafting items. Then teleport to the station you want to steal from and have at it.

Skyrim is a great game but it pales in comparison to this. (Climb the seven thousand steps again? No, fast travel? No, thanks. Greybeards can be lonely and alone. I don’t need no shouts this time around. This play through I only visit Ivarsted to visit Temba. Yes, Temba. Oh, how I long to have some … chat with her. And woo her with some spirit when she comes.)

Also, you might have noticed something. If you started with spacefly eggs and made caviar and then played through the game only to now restart and do budgeted game start again, you find that you can give yourself an even greater number of spacefly eggs at the start. Maybe last time you could only give yourself 1900 spacefly eggs but this time you can get 2100. Why is this?

The amount of cash budget you have will go UP over time as you play the game. When you do specific things in the game like build stations and build ships then your budget for custom game start will go UP and you can start the game with larger and larger sums of cash. When I discovered this and tried it I was able to get 100 Million the first time I tried it and with newer characters the amount went up. I don’t know what the max is but starting with 100 million I’m not in a hurry to restart again. The other standard game starts are nice and all but eventually I think all players will just use budgeted game start almost all the time as it is the thing in the game that shows your real progression.

I want to know EXACTLY what to do in the game to increase the budget!

Ok, here you go. Here are the things you need to do to increase the budget.

First, uninstall all the expansions. You want to do this because you will be starting a lot of new characters in succession to just get past the grind. Keep in mind, this will still be a grind but you asked to do it without playing the fun parts of the game so here you go.

Here is your in game shopping list.

Ships

13 Medium ships
7 Large ships
1 XL ship
1 Carrier
1 Support

Stations

Production 13
pier 7
dock 21
Luxury 1
S storage 9
M Storage 9
L Storage 7
Wharf 1

Sales:
Sell 100,000 worth of wares in one transaction as many times as you can
Sell 1,000,000 worth of wares in one transaction as many times as you can
You know, by playing the game you spent money on in order to enjoy.

Anyway, here is the plan.

Character 1
To start with, follow what I have above and start with spacefly eggs. Eventually you’ll have so start money that you’ll max out spacefly eggs and will have to come up with a different strategy. But to start, save yourself some frustration and flight time and just do spacefly eggs.

Now that you have your max amount of money from caviar buy 13 medium ships. They can be all the same one. They can be the cheapest thing with no shields and no guns. You don’t have to actually use them, just build them. Once they are finished building, save and go back to the main menu. If you can’t do all 13 in one character, make another, do the same thing and buy medium ships until you finish.

Tally: 13 Medium ships

Character 2
Do as above but you will be able to get more money because the 13 medium ships. Use that for more eggs and use that for more caviar.

Next buy 7 Large ships. Again, no shields, no guns, no use. Just build them and let them sit in the wharf. Save and go back.

Character 3
By this time you should be able to make enough with caviar to buy a builder ship. It is an XL ship. You only need one. More than one won’t count.

Character 4
Now we have to start looking at stations because in order to build a carrier or an auxiliary ship you need reputation, which you don’t have yet because you haven’t played the game yet. Besides, it is cheaper to start looking at stations.

Get some blue prints for the cheapest production you can make. I admit, for myself I didn’t do this. I went with energy cells cause I was actually playing the game. Build 13 of whatever you choose.

Now that is one way to do it but there is also another.

Design a station with 2 productions, 3 docks, 1 pier, 1 S storage, 1 M storage, 1 L storage. Save the design. Build it. If you can build two of the exact same one, then do that. Eventually you’ll need to build seven of them. On the last two, add an additional M storage and S storage. On one of the stations, add an additional Luxury dock. If you can get it done with one character, great. If not, restart characters until you finish.

Character 5
If you did all of that above, you should have a lot of starting cash, and might even be to the point where your starting cash will max out eggs. You want to make maximum use of your money so here is a new item to start with.

Loadstone
Remote Detonator
Secure Container

You want to have an equal number of all of them.

Do not start in Hat 1. Start in Silent XI. Turn on, see all stations so you can find the Hat Free Port. Fly there and turn the Loadstone, R Detonators, and S containers into EMP bombs. SELL the EMP bombs. You will get a lot more money from that than you got from caviar but now you are in a dangerous part of space. You have to now fly to Argon Prime.

In Argon prime, buy a Discoverer scout ship with two good guns. The Elite has a tougher hull but it sucks at aiming. Plus, it only has one gun. We can do better than that. So buy a Discoverer or a Quasar. The Quasar is a very cheap but also very weak ship but it would be nice to have because it has four guns.

Why do we need so many guns you ask, so we can kill criminals with one hit from distance instead of always missing like with the Elite. Honestly, a Discoverer is enough for police work but a Quasar is nice too. Four guns means one hit kill on criminals instead of flying after them. Make sure you get MK2 Pulse guns. When hunting criminals we don’t care about a tough hull because the criminals can’t fire back.

Now kill criminals until you grind reputation all the way up to 20. You need 10 to buy an Auxiliary but since you’re grinding rep, don’t stop there. Keep going to 20 and also buy a carrier and then a Wharf. If you are so inclined, also got to 30 and guy a shipyward. Why not? It’s not on the list but probably should be. You should have the money for it if you did the EMP bombs right.

Once it is all built, you will have the MAX amount of money you can have without fully playing the game. In order to get to 100,000 sold or 1,000,000 sold, you’ll have to play and set things up. There’s no way around it.

New Character

Once you get this far you should have about 130,000,000 worth of starting money. You can use EMP bombs to turn that into over 800,000,000. Now you can reinstall all the DLCs and play the game however you want. The hard coded max for starting money is 134,000,000 so the last 4M you have to just play the game to get. Enjoy.