Crew Skill Leveling Revised
🟠 Updated over a year agoPreview
🔍 Analysis
- 👍 1.9% endorsement rate — high engagement, a strong quality signal
- 🏆 #140 of 596 Gameplay mods in this game by downloads
📋 About This Mod
An attempt to balance leveling mechanic. Main features: buffed piloting skill, tweaked XP Cap for every single action, viable ship mining and trading, nerfed station trading and repair, tweaked boarding, exploration and other non-combat
I was looking for a mod that worked well for leveling crew members but both available alternatives (Faster Crew Leveling and Learningallthethings) have their downsides: the former is too overpowered and the latter is cheaty because it applies a passive random chance to level to single pilots and it's limited to player owned npcs. So I took experiences.xml file and tweaked most entries.
The scope is simple - to balance what is intrinsically broken or underpowered. It is an experimental work based on number tweaking, so it may need further testing. Most changes are relatively small to ensure better consistency in progression tables. Since experience table is shared with AI, the final result should make better pilots and traders (technically speaking - closer to 3 stars in a long run), and that includes your enemies as well.
Summary of changes
-
[]Tweaked X4 Level cap - FCL was uncapped in all the modded variables, I changed most caps with the following order: bad 9 normal 12 good 15.
[]Buffed piloting Killing a ship is now capped at 15; turrets, modules, and other smaller structures will contribute much more to piloting skill and are capped at 12, same for other combat events (disable, repel, flee), divided in two tiers, easy/normal (12) and hard (15).
[]Buffed Mining and Trading, minor nerf to Station Trading - it makes trading and mining a viable alternative from gamestart. Station trading is actually quite good, it has been toned down a bit in line with most actions
[]Revised morale buffed in group actions, aligned to piloting for a more coherent progression
[]Engineering has been slightly buffed in most non building activities, just too add some source diversity and make xping a more harmonic process
[]Boarding has been slightly tweaked: individual boarding xp has been increased; group boarding has been reduced a bit due to morale changes
[]Tweaks to non combat actions ship repair, dismantle, construction, upgrade
[]Better skill curve with less difficult average levels to reach; most skills will contribute to level progression. To my calculation you should be able to reach 3 star pilots/marines/traders in 50-100 hours; 4-5 star crew will be still very rare
- For efficient leveling the player is bound to abuse one broken mechanic (Ship Builders, Xenon spawn area, chain-boarding, Trade Station, Terraforming); most of them are late game solutions, and buying a skilled pilot costs more than a XL ship. At that point of the game crew level becomes just a money issue (I'm a space billionare tyrant but most of my personnel is mediocre, why?)
- In vanilla game Piloting is really difficult to raise without a solid action plan and a decent fleet
📊 Mod Details
- Game
- X4foundations Mods
- Author
- esch1lus
- Version
- 1.26
- Downloads
- 3,453
- Endorsements
- 65
- Category
- Gameplay
- Created
- 5/9/2025
- Updated
- 5/14/2025
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