DA Gate

Player control over the game’s dormant jump gates. Vanilla X4 has a set of gate connections that stay inactive until a specific story mission unlocks them. DA Gate hijacks that — every tracked gate pair is exposed as a clickable toggle. You can activate or deactivate any of them at any moment.

In-game view

Layout:

• Top section (DA Gate Options) — 3 configurable fields.
• Bottom section (Jump Gates) — read-only table of currently-tracked gate pairs. Each row has a click-to-toggle button.

DA Gate Options

Setting	Default	Effect
Enable DA Gate	Enabled	Master toggle for the whole subsystem. When on, DA scans for tracked gate zones on gamestart and rebuilds the table. Off = no runtime tracking, existing gate states left untouched. $DAGateEnable in source.
Show All Gates	Disabled	When off (default), only DA’s hardcoded dormant-gate whitelist is shown (see Tracked zones below — 8-12 gates depending on installed DLCs). When on, the table expands to include every gate in the galaxy, including all currently-active ones. Use with caution — activating already-active gates is a no-op, but the table becomes very long. $DAGateShowAllGates.
Enable Gate Debug	Disabled	Verbose [GATE] log lines with per-gate scan-result diagnostics. $DAGateDetailedDebug.

Jump Gates table

Three-column table listing every tracked gate pair, sorted alphabetically by sector name.

Column	Meaning
Jump Gate Connection	Sector A <-> Sector B — the two endpoints of the gate pair.
Status	Read-only current game state. Active (green) or Inactive (red). Reflects vanilla gate.isactive — automatically updates when the state changes.
Active / Inactive	Click-to-toggle button. Clicking flips both gates in the pair (entry gate + exit gate) between active and inactive states. Fires ExecuteOption_GateTriggerGate.

Interaction model: Status shows the current engine state; Active/Inactive is the player-set target that also happens to reflect the same state (they’re always identical because the toggle applies immediately). Two columns exist because the code path can imagine future disagreement between “requested” and “current” states.

Tracked zones

DA has a hardcoded whitelist of dormant-gate zone macros (md/deadairdynamicuniverse.xml:215-226):

Vanilla base game (always tracked)

Zone macro	What it enables
ZoneDAG3_Cluster_28_Sector001_macro	One of the vanilla dormant gate pair endpoints.
ZoneDAG6_Cluster_41_Sector001_macro	Another dormant gate pair endpoint.

Terran DLC (Cradle of Humanity)

Zone macro	What it enables
ZoneDAG5_Cluster_405_Sector001_macro	Terran-side dormant gate.
ZoneDAG2_Cluster_418_Sector001_macro	Terran-side dormant gate.

Boron DLC (Kingdom End)

Zone macro	What it enables
ZoneDAG1_Cluster_112_Sector001_macro	Boron-side dormant gate.
ZoneDAG1_Cluster_112_Sector002_macro	Boron-side dormant gate.

The 8 gate connections seen in a full-DLC save (from the observed screenshot):

1. Antigone Memorial ↔ Second Contact XI
2. Argon Prime ↔ Black Hole Sun IV
3. Bright Promise ↔ Hewa’s Twin I
4. Family Nhuut ↔ Zyarth’s Dominion IV
5. Hewa’s Twin V ↔ Ianamus Zura IV
6. Morning Star IV ↔ Silent Witness I
7. Sacred Relic ↔ Trinity Sanctum III
8. Savage Spur I ↔ Savage Spur II

The exact list depends on installed DLCs — the code uses haslicence-style DLC guards to skip macros that aren’t loaded, avoiding “unknown macro” errors.

Interaction with modded gates

DA Gate exposes an event hook (EventGateFindOtherModGates) that other mods can signal with a list of zone macros to register their own dormant gates for tracking. See md/deadairdynamicuniverse.xml:9318 — signature: event.param = [$ZoneMacros].

Any signaled zone gets added to $DAGateTrackedGates and appears in the menu identically to vanilla gates. This is how compat mods (Apus, ETW) can slot their custom dormant gates into DA’s UI without patching DA itself.

Use cases

• Skip early exploration: activate Show All Gates and toggle every gate on to open the entire map at gamestart. Useful for testing / role-play / sandbox saves.
• Story-gate control: activate a specific dormant pair (e.g. Terran ↔ Argon) without triggering the vanilla story mission that normally unlocks it.
• Faction isolation experiments: turn OFF a normally-active gate to see how the AI economy handles a severed sector. DA Fill and SST should re-route around it.
• Roleplay: flip a gate back off after a decisive fleet action (“we’ve closed the Xenon front”).

Preset scope

Only the 3 top-level options (Enable DA Gate, Show All Gates, Enable Gate Debug) are in Configuration Presets scope. The per-gate Active/Inactive state is NOT — presets don’t toggle individual gates for you.

Notes

• Save-compat: enabling a gate that was originally inactive is a live change to gate.isactive. It should persist across save/load without issues, but there’s no explicit rollback if you disable the mod later. Test in a throwaway save first.
• Story missions: if a vanilla story mission expects to open a specific gate later, and you already toggled it on manually, the mission may complete its “open gate” step as a no-op. It doesn’t break the mission, but the gate-opening cinematic won’t fire.
• Xenon incursion risk: opening a normally-closed gate near a Xenon-adjacent sector can trigger a large Xenon wave through the new connection. Fun but destabilizing.