Galactic Heroes

X4’s galaxy simulates trade, war, and station-building — at the level of factions, not people. A war between Argon and Holy Order is a relation value, a few job queues, some patrol routes. There is no Argon admiral whose loss the empire feels. There is no infamous Buccaneer raider players hunt across sectors.

Galactic Heroes adds a thin layer of named characters on top of vanilla. Each hero is a real flying quest-NPC with a name, a biography, an archetype, XP gained from confirmed kills, star-rank progression (★ → ★★★★★), a fleet that rebuilds from Recovery Points, and a d100 death roll on flagship loss. When a hero dies for good, the lineage template goes on cooldown and a successor may take over weeks later with fresh XP and a new face.

The design goal is emergent drama from system rules, not authored quest content.

⚠ Alpha status. Six archetypes ship in a working state — Admiral, Military Coordinator, Engineer, Pirate Raider, Kha’ak Hive Lord and Kha’ak Seeder — across 261 hand-authored hero templates in 22 factions. On top of them sits a corporate layer: 17 investment funds, a share exchange, and paid work for the player. Save-compat is best-effort within a major version. Not recommended for casual playthroughs yet — but stable enough for observation, testing, and feedback.

Installation & configuration

Requirements

• X4 Foundations 9.0 or newer (currently developed against 9.0 beta)
• SirNukes Mod Support APIs — required for the Heroes menu (Simple Menu API)
• DeadAir Scripts (mlog4 fork) and DeadAir Economy Overhaul (mlog4 fork) — recommended companions for the fuller ecosystem (economy signals, faction wars, station growth). Not required — Heroes runs independently: RP, faction relations, task board and hero decisions are all self-contained. No DA hooks. Heroes and DA can coexist without integration.
• All Egosoft DLCs — all optional; mod adapts to what you have

Install

• Nexus (manual): Download the latest ZIP, extract into X4 Foundations/extensions/ (folder must be named mlog_heroes).
• Steam Workshop: Coming soon — currently Nexus-only during alpha.

First-time setup — what to expect

1. Launch a game. The mod does not require any menu configuration to start.
2. In the first 5–10 minutes of game time, HeroManager wakes up on its LoA cron, scans faction state, starts populating the hero roster. Nothing visible on the map yet.
3. After ~15 minutes, first heroes spawn on their flagships. Yellow markers appear in Argon Prime, Second Contact II, Getsu Fune, and other faction capitals.
4. After ~30–60 minutes, heroes have committed to their first campaigns. Admirals are patrolling contested borders. Pirate Raiders are pulling Order Board tasks. Kha’ak Hive Lords are on the warfront.
5. Open Extensions → Galactic Heroes menu any time to see who is alive and what they are doing.

Recommended play patterns

• Observer — keep the Heroes menu open, watch the roster. When a hero climbs ★★★ or dies, note the story. Great for chill exploration playthroughs.
• Ally — track a friendly admiral, join their combat when a big engagement starts, gain rep + XP bonus.
• Hunter — track an enemy hero, hunt their flagship. On kill, watch the d100 roll play out — you may be responsible for a KIA that goes on the wall permanently.
• Interventionist (future feature) — supply Recovery Points to a favoured hero, accelerate their recovery. Not shipped yet.

In-game menu tour

The Heroes menu is your control panel. Open via Extensions → Galactic Heroes (icon appears once SirNukes API is loaded).

The top level has six entries. Settings, Heroes and Factions cover the hero layer; Corporations, Exchange and Corporation missions are the corporate layer.

Heroes opens onto six screens of its own — the living roster, the pool every hero is drawn from, the two archives, the perk catalogue and the order board:

Menu section	What it shows
Settings	Declared tuning in four sections — Heroes, FRS, Corporations (two pages: contracts/campaigns/intrigue, and favour/accrual/lawsuits), Exchange. Every constant the mod uses is a slider here, not a literal in the code.
Heroes → Active	Every living hero grouped by faction: archetype, star rank, XP, RP, current decision, sector.
Hero detail (click a row)	Biography, rank, XP breakdown, kill count, RP balance, flagship + escort composition, perks, Track button.
Heroes → Pool	All 261 templates and their spawn state, with the per-faction slot arithmetic (cap = base + territory + leadership).
Order Board	The shared work queue every hero claims from — 31 order types across five archetypes, drilling from a faction list down to individual tasks with their status, claimant, priority and age. See The Order Board.
KIA archive	Every hero permanently lost. Final stats, cause of death, $kia_at timestamp. Records are frozen — no resurrection.
Retired archive	Heroes mustered out by faction succession events (faction merger, dissolution). Not the same as KIA.
Perks catalog	All 28 perks — 15 common, 11 rare, 2 epic — with tier cost, applies_to filter and effects. See Perks system.
Factions → Faction missions	⚠ A placeholder. The build contracts it was to hold were stripped from the release; the screen says “coming in a future iteration”. The design is kept on record at Faction Missions.
Corporations	The 17 investment funds, their buckets, capital and current intentions. See Corporations.
Exchange	Four tabs: a share market in those 17 funds — see Galactic Exchange — plus decommissioned hulls, equipment mods and crew seminars, covered in Ships, parts and seminars.
Corporation missions	Paid jobs corporations offer you against rivals they are already fighting. See Corporation missions.

Every hero has a Track button — attaches a live objective marker to the flagship via vanilla Guidance API. Same tracking overlay you’d get from a story mission.

The Pool page shows every template and how many of them a faction may field. cap = base + territory + leadership — a faction with more sectors and a senior hero alive supports more heroes at once:

Every template in the pool is clickable, spawned or not — and you can switch any single one off, so a hero you would rather never meet simply never enters the rotation:

A pooled hero shows biography and a perk preview but no location and no live stats, because it has none yet. The + and − marks say which perks would be active from spawn and which wait on a condition.

Settings has four sections — Heroes, FRS (Faction Radar Sharing), Corporations and Exchange; Corporations opens two further pages of its own. Every constant in the mod — death-roll difficulty, RP rates, contract prices, exchange thresholds, mission intervals — is declared data with a default, a range and a hint, and the slider and the driver read the same value:

The Factions submenu lists every faction the mod has spawned heroes into. Relation column is the mod-internal faction disposition (used for admiral decision-making); Favours is the standing the player has built through gifts to heroes; Heroes is the current living count:

Deep dives

Every mechanic gets its own page below. Read in the order shown for the full model, or jump straight to the archetype that interests you.

Mechanics

• XP and star progression — kill weights per class, XP thresholds, full ★1–★5 fleet scaling matrix, memorial preservation across clones
• Death cycle (d100 roll) — the roll, the outcomes (KIA / wounded / unscathed), configurable difficulty
• Recovery Points — RP tick rates per rank, ship rebuild costs, the 200-cap, why rebuilds take at least 25 minutes
• Lineage succession — clone system — pool templates, clone-of-founder (“Walter Korkov (Clone #1)”), KIA archive, perks inheritance across clones
• Perks system — 28 perks in 3 tiers (common / rare / epic), authored per template, auto-unlock at 10M cr milestone, LEARN new at 20M/50M/100M by tier
• The Order Board — the shared queue every hero claims from; 31 task types, the claim rule, and how to read the board as a diagnostic
• Faction Radar Sharing — invulnerable ghost satellites at the stations of factions that trust you, gated on reputation or a trade subscription
• Satellite Sale to Factions — sell your own basic/advanced satellites to any faction for intel on enemy fleets, stations, and Kha’ak infrastructure
• Faction Missions (design of record — not in the release) — Trade Hubs and Reserve Shipyards, built and then stripped from the shipping build

Corporate layer

Seventeen supra-faction investment funds that finance, manage and insure but produce nothing — and the market they fight each other on.

• Corporations — the 17 funds, four buckets, favour as political currency, station-management contract auctions, campaigns against rivals, intrigue, liquidation
• Galactic Exchange — share valuation, the issued-share control basis, private/self-holding ceilings, raid and defence steps, subsidiaries, and why the takeover pass ships disarmed
• Ships, parts and seminars — the Exchange’s other three tabs: decommissioned hulls priced off hull damage, Xenon trophies sold whole, equipment mods asked from the ware database, crew training at ten times shop price
• Corporation missions — six paid hack jobs against a rival’s managed station, gated on how badly the two companies are already feuding
• Chronicle — the append-only event log every hero and corporation carries, 36 kinds across three families

Archetypes

• Admiral — faction military leader; multi-sector campaigns; home-space defence + ★3+ combat decisions (outpost defense, fireships, luring)
• Military Coordinator — HQ-based faction strategist; commandeers scattered military jobs; capacity scales with rank: one captured fleet per star; mission-driven cascade defense → expansion → personal → XP
• Engineer — non-combat archetype; travels between own-faction stations; +20/30/50/80% production efficiency buffs at ★1-4 via cargo injection
• Pirate Raider — freelance criminal; civilian target focus (purpose.trade / .mine / .build); Order Board dispatch + own economic outputs (Joint Raid ★3+, Pirate Base ★4+, base ship spawn cron)
• Kha’ak Hive Lord — psychic hive matriarch; commands scattered Kha’ak fighters (RP-gated, flat ceiling of 100); strike > gather > probe > harassment cascade
• Kha’ak Seeder — distributed network commander; drops outposts + hives; per-tier abilities ladder (★1 small summon → ★4 big summon apex); teleport-as-escape
• Scout-Saboteur (shared) — asymmetric tactical primitive; one-way S-class deploys 2-10 mines, self-destructs; used by raider / coordinator / hive_lord

Extending the mod

The mod publishes registration windows, so a separate extension can add heroes, fleets, spend plans, corporations and corporation missions without editing it — and without breaking on the next release. A desktop app writes those extensions for you.

• The Galactic Heroes Editor — what it is, why nothing about the mod is hardcoded in it, and how to get it running
• Walkthrough — your first pack — empty window to a hero flying in game, in about fifteen minutes
• Editor reference — every screen, the 86 validation rules, and why corporations are the one object you cannot take back

Design philosophy — why the mod is thin

Under the hood, the mod is deliberately minimal. Explicitly out of scope:

• No new ships, weapons, or station modules. Heroes use whatever the faction already owns.
• No new ware types, economy nodes, or supply chains. Faction task pool and hero RP are fully self-contained — no DA-Eco integration required.
• No new diplomatic mechanics. Future Diplomat archetype will call vanilla diplomatic operations, not replace them.
• No custom save format. Heroes are vanilla quest-NPCs with the standard yellow marker. Persistence is what X4 already does for Boso Ta.
• No custom UI framework. Simple Menu API handles everything.
• No per-frame AI. HeroManager ticks every few game-minutes; all in-flight behaviour delegates to vanilla orders (patrol / protect / attack / commandeer).

Result: minimal engine footprint, low frame cost, deep integration with X4’s living galaxy. The mod is a strategic decision layer, not a behavioural simulator.

Known conflicts

With	Status	Notes
mlog_frs (Faction Radar Sharing)	⚠ Bundled	Do NOT install the standalone mlog_frs mod — Galactic Heroes bundles the same code internally. Loading both causes ID conflicts.
VRO 5.01	⚠ Untested	Mod does not replace ships, but places heroes on faction-owned ships. Aggressive faction overhauls may need an adapter. Report if you try.
X4-Reemergence	❌ Not yet	RE isn’t on 9.0. Waiting on RE v1.9 update.
Faction expansion mods (Apus / ETW / Kaiori)	⚠ Partial	Modded factions currently get no heroes. Design is spec’d but implementation pending; on the roadmap.
Everything else	✅ Compatible	DA Scripts, DA Eco, SirNukes, TaterTrade, Zero-Transporter, mlog_dev_bridge — all coexist cleanly.

Known limitations & alpha caveats

Honest list. None are blockers, but they are real:

• Performance tested up to ~45 active heroes across 22 factions, in multi-day soaks. A representative late session: 44 living heroes in 19 factions with 1 007 open tasks on the order board, at full frame rate. No measurements past 60 heroes.
• Xenon currently uses Admiral templates — mechanically works and their fleets look distinctive (XL_K flagships, no S/M escort — they use pure Xenon composition), but narrative model isn’t Xenon-native. Proper Xenon-flavour design pending.
• Perks Phase 2 (game-event unlock triggers) — the framework exists and is used by the auto-unlock at 10M cr milestone + LEARN system, but the “unlock on kill of 500 enemies” / “unlock on age 24h” style is deferred. Perks currently activate via cash milestone, LEARN purchase, or authored $initially_active=true on the pool template.
• Modded faction support (Apus / ETW / Kaiori) — architecture supports it, but hand-authored hero pools for these factions aren’t shipped yet. Base-game and DLC factions are fully covered.
• Player rep gating on hero visibility — heroes visible at rep ≥ 0, bio at ≥ 10, live tracking at ≥ 20 — spec’d but not enforced yet. Currently all heroes visible unconditionally.
• Corporate takeovers ship disarmed. The pass that decides who controls whom computes and logs its verdicts without executing them, because arming it would reclassify stakes that already exist in a running save. See Galactic Exchange.
• Retired archive UI — populated only by faction merger events (which don’t fire yet at any regular rate); mostly empty in current saves.

Links and source

• Nexus: (link pending)
• GitHub: github.com/mlog4/galactic_heroes
• License: TBD (likely MIT or similar permissive) — will be set before v1.0

Design corpus in the source repo: 31 concept docs, 23 iteration plans, 19 engine research notes. Contributors should start with concepts/C-001_overall_vision.md and docs/DESIGN.en.md.

Credits:

• mlog4 — design + implementation
• DeadAirRT — Expeditionary Corps pattern (battle-tested multi-sector flotilla logic that Galactic Heroes borrows for admiral decision cycles); DA-Eco signals that feed Pirate Order Board
• SirNukes — Mod Support APIs (Simple Menu API for the Heroes menu)
• Egosoft — Guidance API + quest-NPC persistence primitives Galactic Heroes builds on

Version notes

v0.20.0-alpha3 (current): Six shipping archetypes across 261 hand-authored templates in 22 factions — Admiral 190, Pirate Raider 30, Engineer 17, Military Coordinator 14, Kha’ak Hive Lord 6, Kha’ak Seeder 4. Order Board carries 31 task types (admiral 15, coordinator 8, raider 8) with a per-type live task list. 28 perks in three tiers. The corporate layer ships: 17 corporations in four buckets, station-management contract auctions, campaigns and intrigue, the Galactic Exchange, six corporation missions, and a 36-kind chronicle. Settings menu exposes every tuning constant as declared data across five pages.

Fully localised. All display text lives on text page 65644 — 1 388 ids, complete in English and Russian, with no string left inline. The build refuses to ship if an id is referenced and missing from any language page, if a parenthesis on a text page would be eaten as a comment, if a glyph outside Latin-1 would draw as a box, or if a localised value is used to build an identifier.

Source: 42 MD files, ~58 600 lines.

Next release targets: Xenon proper archetype, player-rep gating, arming the corporate takeover pass, modded-faction hero pools.