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. Three archetypes ship in a working state (Admiral, Kha’ak Hive Lord + Seeder, Pirate Raider). ~10 more are designed but unbuilt. 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).

Top-level items:

Menu section	What it shows
Roster	Every living hero: name, faction, archetype, star rank, current activity, home sector. Filter by faction / archetype / star.
Hero detail (click a row)	Biography, XP breakdown, kill count, RP balance, flagship + escort composition, current activity, Track button.
Order Board	Faction-level task board. Not pirate-only — every faction has a board with archetype-specific order types (admiral: station/fishing/recon/satellite/hunting; coordinator: commandeer ops; raider: trader ambush / satellite deploy; Kha’ak: hive_development / swarm_summon / resonance). See per-archetype pages.
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	Full list of all defined perks (common / rare / epic tiers) with unlock rules and effects. See Perks system.
Faction Missions (via own submenu)	Player-facing build contracts to raise a faction’s hero cap or unlock corp archetypes. See Faction 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 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
• Faction Missions (player-created) — build Trade Hubs and Reserve Shipyards to earn cash + raise a faction’s hero cap
• Satellite Sale to Factions — sell your own basic/advanced satellites to any faction for intel on enemy fleets, stations, and Kha’ak infrastructure

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; ★-scaled capacity 5/10/20/30; 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 (capacity 8/15/25/40); 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

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 (multi-day soak 2026-07-04). No measurements past 60.
• 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.
• Localization — text mostly inline. EN + RU baseline. Full t-file extraction pending.
• 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

v0.1 (alpha, current): Three shipping archetypes (Admiral × 10 templates × 8 factions, Kha’ak Hive Lord × 6 templates, Kha’ak Seeder × 4 templates, Pirate Raider × 4 templates with 4 task types on Order Board). LoA HeroManager cron, XP + star progression proven, death cycle + d100 outcome + lineage succession proven, Heroes menu via SirNukes API, “Track this hero” via vanilla Guidance API.

Next release targets: Xenon proper archetype, Coordinator, Engineer, perk system C-009, player-rep gating.