Corporation missions

Corporations at war with each other do not only hire pirates — they hire you.

A corporation mission is a paid job against a rival’s managed station. It is offered only when the two companies are already fighting, so the board fills as feuds start and empties as they settle. Both sides of a feud hire, which means you may be offered work against a company you worked for last week — and it will remember.

That single row is the whole layer in miniature. Amitra Concord Capital is a peace broker out of bucket D; Bellwright Capital finances wars for a living. They are now on opposite sides of a feud, and the peace broker is paying an outsider 250 000 credits to cut the war financier’s output.

Read the target’s name again: ARG Hull Part Factory I [BLW]. The station belongs to the Argon Federation — the bracketed code says Bellwright manages it. That suffix is a setting (Show corporation code in station names), and with it switched on you can read the corporate map straight off the galaxy map without opening a menu.

On a fresh save this screen is empty instead, and says so rather than looking broken: corporations have to start fighting each other before anybody hires.

The six jobs

Every job is a hack of one control panel on a rival-managed station, driven through X4’s own control-panel mission machinery rather than a custom implementation. What the mod supplies is the target rule, the brief, the reward and the politics.

Job	Panel	Reward	Needs grudge	Level
Count the doors	personnel list	90 000 cr	0	1
Open the books	storage	180 000 cr	1	2
Undercut them	trade	200 000 cr	1	2
Bleed the line	production	250 000 cr	1	3
Blind the watchdogs	security	280 000 cr	2	3
Stall the cranes	construction	300 000 cr	2	3

Grudge is how badly the two companies are already at odds. Count the doors needs none — it is reconnaissance, and a company will pay for a personnel list about anyone. Stall the cranes and Blind the watchdogs need a real feud, because they are acts of sabotage that the target will notice.

The briefs are written from the client’s side, which is most of the characterisation the layer needs:

Job	What the client says
Count the doors	Before anything else, we want to know who works there.
Open the books	We want to know what they are holding before the next tender.
Undercut them	Their traders are winning on price. Change the price.
Bleed the line	Their output pays for the campaign against us. Stop it.
Blind the watchdogs	Somebody else has work to do there afterwards. Make it quiet first.
Stall the cranes	Every week they do not expand is a week we do.

Blind the watchdogs is the one worth reading twice. Nobody says what the other work is.

The board

Knob	Default	Range
Missions on offer at once	5	0–30
Minutes between offers	30	5–240
Minutes an offer stays up	120	10–1440

One offer appears per pass, so the interval is also how fast the board refills after you clear it. An untaken job is withdrawn after its time is up — without that, the board would quietly become a list of jobs against stations that changed hands hours ago.

Set missions on offer to 0 and corporations stop hiring entirely. The dev levers still work, so the feature is off rather than broken.

Standing — being on somebody’s list

Taking the job is the easy part. The consequence is that two companies now have an opinion about you.

Knob	Default	Meaning
Standing gained for a mission done	+10	with the client
Standing lost for a mission done against you	−15	with the victim
Standing floor	−30	below this, a corporation stops hiring you

The loss is deliberately larger than the gain. Playing both sides of a feud costs you more than it pays, and a few jobs taken carelessly will close a client permanently. Set the loss to zero and nobody minds who you work for; set the floor to −100 and no company ever refuses you.

Standing is per corporation, and it is not faction reputation — hacking a station managed by Harborlight does not upset the Argon Federation, whatever Harborlight thinks of you.

Honest list

• The board is empty until corporations feud. This is the design, not a bug, and the screen says so.
• The payment path has never been observed end to end in a soak. It is built and checked, but no long run has yet caught a completed corporation mission being paid — that needs a player to take one and finish it.
• All six jobs are hacks. Destroy / deliver / escort variants are designed and not built. The hack family shipped first because it is the one X4 already supports cleanly for a third party’s station.
• Targets are rival-managed stations only. A corporation will not send you against a station nobody manages, and never against its own.