A beginner's guide

Our ship

One of the most important things to understand is your own ship. Every ship in the game has two important values: shields and hull. When taking damage from a missile, laser or hitting something, your shields will absorb first until they are depleted. After which you will start to get hull damage. Shields recharge all the time and cost nothing to regenerate. However when your hull is gone, your ship will explode and will be game over. Sometimes attacks can be so strong that both your shields and hull are gone in one hit (happens with missiles sometimes). For this reason, fighting in X3TC can be very hard at first. If possible build up your resources and money to get better ships.

You can always check the status of your ship buy pressing enter, then use the down arrow key to select current ship, then press enter on Info, to see a screen such as this:



As you can see, we are flying an Sabre, with full shields and hull.

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Controlling our ship

Your ship comes with a some basic equipment which allows you to compress time (SETA, shortcut key j), automatic pilot (which saves you learning how to dock at stations, shortcut key u) and your on-board computer that tracks your progress and status in the game.

There are 3 ways to control your ship:

• Keyboard,
• Joystick/joy-pad,
• Mouse,

I would personally recommend either using the keyboard or a joystick depending on what your used to. For me the mouse is rather difficult way of controlling a ship. You can find a list of the basic controls on kongrudi's humble merchant guide here.

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So far

So hopefully so far, we understand the basic layout of the game (sectors / gates), the controls and what the HUD means. So now its about time to choose what you like to do, as this game is very open. So what would you like to do now?

What do you want to do now?

• Do the Flight school mission *,
• Learn how to trade,
• Explore new sectors *,
• Learn how to fight *,

* = not yet written