Ironman Mod for X3:TC, X3:AP and X3:FL

[Blitz4]

Hi. I'm an ironman player and I'm looking for an ironman mod for X3:TC, X3:AP and X3:FL.

I know most reading this would understand why. I haven't seen any serious mention of creating an ironman mod on this forum. I guess I should address some questions most would have.

Why create an ironman mod when one exists in X3:TC via Dead is Dead mode?
Dead is Dead is great, but the way it's implemented is not. It's disrespectful to the player that the game isn't maintained any longer and a Crash To Desktop (CTD) could eliminate hundreds of hours of play. I'd agree DiD being a brilliant idea if the game was still supported or if the game was fully open sourced.

I don't get CTD's.
And I'd love to be you. Sadly they're common on my rig. Using Windows 11, borderless mode, OBS recording the game, RTSS 60fps frame limiter, steam overlay, nvidia overlay, and constant alt tabbing in and out of the game. It's the way games are recorded and streamed in today's age. I use 3rd party maps on my 2nd monitor to better my experience. Intense music playlists instead of the in-game music. Steam Notes overlay with a 90% transparency setting to show viewers what I'm currently doing in game. Would you like to see an example? This shows an example of a DiD CTD destroying the save. Off screen i restored a backup of the DiD save while the game was running to have it upload to steam cloud, then exited, but that isn't allowed by the game. This is why DiD is incorrectly done. It might've been great during its time, but not being supported is the limiting factor. You have to consider that the devs would have to support the game for eternity or open source the game due to the way DiD is implemented. This is why a mod is needed.

You can't have Ironman due to the autopilot AI colliding with asteroids and such.
You're right, but up to a point. I wouldn't play DiD mode in a Kestral. I'd have them auto-explore the universe while I'm in a beefier and slower ship with a jumpdrive. My job is to grow the empire and when possible delegate tasks to those able. The fastest ship for ironman I'd use in X3:TC would be the Spitfyre, but I'd much rather be piloting a beefy M1 or M2.

Wouldn't it be safer to dock up and manage the empire that way? Doesn't ironman limit the fun you have in the game and prevent flying smaller ships to dogfight with?
You're again right, but up to a point. Since there's no intelligent save or death system in X3 outside of manual and auto-saves, the sandbox of saving and dieing is left up to the player to handle. For example, in X4 when your ship explodes, you are ejected from the ship. You still are alive at this point. How long before your oxygen runs out or if you get captured as a slave or clipped by a fast ship or laser, that's one of the risks you sign up for. It adds another way to handle death, where when the ship explodes it'd not gg. Imagine you accepting the risk of using autopilot through an asteroid field and your ship blowing up but sitting there next to the debris questioning life. It'd give another chance to ironman and that's what I meant by no intelligent save or death system in X3.

How can there be Ironman in X3:TC? The playercan just backup and restore their saves from the save directory.
Great question and that's not something a dev should infringe upon unless they have guaranteed they're not to blame for the players death. Since that's not possible outside of a multi-billion dollar studio, you don't limit the players ability to backup and restore save games. Like can you yourself guarantee that the player won't die from a CTD or odd autopilot calculation?

What's the ideal way to experience ironman?
* The game is constantly autosaving in the background with no reduction of the game's performance.
* The autosaves created aren't able to be loaded by the player.
* The player can only save via a save & quit.
* The save & quit save is the only save a player can load and only at the main menu.
* After the player loads a save & quit that save is no longer able to be loaded by the player and is converted into an autosave.
* Each autosave created cycles to save the latest 3, 5, 10 autosaves. Player choice, they must weigh if a CTD or bug could permamently persist in the save file.
* The autosaves created are able to be backed up by the player and converted to a save & quit save if necessary, but can never be loaded.
* The game over screen doesn't need to delete any saves as there aren't any. If the player feels it not their fault, they are free to quit the game and restore an autosave.

The game can't autosave constantly, it's single-threaded.
That's my belief. It's easily tested when docking and noticing that an autosave freezes up the game for 2-3 seconds, which still occurs on a 4GB/s NVMe drive.

What about achievements? There's no way to get the DiD achievement if you're not playing DiD.
Correct again, but up to a point. Using Steam Achievement Manager (SAM) will allow you to add/remove any achievement in any game of your choosing. I have never given myself any achievements in any game, I've only removed them similar to using the -clearstatsandachievements command line arg. But in this case I'm willing to make an exception. If I was notified of an achievement that I obtained in game, I could then quit the game, load SAM, and check off that achievement in Steam.


That's the premise. In DiD mode we could play DiD as well as the base game. I'd prefer the same to occur using a mod as well. Consider it's an ironman playthrough and every game I've played there's two playthroughs going on. One that's slightly ahead of the ironman playthrough to test if something is possible non-ironman, then the ironman playthrough.

What's cool is depending on how the autosave is performed, it maybe possible to have multiple playthroughs accessible and loaded at anytime. For example it's often best in many games I play ironman to have two playthroughs, on testing out something before it's done. Can even show a similar way that's done in the conclusion of a popular yt playthrough of that being done in another game. Often what I do is focus only on one game, beat that game then immediately after beat it again at a reduced difficulty on ironman with a very specific set of handicaps to allow me to play it ironman. It's possible to play DiD mode and a normal game with no issue, I only mention it being cool to allow the same thing here.


I don't know if a 3rd party app would need to be created, but I do imagine there's many other questions like when to autosave and such. I think I said a lot already. Anything further may limit the design.