Vermillion Online vs X4: Foundations

"X4 multiplayer" is one of the most searched questions about Egosoft's game, and the honest answer is short: X4 is a single-player game. Egosoft tried online features once, called ventures, and they've been switched off for years. If what you actually want is an X-style economy with other humans in it, this page is about what that looks like in Vermillion, and what you'd give up.

Is X4: Foundations multiplayer?

No. X4 is single-player. Version 1.5 in December 2018 added ventures, which let you send ships into other players' universes. According to Egosoft's own wiki they were disabled from version 4.0, and a test of a replacement, the Multiverse Team Seasons beta, ran from April to June 2023. As of October 2026 there's no co-op or shared universe. Egosoft's focus has been the single-player game, most recently with the 9.00 Empire Update in June 2026.

That's a design choice. A big part of X4 is that the universe runs without you and waits while you pause to plan. You can't pause a shared world.

Empire builder vs one pilot in a crowd

The biggest difference is what you control. In X4 you start in one ship and end up running fleets, stations and production chains across many sectors. Your "character" is really a company.

In Vermillion you're one pilot. You fly one ship at a time, and you can bring friends along as gunners or form a party or company. There are no fleets of AI ships working for you and no player stations yet. Those are on the roadmap, not in the playtest. What you have instead is a ship you built and other players who want what it carries.

NPC economy vs player economy

X4's economy is a simulation. NPC factories produce wares, NPC traders move them, and prices respond. It's impressive and it's yours to bend.

Vermillion's economy is mostly players. NPCs set price floors and supply pirates, and the rest is people:

• Every station has its own order book: buy orders, sell orders, escrow, a 2% tax and price history.
• There's no global inventory. An item exists at one station, and moving it means flying it there.
• Courier contracts with collateral let you pay someone else to take the hauling risk.
• Better ore sits in more dangerous space. Titanite only in Low security, Iridium only in Lawless.
• Fields deplete and respawn somewhere else, and jackpot fields are announced by sector to the whole server.

The X4 player in you will recognise all of it. The difference is that the hauler you're about to undercut, or ambush, logs off and complains on Discord.

Ships: picked from a shipyard vs built from blocks

X4 has a long list of fixed hulls in four size classes, and you customise loadouts at a shipyard. Vermillion lets you design the hull itself in 1 m blocks: 68 armour shapes in five materials, plus about 140 functional parts. Engines, thrusters, cannons and radar are assemblies of several blocks, so a bigger gun means finding room for more barrels and autoloaders, and every one of those blocks can be shot off.

Flight is Newtonian on six axes. Thrust comes from where you placed the thrusters, so a design with weak side thrust strafes badly. It's closer to flying an X4 ship with flight assist off than with it on, except your layout decides how it handles.

Combat and risk

In X4, losing a ship is a cost on a spreadsheet, and a save file is never far away. In Vermillion there are no saves. The map has four security tiers: Secure (no damage), High security (police destroy attackers after 20 seconds), Low security (no police) and Lawless (no rules). A destroyed ship loses half its cargo; the rest spills into the wreck for anyone, and other players can salvage the hulk. A free Rookie Ship means you're never locked out.

NPC pirates exist too: patrols, hideouts with three waves and a boss, strongholds in Low security and Lawless with a Pirate Captain in the last wave, and raids on mining fields. Bounties run from 18,000 cr for a Skiff to 250,000 cr for a Captain.

Where X4 is better

• Scale of play. Fleets, stations, production chains, territory. Vermillion is one ship and one zone of 19 sectors today.
• A living universe without other people. Factions trade, build and go to war on their own.
• Your pace. Pause, save, speed up time. Nobody ganks you while you're making tea.
• Content. Years of updates, several expansions, story plots and a big modding scene.
• Stability. X4 is a finished game. Vermillion is a playtest that may wipe.

Who should play which

If you want to build a trade empire and watch it run, play X4. If the part of X4 you liked most was flying one ship through dangerous space with a full hold, and you want that to be risky because a real person might be waiting, give Vermillion a go. Plenty of X players will keep both installed.

Questions people ask

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