Introduction/Warning
In very rare circumstances you might have trouble running the game with Steam. While it's better to resolve the underlying problem, as a last resort we provide an alternative executable which allows you to play the Steam version of the game w/o requiring to have the Steam client running.
This version we call the NoSteam executable.
Please understand that we are recommending using the NoSteam executable only if you are running into otherwise unresolveable problems with Steam. Using the NoSteam exectuable has certain limitations which you won't run into with the normal Steam version. Namely (at the time of writing this) these are
- No patch support (Patches are only provided through Steam)
- No achievements
- No other Steam provided functionality (like chat/Steam overlay integration)
- Limited troubleshooting support with regards to crashes/startup issues
Downloading/Installation
If you still think you need to give the NoSteam version a try, you can download it by having a registered account on our forums and either have registered your X4 copy with that account, or linked your Steam account to the forum account. If that's the case, you can download the NoSteam executable from the download page.
Once you downloaded the zip archive, you need to extract it into your X4 game directory.
If you don't know where it resides, open the Steam client, go to LIBRARY (1), right click the X4: Foundations entry (2) and click on: Properties (3)
In the following window click on LOCAL FILES (1) and then on BROWSE LOCAL FILES... (2)
This will open the Windows explorer pointing you to the game directory.
You can then start the NoSteam version by double-clicking on the X4_nonsteam executable.
Savegames
If you want to take over existing savegames from your Steam version, you need to manually copy over the savegames from the Steam version to the NoSteam version.
To do so, locate the X4 data directory which resides under your Documents directory in %userprofile%\documents\Egosoft\X4 .
In there you should have a folder consisting of only numbers (your Steam ID). Inside that folder you'd have a folder called "save". Copy all the files from that folder to %userprofile%\documents\Egosoft\X4\save . Afterwards your old savegames you did with the Steam version will be available with the NoSteam version.
You can reverse the trick to copy over the saves made with the NoSteam version to use them in the Steam version again of course, if the issue having prevented you from using Steam was resolved.