The very lifeblood of the playthrough.

X'i Seed Bulbs, produced by your racial tech, can be planted in regular un-tilled ground (And later grown in trays) to start growing into X'ian plants.

If they're just regularly planted in the ground, they have an on-contact effect. If your race is natively radiation resistant (X'i, obviously, Novakids, Thelusians), contact with X'i bulbs with give you a short duration healing effect and hunger restoration. (Else, it's a bad thing.)

This effect of the bulbs means that whenever you are near your base, you can just park inside the glow for a bit to heal up and save your otherwise limited healing/hunger tools - again further reinforcing the fortify-up nature of the race. It's worthwhile to leave bulbs planted and unharvested in areas you want to recover or just sit in.

Occasionally, when you use your racial tech, you will produce 'Mutated' Seed Bulbs. These harvest just like normal bulbs but when regularly planted, they will grow into a differently-colored X'i plant with a stronger heal effect, that stacks with the baseline.

Very rarely, you will produce an 'Alpha' seed bulb. Same as above, even stronger effect. You can plant the three bulb varieties in a line next to each other and have an incredibly strong passively-available recovery area.



To produce the rest of the X'i racial items you'll need to craft the forming bulb, available in the basic 'C' craft by hand menu.

Racial Weapons

All of the X'i weapons do the fairly decent Radioactive damage type. The melee weapons are fairly standard (The two-handers have some nice Radioactive secondaries) but, as the rarity levels show, their ranged weapons are where the interesting things happen.

The ranged weapons are characterized by no ammo counts, high energy use, decent damage.

X'ian Bulb Gun - 2 Handed: Hunting Weapon. Has a short ranged, piercing, one-wall-bounce radiation energy projectile dealing decent damage and an alt fire that deals significantly less damage as a Poison dart that inflicts poison if it hits.

X'ian Pistol - 1 Handed. Fires a short ranged 'Guile Sonic Boom' shaped projectile that pierces, deals decent damage, and slows enemies hit.

X'ian Arm Blaster - 1 Handed. Fires a medium ranged energy projectile that pierces, deals decent damage, and slows enemies hit.

X'ian Rad Thrower - 1 Handed. Short-ranged radiation flamethrower that rad-burns enemies hit. Combines very well with the Pistol and kiting.

X'ian Acid Gun - 1 Handed. Fires a short ranged bulb that attaches to hit terrain and spews forth ground-damaging radioactive gas. Haven't used this one much, mulches surfaces.

In short, you get a *lot* of options for dealing out Radioactive damage. You'll want to pick up some other damage types elsewhere, but the Xi weapons make for a good primary arsenal. Of special note is combining the Pistol and Radthrower for a close range Damage+Slow+DoT+AoE Pierce effect that does exceptional work in killing things while keeping you safe.

Racial Armor

There are T1, T2, T4, and T6 Armor sets for the X'i. The T1 and T2 are very easy to craft, among the best suits at their given level, and some of the first things to shoot for.

The T4 set is exceptional in that you can get to all of it's components without leaving the starting planet, if you keep investing in farming. It's resistances compensate for your racial weaknesses, it boosts your racial strengths, and is *the* standout set for exploring Sulfuric biomes at it's level.

The T6 set, in it's current incarnation, is in a bit of an awkward place - the ingredients, mainly the Pyreite, will be hard for you to get with a heavy racial fire weakness. By the time you can make it, you will have access to comparable T6 sets. It is an upgrade to muta-chitin, and serves as a decent combat set that allows for a good amount of exploration on the side.

Your very early ability to delve into Sulfuric, Radioactive, and Poisonous biomes should be put to use to upgrade your tier. In general, the order in which you'll want to tackle the various places in each tier list are: Radioactive, Poisonous, Sulfuric, Cold, Hot.

Of special note is Strange Seas planets, which you'll want to beeline to as soon as you have a decent Poison EPP, because Plasmic Fluid is tremendously useful to you and is available there in infinite quantities.

Racial Utility Items

The general rule for X'i utilities is that they are worse than their tech equivalent but available significantly earlier.

This holds for:
Acid Node - Worse than both the Acid EPP and Ar-Con Pack, but available earlier than either. Not much use with the racial armor also providing Acid immunity and being easier to make than it.
Float Bulb - Better than the base parasol, worse than an upgraded one. Craftable from the first planet, useful in early exploration.
Lantern Bulb - Significantly better than the lantern on a stick - provides all the light you really need. Eventually replaced by the Plasma Light Pack, renders other light-back-items unnecessary to craft.
Grapple Vine - Worse than the Grappling Hook but available very early if you can get a lucky neptunium find.
Bed/Pod - X'i don't benefit or heal from sleep in any way, so I don't even know how good these are.
Well - Eventually to be replaced by water generators, but available stunningly early and cheaply.


Unique to the X'i / Better than Comparables:
Water Repulsor - Kind of neat and unique to the X'i. Didn't really use that much, as the majority of time I wanted what was *under* the fluid or the fluid itself.
X'ian Flag - This is the cheapest-to-construct flag in the game. As suiting the tend towards fortifying areas on a X'i, you have always-available flags to pop down to save your basebuilding progress. Use these- they're both smaller in footprint and cheaper to construct than anything else.
Xi Chitin - This is the endgame reason to play a Xi and is one of the best EPP Augments in the entire game. The Xi chitin gives a solid 10% resistance to every single element, the equivalent of several high-tier shield augs combined together.

Racial Heals and Misc Craftables

You get three racial healing items as a X'i:
Reactive Gel I - 50hp/1s
Reactive Gel II - 75hp/1s
Reactive Gel III - 100hp/1s

Gel 1 requires Algae (Get farming it as soon as you can/Prioritize getting a Water Generator up as soon as possible) and Carbon Dioxide (Extractable from many things, notably logs, coal, limestone, and centrifuged Poison) - in short you can very easily produce this one in massive quantities with some basebuilding. It's certainly harder to access than a bandage, but with a bit of development work you won't really hurt for their lack.

Gel 2 requires Bioluminescent Spores (Sifter or extracting Oonforta Seeds) and Fungal Ichor (Blex Cactus, also something you'll need for the T4 Armor Craft) - Less easy to farm these in quantity, I honestly recommend skipping them to go right to T3 after making one.

Gel 3 requires Plasmic Fluid (Available in infinite quantities on Strange Seas planets) and Erithian Algae (Something you'll want to farm anyways for it's use as biofuel). Once you've hit a Strange Seas planet even once and started farming the Algae this replaces your other heals for the rest of the game. A simpler production chain than the comparable Nanowrap bandage, once your production of these is set up you can freely spam them for the rest of your playthrough.

Misc Crafts:

Algae, Carbon Dioxide, Silicon, Water - Very useful crafts for the very beginning of the game where you don't have access to infrastructure.

Xi'an Rad Bulb - A throwable radioactive gas grenade. Didn't really use - throwables have scaling problems.

X'ian Bulb - Remember that 'Find Strange Seas' advice? 1x Bulb + 8x Plasmic fluid = 2x bulbs. The moment you touch down on a strange sea you don't have to grow bulbs anymore. Very nice increase in utility when most bulb crafts are starting to fall off compared to tech equivalents.

Edible Isotopes - An interesting way to make shelf-stable food that doesn't need a fridge to keep from decaying. Since X'i are so dependent on staying full, having some edible isotopes packed away in reserve for emergencies is a nice touch.

Uranium Ore - A craft the game tells me I *should* have for a X'i and a quick check of git confirms should be present but isn't on my character, so covering it as though it was:
1x Seed Bulb + 200x cobblestone = x3 Uranium Ore. This would have been a tremendously useful craft in using cobblestone and acquiring uranium for that edible isotopes craft. (Yes, I'll report this immediately afterwards. I found this one while doing a comprehensive look for anything I missed.)

I really wish there was at least 1 Xi'an block type covered here, because they have a neat biologic look to all their tech, and I think it can jar with most other things you can build a base out of, but as it stands there aren't currently X'i blocks. I imagine there eventually will be.
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As you can hopefully see by the shear amount of stuff covered, the Xi have had a ton of work put into them, and will give you a different playthrough than you might be used to. The way their abilities works pushes you very strongly towards building up installations on the planets you visit and changes various aspects of the game. If this inspires you to give them a whirl, I'm happy to have pulled your interest.

No comment ? Come on guys, that's a very good guide !

Very good job here, I did a Xi run already, but might do another one again, it is so much fun...

Hi it seems the ship bios for this race are missing. There use to be a ship for this race. Any idea what happened? How do i fix this to get the race ship back? Was it removed on purpose?

Yo, great hints. Can you please clarify for complete newbies more about defense bonus.
Does it disappear fully and completely once you jump away for one small mission in space and return back to same planet etc?

... after a couple of quick tests with starting char and zero armor. Any change of planets incl ship warp resets armor. Then within 15? minutes it ticks to 25, which is monstrously powerful at start.

Microproblem - heals you get from standing near seeds cancel out fully eaten buff which puts an extra emphasis on two separate modes of operation - at base and wandering.

Anyway, this is the only race that from the early game allows and massive afk in survival mode, which even with no research ticking is great for a lot of those automated activities. Tbh this ultra hard race with enough patience feels more convenient than ultra easy fish samurai with their seeminly little energy resist penalty becoming a problem more often than this race's weakpoints IF you can play without being in constant rush forwarts.

When I get Alpha seed bulbs, the first one goes with me everywhere (hotkeyed alongside a Mutated seed bulb & maybe a standard as well for quick easy healing/feeding in the field - you can only get 2 seeds in range standing still, though if you pace between you can get all 3). The second one goes in a carefully constructed part of my base where I'm within reach of a lot of crafting stations which I often use to make large quantities of things, but barely - not so close that I'm likely to accidentally harvest the bulb. Any more go into storage in case of accidents, or to secondary bases. Note that the bulbs DO NOT WORK on your ship. I recommend an Organic Soup tub instead for handling hunger during those long journeys between planets. You might also find it worthwhile to hire one or more chef-type crew members.

Faster hunger means STL boosters should be a higher priority than normal. It'll reduce your downtime & help you make planetfall in good shape without eating half your stash.

Important note: Bulbs will fill up your hunger meter, but it's slow and the effect doesn't grant Well Fed.

Kadavan Cactus is probably the best easy no-spoil food to accumulate without paying pixels, though Chocolate Yum Yums from Murder-Twig's Yum-Yums at the Science Outpost are relatively cheap & also never spoil. Not your best option for constant use, but good if you only need the Well Fed regen buff occasionally & haven't gotten your hands on cactus seeds yet.

Sweetscoop also doesn't spoil, substantially impacts hunger (40 food value; cactus is 8.5), & gives you a 20% bonus to your effective energy max for 2m, but it's quite far into the agriculture research tree; you have to farm a lot of genes to unlock it. If you go that route, plant flowers that don't mention dye in their descriptions, & run the seeds through the xeno lab at the science outpost. It's a bit west of and one level above the teleporter. You can get the phosphorous for the sugarcane precursor by running miracle grass seeds (not roots) through a hand mill or extractor. Alternately, you can buy hops seeds from the agriculture merchant near the 2 stop teleshop & run those through the mill/extractor instead. But miracle grass doesn't require watering, it gives a lot of seeds, and the roots can be sold or refined into mulch which can be used as raw material for making cell material at the alchemy/chemistry lab.

Robo Snax, despite being metal, can and will spoil.

Bananas don't feed you as much.

Edible ores don't feed you as much AND cost you valuable materials. Treat them as emergency food. They're a basic craft, so you can leave them in ore form until/unless you need food, then craft as needed. Just make sure you have enough bulbs. You can stock up ahead of time by converting cobblestone to uranium. The food value is minuscule & the recipe costs 200 cobble, so it's best used as a source of the Well Fed buff after filling up with a temporarily planted bulb (or 2-3 if you bring a mutated and/or alpha seed along).

Kiosk food is mostly pricey and/or spoils.

Baked goods require wheat, which is a pain to work with & competes with booze for ingredients.

Honorable mention: Canned food eventually does spoil, leading to stacking issues, & it's pricey (though less so if you flag & if necessary encase a merchant selling it cheap-80 or below is good, sub 50 is a steal). But it lasts a long time & fills you up quite well, so it's a good panic button food if you realize you forgot to eat for a while & need to get your hunger meter up STAT.

Feel free to add this or a modified version to the guide, with credit please, if you find it helpful.

Radioactives are good for active players. I love this race for opposite approach because of afk homerunning ability - bees and somesuch. In that semiafk mode community garden can generate helloads of cocoa beans which means having 1k stacks of chocolate ready to be cooked. So usually it's a few hours doing real life chores while this character farms, then using whats farmed to have easy life during an hour of active playing for me. Best afking abuser race ever.

I found that Strange Seas tend to be poison *gas* specifically, so if you do the early mission at the science outpost (fertilizer for gas mask), you can go to a Strange Sea planet & harvest by hand or set up a pump first thing after fixing your ship. The other hazards of those planets can be avoided simply by digging and filling the hole after you, and if you plant a flag & mine the back wall behind it you can warp in & out without hitting the surface ever again. You can even set up the pump to be isolated from the sea at large - any destroyed back wall below the "water" line will rapidly leak plasmic fluid into that space. (Note for newbies: Pumps do not require power, and they have internal storage so you don't have to mess with ITDs to use one.)

The race revamp that's in testing right now should make it to Steam soon. The guide will need an update.

Are there late game weapons for this race?

Nothing on uber tiers, but weapons in game are upgradable. I'd say treat Xi gear as a means to steamroll into early game, but later? Not having top heals of other races means you need to be more concentrated on resisting and/or avoiding damage properly, your weapons, like them or not, stick to one element which means you will have to diversify anyway - all that means the Xi lategame are mostly good at tanking rad related damages and environments and living in such places means facing a lot of rad resistant creatures so Xi weapons IMHO are not supposed to be an answer to everything endgame.

Thank you. Different races give bonuses to weapons that can be used in the late game, and quite significant ones, so I would rather choose a race with a good bonus to weapons that can be used throughout the game? In addition, I use the rpg growth mod and there are also bonuses to weapons and it’s sad that Xi bonuses doesn’t stack with it. for this race it’s probably worth taking the explorer class and probably for a cooperative game i think.

Well, I used Xi with FU and their best points are a bit overshadowed by the mod content. Their ability to have non perishable food? FU has sweetscoop. Their unique ability to afk without starving? FU has organic soup bath. Unique weapons of Xi. Don't even get me started about FU weapons. So in FU related mod combos Xi are a race for challenge runs where due to rp or whatever other reasons the player forbids himself to use some things like any combat mod content at all unless it's needed to do quests or survive environment. ... then most of the better made races are suddenly fun.