E:D Black Box
Elite Dangerous ships with a usable but deliberately limited in-game UI — no trade route planner, no engineering material checklist, no system search by attribute, no neutron highway plotter, no exobiology aid. Almost every meaningful gameplay loop above casual depends on at least one third-party tool, and a handful of foundational ones — Inara, EDSM, EDMC, Spansh, EDSY / Coriolis — are essentially required for serious play. The 2023 shutdown of EDDB reshuffled the deck; CMDRs Toolbox followed in 2024, picked up almost immediately by the Wanderer's Toolbox restoration project. The Powerplay 2.0, Colonisation and Trailblazers gameplay layers added since 2024 have spawned their own tool generations. This dossier is the up-to-date map of the territory.
If only five tools could exist, these would be them. Everything else in this dossier orbits around this set — they are the foundation the rest of the ecosystem either plugs into or builds on top of.
The encyclopedic multitool of Elite Dangerous. Systems, stations, markets, modules, engineers, blueprints, materials, missions, squadrons, Thargoid War, Galnet news, community goals, personal logbooks. Post-EDDB, Inara absorbed most of its functions and is now the de facto answer to "where do I find …?".
Community-maintained galaxy database — system coordinates, body data, station info, faction states, flight logs. Powers dozens of other tools through its public API. Submit your journal via EDMC and your travels populate the map.
The pipe that connects you to the ecosystem. Watches your journal and sends data to EDDN, EDSM, Inara, and any plugin you install. Without EDMC, you are invisible to the community web. Plus a thriving plugin marketplace covering exploration, BGS, materials, overlays.
The dominant route-planning ecosystem — Neutron Plotter, Galaxy Exact Plotter, Road to Riches, Trade Planner, Tourist Planner, Fleet Carrier Plotter, Body/System/Station search, Powerplay sub-tools. If a route or search exists, Spansh runs it. Used as a library by half the tools in this dossier.
Ship outfitting. EDSY is the slot-by-slot build planner with the most complete engineering simulation and is what the project's fleet build links use; Coriolis has a layout closer to the in-game outfitting screen and is friendlier for new commanders. Both encode builds in the URL — share a build by sharing a link.
When you need to know where something is, what something does, or how a mechanic actually works.
The restoration of CMDRs Toolbox. Curated guides on engineering unlocks, Guardian modules, shield mechanics, pre-engineered FSDs and material farming, plus exploration routes (Stratum Boulevard, Billionaire Boulevard), ship builds, and the Fleet Carrier & Plasma Slug calculators. Clean, focused, modern.
Galaxy-wide heatmaps and exobiology / biome distribution maps rendered from aggregated EDDN data. The site to consult before a long exploration run — find under-explored regions, body-type concentrations, biological hotspots.
Long-running ship and module database with engineering blueprint lookup. Less polished than Inara, sometimes faster for quick stat comparisons.
Community wiki — strongest on lore, mechanics, ship anatomy, faction history. Weak on real-time market data. The go-to for "how does heat damage scale" or "what is the Far God cult".
Long-form gameplay guides — fleet carrier ownership, mining hotspots, Thargoid combat, BGS doctrine. Often the most thorough single source on a given topic.
The only place Frontier consistently responds to bug reports. Search before reporting; vote on existing issues to push them up the queue.
Reddit-curated archive of community-voted essential posts — guide compilations, tool roundups, gameplay primers. Useful sanity-check on what veteran commanders actually consider important.
Where you design ships before spending the credits. Build URLs from these tools are the format every other tool understands.
The primary slot-by-slot outfitter — full engineering sim, power priority management, live stat readout. The build links here are EDSY URLs.
The other major outfitter — UI mirrors the in-game outfitting screen. Same engineering simulation, gentler learning curve.
Curated reference builds for Exploration, Logistics, Mining, Racing and PvE Combat — opinionated, role-tuned starting points. Thargoid combat builds link out to the AXI wiki.
"Where can I buy a 6A Fuel Scoop?" / "Which station has this hull?" — the project's nearest-outfitting links use this.
The authoritative source for anti-Thargoid combat builds — gauss, shard, AX multicannon doctrine, caustic-resistance loadouts, evacuation Belugas. Maintained by the AXI squadron.
Side-by-side ship stat comparison for every hull in game — useful before committing to a chassis-class change.
The galaxy is 1:1 scale Milky Way. You need a router. Spansh is the trunk; everything else clips into it.
Optimal routes matching the in-game "fastest" planner but with no 500 LY cap and full neutron support.
Routes through neutron stars for jump-range supercharging. Beagle Point in ~3 hours instead of ~30.
Hops through high-value first-discovery systems, maximising exploration credits per LY. The way to fund a new ship.
Routes visiting points-of-interest (nebulae, neutron fields, Earth-likes, ammonia worlds) — built for passenger sightseeing missions.
Multi-hop trade routes optimised for profit-per-jump using live EDDN market data.
500 LY-jump pathfinder for carriers, including tritium top-up stations and uninhabited fuel sources.
Auto-copies the next Spansh waypoint to your clipboard on each jump. Eliminates the alt-tab grind on long-haul exploration runs.
Newer Spansh route plotter EDMC plugin — supports Neutron, Galaxy, Road to Riches, Expressway to Exomastery, Tourist, and Fleet Carrier plots via CSV import.
Comprehensive route planning and fleet carrier management plugin — full GPS-style navigation experience for the galaxy.
Ultra-fast TSP-based multi-waypoint route optimiser. Quoted at ~3 seconds Sol→Beagle Point, plus an Explorer tab integrating EDSM/Spansh data.
Direct heir to the CMDRs Toolbox planner — paste a list of systems, get the optimal visit order for the route.
Standalone alternative to SpanshRouter. Calculates routes via Spansh API, copies the next waypoint to the OS clipboard automatically.
Apps that live next to the game, read the journal, and react. Most commanders run one or two constantly.
The essential pipe. Sends journal data to EDDN, EDSM, Inara and any plugin you install. Plugin marketplace covers BGS, materials, overlays, voice integration, screenshot management.
Captain's log + 3D galaxy map + trip planner — 50+ panels for combat, trade, exploration, exobio, ranks, missions, BGS. Steeper learning curve than EDMC, more visual.
Voice responder — speaks information back on jumps, scans, mission updates, danger alerts. Exposes game-state variables to VoiceAttack for advanced macros.
Virtual ship-AI assistant — ambient cockpit chatter, 30+ panel touch UI, route plotting, market lookups. Originally built for VR; works brilliantly on a second monitor or tablet via SpaceDesk.
Plugin-based journal monitor — flags "interesting" scans (landable terraformables, shepherd moons, close binaries, high-G landables, atmospherics). Critical for explorers and screenshot hunters.
Multifunctional in-game HUD overlay covering trading, exploration, BGS, logbook and routes. Heavy but powerful — for commanders who want everything on one overlay.
Turns your Elite Dangerous journal into a shareable session debrief (HTML / Markdown) — jumps, scans, bounties, trade, exobio, rank progress. Great post-session memento or stream recap.
Real-time session monitoring dashboard for Elite Dangerous on Linux (GTK4 + terminal). Rare native-Linux option for the Penguin commanders.
Ships materials (raw, manufactured, encoded), Odyssey on-foot materials (chemical, manufacturing, data), engineer unlocks and blueprint requirements. Tracking these without a tool is masochism.
Tracks every ship-side material, data fragment and commodity vs every blueprint, suit upgrade, weapon upgrade and engineer unlock. Progress bars and "next-to-collect" highlights.
The Odyssey counterpart — tracks all four material categories (chemical, manufacturing, data, plus ship materials). Suit and handheld blueprints, settlement loot tracking.
Step-by-step unlock paths for every engineer — referrals, location, requirements. Companion to the project's own engineer-unlock chase.
Best-in-class farm locations for every material — HGE sectors, crystal shard sites, Dav's Hope, Jameson Crash, settlement loot tables. Complements the project's farm guides.
The current list of pre-engineered FSDs available via community goal rewards or Powerplay — these skip the FSD grind entirely on supported hulls.
Step-by-step unlock procedures for every Guardian module — beacon scan order, blueprint sites, material costs. Required reading before chasing FSD Boosters and Guardian weapons.
Crowdsourced list of where to find specific pre-engineered suit and weapon gear in settlements — saves you the grind of engineering it yourself.
Master engineer-by-engineer breakdown — referral chains, materials per grade, blueprint comparisons. The reference for "what does this engineer actually do".
Tools for deep-space exploration, FSS analysis, exobiology scanning, and tracking what you found.
The exploration alerter — flags interesting bodies during FSS / honk and reads them out via TTS. Plugin architecture supports custom criteria.
Predicts which exobiology species are present on a planet from the body's properties — prioritise targets without driving down to check each one.
Highlights high-value bodies in a system and gives a quick total system value estimate — instant call on whether to fully map.
Submits your codex and biology data to the Canonn Research community database — your exploration finds feed into the community's mystery research.
Tracks Artemis-suit exobio sampling progress per planet — kills the manual "did I already take three samples here" guesswork.
Odyssey-live companion that shows real-time route, system, body and biological information at a glance.
Cross-platform (Linux / macOS / Windows) real-time explorer dashboard. Provides live system info even for systems not yet in EDSM or Inara.
Themed overlay for Colonisation, Exobiology, Human Settlements and Guardian sites. The polished overlay companion for surface gameplay.
Mining is one of the most data-heavy activities in the game — hotspot prices, ring composition, prospector limpet timing, refinery sorting. These tools make it sane.
Mining companion with real-time session tracking and a hotspot finder seeded with 61,000+ pre-loaded locations that grows as the community discovers more in-game.
Find ring hotspots by composition, by overlap (double / triple hotspot), by distance to a station. The default tool for "where do I mine X right now".
Where to sell — top markets for Painite, LTDs, Platinum, Tritium and the rest. Sort by sell price; filter by pad size and distance.
Calculator for the laser-mining plasma-slug experimental effect — how much you need, how often it triggers, useful for AX mining loadouts.
Fleet carrier-tuned: find known tritium hotspots close to your current location for refuelling on long carrier journeys.
Tuned, recommended mining loadouts — laser, core, subsurface, deep-core variants. Compatible with the project's Type-11 doctrine.
For commodity hauling, rare-goods loops, fleet-carrier arbitrage, and pure profit per jump.
The heavy-hitter trade route optimiser. Command-line, complex constraints (cargo, jump range, pad size, illegal goods), supports multi-stop loops. Power-user territory.
Tool for large-quantity trades — built for fleet carrier owners shifting 25,000+ tons at a time. Carrier-to-carrier arbitrage support.
Most accessible multi-hop trade tool. Less powerful than Trade Dangerous, immeasurably easier to use.
Interactive web tool for finding trade routes and loops that maximise profit per hour. Imports your ship loadout from Coriolis or EDSY.
Discord bot that finds stations with large stocks of 90% discounted gold — a niche arbitrage corner that pays out absurdly.
Create commodity market price alerts. Get notified via Discord when a specific commodity buys or sells above / below a threshold.
The accessible trade-route lookup baked into Inara. Less optimal than Trade Dangerous, but covers the daily "where to sell this" question.
Once you own a carrier or begin a colonisation build, the logistics curve goes vertical. Colonisation tooling is the freshest category in this dossier — these tools are mostly 2025–2026 builds.
Tracks colonisation build-site progress and fleet carrier logistics automatically from journal. Construction progress, commodities remaining, carrier inventory. The current best colonisation tracker.
Web tool for planning colonised systems, tracking colonisation construction sites, and pre-loading commodities on fleet carriers. Excellent companion to the project's colonisation doctrine.
Journal-based hauling and offloading calculator. Upload your journal to calculate delivered cargo and freight payouts for fleet carriers and colonisation build sites.
Auto-reports carrier fuel, cargo, jump schedule and finances. Multi-carrier dashboard. The default carrier management plugin.
Fleet carrier auto-jumper / autopilot + multi-carrier management UI. Schedules sequential jumps along a Spansh route, auto-commits each jump. Multi-day AFK trips done right.
Newer, simpler carrier auto-plotter focused on long carrier journeys. Lighter than CATS.
C# WinForms app for managing multiple Fleet Carriers (requires alt accounts). Side-by-side stats view across your carriers.
Cost calculator for carrier acquisition, services, and ongoing upkeep — sanity-check before you spend 5 billion credits.
Showcase tool for your fleet carrier — services offered, location, schedule. Lets other commanders find your services.
Lower-tech hotkey macros (Ctrl+F11 refill from carrier, Ctrl+F9 next jump, Alt+F9 auto-jump remaining route). Quick wins without the autopilot complexity.
Background Simulation and Powerplay 2.0 are the deepest meta-games in Elite. For the Jerome Archer pledge specifically, the Powerplay Assistant below is the single most useful tool in this dossier.
Web tool covering every Powerplay 2.0 task — select your task and Power, it gives full instructions. Finds nearby anarchy systems for illegal tasks; tracks Megaships (auto-update with the tick); rare-goods finder; system finder by Powerplay requirements. Essential for the Jerome Archer pledge.
The all-in-one tracker — BGS, Colonisation, Powerplay merits and Thargoid War activity. Counts every contribution across the journal and generates squadron-ready reports. Most actively maintained meta-game plugin.
Multi-tenant squadron intelligence portal focused on BGS and Powerplay activity tracking. Aggregates squadron contributions, visualises trends, supports cross-squadron coordination.
Elite Dangerous Minor Faction Activity Tracker. Auto-records every in-game action affecting minor faction influence — missions, bounties, cartographic sales. Generates BGS reports.
Web companion app focused on commander statistics and a powerful squadron dashboard. Activity tracking and leaderboards.
Built-in squadron features — member management, contribution tracking, mission boards, internal communications. The low-friction default for most squadrons.
Optimisation tool for combat exploration, colonisation, massacre missions, and mining — focused on stacking the right missions for maximum payout.
Scans other commanders, fetches Inara background plus Karma / past legal records aggregated by other EDR users. Critical for Powerplay PvP encounters and Open-mode situational awareness.
Manages wing invitations from a predefined commander list — monitors the journal to detect when squadmates are online and auto-prompts for invites.
Voice command and ambient AI. The most fast-moving sub-category in 2025–2026 thanks to the arrival of LLM-driven copilots.
The platform almost every voice tool builds on. Maps phrases to keybinds, macros, plugin calls. Foundation layer for HCS, EDDI, EDCoPilot integration.
Commercial voice packs (Astra, Verity, Eli, Orion, more) with theatrical voice actors and Elite-specific scripts. The immersion layer most commanders pair with VoiceAttack.
Voice responder providing rich in-game event narration — jump destinations, faction states, system economy. Doubles as a VoiceAttack data layer.
The most polished virtual ship-AI — ambient chatter, route plotting, market lookups, 30+ panel UI. Works with HCS packs and VR overlays.
Talk to your ship computer in real-time. TOS-compliant, reacts to game events, triggers ship actions and searches, vision capabilities, persistent memory, supports local and online STT/TTS/LLMs. The most ambitious AI copilot in the ecosystem right now.
Sci-fi inspired offline private AI ship computer. Open source, Linux + Windows. The privacy-conscious alternative to cloud-LLM copilots.
VoiceAttack plugin exposing in-game events, variables and keybindings to your macros. The clean modern alternative to older bridging plugins.
Surface and orbital navigator — calculates bearings and headings for surface driving and planetary approach. Excellent for VR commanders.
Things that change what's on your screens, add new screens, or wire physical hardware to the game.
Recolour the entire in-game HUD — orange becomes blue, green, white, anything. Reversible, online-safe. Accessibility-critical for some colour-blind commanders.
Modern replacement for EDMCOverlay / EDMCOverlay2 with backwards compatibility. Custom on-screen placement of plugin HUD elements, Windows + Linux.
SteamVR overlay adding virtual throttle, joystick and holographic buttons — VR play without HOTAS. Works everywhere except on-foot Odyssey.
Extends cockpit instrumentation onto additional monitors (Thrustmaster Cougars, touchscreens). Fleet Carrier, mining, piracy and bounty-hunting extras baked in.
Makes Razer Chroma and Chroma-connected RGB devices react to Elite Dangerous in-game events. Cockpit-lighting immersion for desk gear.
Turns a phone or tablet into a customisable touchscreen control panel. Pages of virtual buttons mapped to Elite keybinds — Stream-Deck-on-glass.
Turns any tablet into a wireless second monitor for your PC. Many commanders use this to host EDCoPilot's UI on a tablet beside the HOTAS.
Generates a printable visual reference sheet from your Custom.binds file — keyboard layouts, joystick, HOTAS. Browse other commanders' shared bindings for ideas.
Multiple graphics, HUD-colour and controls profiles — switch between them before launching Elite. Useful for VR-vs-monitor swaps.
Companion app for the Logitech G19 keyboard's secondary display — orrery view, status, market info, news ticker.
The substrate everything else runs on. You don't talk to these directly — but every tool above does.
The community-run firehose of anonymised journal events — market prices, scans, faction states, shipyard, outfitting. Every EDMC and EDDiscovery commander contributes; every tool subscribes. The single most important piece of infrastructure in the ecosystem.
Public read API over the Star Map data — systems, bodies, stations, factions, traffic, ranks. Rate-limited but free.
Spansh's route-planning REST API plus daily JSON dumps of all EDDN-derived galaxy data. The default heavy-data substrate for tool builders.
Open-source .NET library wrapping journal parsing, in-game state and keybindings. The base under EliteVA, Discord rich presence apps, custom companion tools.
Performance-first galactic coordinate, 2D vector system maps, 3D galactic neighbourhood, closest neutron star, coordinate prediction. Backup for EDSM when its load is high.
Community-collected mapping of FDev internal API identifiers — every ship, module, commodity, suit, weapon by its internal symbol. Required reference for any tool builder.
The canonical machine-readable model of every ship hull and module in Elite. Powers Coriolis, EDSY, and most downstream simulation tools.
Authoritative blueprint definitions — material costs per grade for every engineering blueprint. Used by EDEngineer itself plus many other material trackers.
Player organisations that have real gameplay impact — fuel rescue, hull repair, science research, anti-Thargoid combat.
The search-and-rescue squadron. Stranded out of fuel anywhere in the galaxy → file a request → a Rat is dispatched (typically <15 minutes). Free, 24/7. The Sidewinder insurance fallback's actual backup plan.
The repairs mirror of the Rats — hull repairs, broken canopy rescues, SRV strandings. The Asp Explorer's deep-space insurance.
The science-and-mystery squadron — Thargoid biology, Guardian sites, anomalies, codex entries. Operates its own megaship (The Gnosis). Pairs with the EDMC-Canonn plugin.
Coordinated anti-Thargoid combat group. Evacuations, AX combat zones, Thargoid Titan ops. Maintains the canonical AX build wiki.
The (in)famous community around hauling cargo to Hutton Orbital (6.7 million light-seconds from the entry star). Has its own EDMC plugin (Hutton Helper), podcast, and lore. Run for the meme, stay for the mug.
French fan-corporation site — guides, news, lore content. The reference for francophone commanders; deep-lore enthusiasts in any language.
The starting points for discovery — if you remember nothing else from this dossier, remember EDCodex and Wanderer's.
The directory of directories. 288 third-party tools catalogued by function (audio, BGS, EDDN, exploration, fighting, graphics, logbook, routes, shipyard, trading, etc). Tool authors submit and update entries themselves.
Restoration of CMDRs Toolbox — curated guides, exploration routes, ship builds, and useful tools (FC calculator, multi-waypoint planner, plasma slug calc). Also acts as a hand-picked external resources directory.
Clean, curated short-list of essentials targeted at new commanders. Avoids overwhelm — the recommendation list to give squadmates.
Reddit-curated archive of vote-promoted essential posts — guide compilations, tool roundups, gameplay primers.
Community-driven guide site — curated tool recommendations from community submissions, creator profiles, gameplay deep dives.
Lets you choose which apps and websites to launch when you run Elite — a coordinated launcher for your tool stack.
Older guides and YouTube tutorials still link to these. They no longer work — but their functions have all been picked up elsewhere.
Was the de facto station / system / commodity database for nearly a decade. Replaced by Inara (markets, stations, trade) and EDSM (systems, bodies, prohibited goods). Both absorbed the data dumps.
Long-running guides and tools site (Shield Tester, Material Finder, multi-waypoint planner). Now actively restored and maintained as Wanderer's Toolbox (wanderer-toolbox.com) — same role in the ecosystem.
A* route planner that pre-dated Spansh's Galaxy Plotter. Officially deprecated in favour of Spansh Exact Plotter. Some older Reddit posts still link to it.
Pre-journal-era OCR tools for scraping market prices from screenshots. Made redundant in 2016 when Frontier added the journal log. Listed here only because some legacy guides still reference them.
Mapping tools to the specific roles in the KA- fleet. The five essentials in Section 1 are assumed always-on; this layer is what you stack on top.
| Role / Hull | Add to the essentials |
|---|---|
| Insurance / Sidewinder Mk I | Fuel Rats & Hull Seals bookmarks. That's it — the disposable hull doesn't need more. |
| Explorer / Asp Explorer · Mandalay | Elite Observatory Core, EDDiscovery, EDMC-Canonn, EDMC BioScan, EDMC Pioneer, Artemis Scanner Tracker, Hull Seals bookmark, Fuel Rats bookmark. |
| Passenger ferry / Lynx Highliner | Spansh Tourist Planner, EDCoPilot or EDDI for ambient narration, EDISON for orbital approach. |
| PvE Combat / Viper Mk IV · Python Mk II | EDEngineer, HCS Voice Pack + VoiceAttack, BGS-Tally (for Powerplay merits), EDR for situational awareness, EDHM-UI for HUD visibility. |
| Cargo trader / Type-9 · Type-8 | Trade Dangerous or Spansh Trade Planner, EDDI (mission narration), ED Alerts for price thresholds. |
| Mining / Type-11 Prospector | EliteMining, Spansh Body Search (ring hotspots), Wanderer's Plasma Slug Calculator, EDG (tritium hotspots). |
| Powerplay 2.0 grind (Jerome Archer pledge) | PowerPlay Assistant (elite.niceygy.net) — non-negotiable. BGS-Tally for merit tracking. EDR before any encounter. |
| System Colonisation | EDColonisationAsst, Raven Colonial, Elite Cargo Log, plus the carrier stack below. |
| Fleet Carrier owner | FCMS (EDMC plugin), CATS for auto-jump, Spansh Fleet Carrier Plotter, Wanderer's Carrier Calculator, Multi Carrier Manager (if alt-account carriers). |
| BGS / Squadron player | BGS-Tally (covers everything), EDMFAT for minor-faction work, Inara Squadrons, ETN if running organised ops. |
| Thargoid War combat | AXI Wiki builds, Canonn Research membership (intel), HCS AX voice pack. |
| VR commander | EDCoPilot + COVAS:NEXT (or Elite Intel offline), VoiceAttack + HCS, Elite VR Cockpit, EDDI, Touch Portal + tablet. |
For someone just starting their tooling journey: install EDMC. It's the foundation everything else builds on, and even with no other tools it makes you a contributing member of the data ecosystem. Then bookmark Inara, EDSY and Spansh, and add tools from this directory as specific gameplay needs arise — not before. The galaxy doesn't reward over-tooling early; it rewards understanding why each tool earns its slot.