Newcomer / Intro Need tips for 3rd party tools

PHENASH

P
Hello Commanders!

I've been playing the game for a couple of weeks now and enjoy it a lot. I've gotten to grips with most of the basic stuff in the game, but I want to expand my experience. What I really miss is some way of documenting my journeys and taking notes. I'm aware that there are tools for this, like Inara, EDDB, EDSM, EDMC (and all the other ED-acronyms the internet could think of).

Problem is I find it very confusing. Which tool does what? How to get i all working? I've tried reading on the tools' websites, and searching forums. But there is only so much time in a day... And some sites are poorly documented (hello Inara, why you no have FAQ?).

So I turn to all you experienced Commanders out there. What tools do I need? What do you recommend? Here is a short-ish list of my needs. Keep in mind that I don't necessarily know what I might need in the future. Also, I might be asking for a bit too much...

*A way to see my past travels between stars, both visually and as a list (perhaps connected with lines on a per-session basis)
*A way to write personal logs, with attached pictures. Preferably with ability to link log entry to a route taken, a system or possibly a body.
*A way to note points of interest, possibly different kinds of POIs.
*A way of taking location-tagged pictures (could use the in-game F10/alt-F10 if converted to PNG or JPG)
*In a galaxy map style presentation see log entries, points of interest, find pictures etc. (not just bookmarks, as in game)
*In a galaxy map style presentation see exploration status for systems; visited, partly discovered, fully discovered, partly mapped, fully mapped, etc.
*Contribute data on commodities, materials, etc. (to sites like EDDB)
*Find commodities, materials etc.
*I'm happy with having all this in a separate window, be it browser or local program, as long as it offers a dark skin/theme.
*Hopefully most of this solved in a single front-end application.

If I get some really good answers I might try and make a post outlining some recommended set(s) of tools for new commanders, and make it a sticky somewhere. If something like that already exists, please link it.

Your help is much appreciated! Take care guys and girls :)
 

Alderius

Alderius
I use EDDiscovery (you can find API links on the Inara website). It logs every place I go, all of my trades, anything I discover when exploring, how much of a system I checked, you can enter notes, and it's all time stamped. Also has a voice output (you can configure), indicating how much fuel you scooped, tonnage left over, distance to next jump etc etc. There is also a link so you can show show routes you've traveled in the galaxy map, although I haven't used it myself.
A great companion tool for "note taking" when you don't want to make notes. Good luck!
 

Dommarraa

Dommarraa
I used to use eddiscovery, but after a few epic trips, it's now just got too big a footprint for my feeble laptop. Instead I use edmc.

Both link to edsm and inara which are imho the best place to view things and make notes etc.
EDMC will need slightly more effort to get configured, as things like image convertion are plugins, but that range of plugins allows all sorts of things that you might be interested in, like gathering Canonn data.
 
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Para Handy

Para Handy
EDDiscovery has just about all those bases covered. If you also have a profile / account in EDSM, that is updated by EDD and you can create (write) very detailed logs in there.

(EDDiscovery also updates the shared database of markets.)

I don't use an INARA account although I use their data pages, lots of people do use it though.

I stopped using EGO as that keeps getting bogged down. I stopped using EDMC as that needs you to share your F D account login details.

So, in essence, if you run EDDiscovery you need not have any other 3rd party tool open at the same time.
 
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Codger

Codger
I use EDMC to automatically upload my info to Inara and EDSM.net. I also use EDEngineer to keep track of Engineering materials and help me organize. I use EDDB to find commodities and bodies and ships and modules and etc. That's all I use for data-related stuffs.

EDSM does keep a history of my travels and discoveries, and a nice visual map of the galaxy with my route(s) over time.

I don't keep notes very much. My screenshots I just dump in a folder :)
 

Stabby_Dave

Stabby_Dave
EDMC, inara and EDDB. INARA is my go to website for ED. It has pretty much everything.

If you’re on pc, I’d recommend Voice Attack.
 

Mugur

M
AFAIK, there is a site dedicated to external resources (sites, utilities, etc.) for ED.

I use inara.cz, eddb.io, coriolis.io, EDEngineer, cannon.science, a navigation tool to reach coordinates on planets...

The game would be almost unplayable for me without the external resources. I play "casual" for more than 3 years and my time is limited.
 

ethelred

ethelred
Just to say again I use:-

EDMC - that then links to:-
  • Inara.cz (probably the best overall tracker)
  • EDSM (probably the best to track your travels)
  • Elite Trade Computer (probably the best to record data from stations you have visited only - https://eddb.io/ - is "better" as you can find everything you need, but the trade computer only records what you have done and seen - plus trade computer is an overlay rather than an open screen elswhere)
 

jnTracks

jnTracks
I'm considering installing one of these so I can give back data on markets, systems, stations; since I use the data all the time.

What can you all say about the load this places on your computer?
My system isn't weak, but it's far from new and I wasn't a bleeding edge when it was. i5 skylake, 8GB ram, GTX 970 4GB, M.2 storage. I'm running max shader settings and only get occasional drops from 60 fps which I think happen when the game is doing something in the background like loading stuff in.

Will I notice any extra load to hiccups using any of these?
 

Dommarraa

Dommarraa
jnTracks said:
I'm considering installing one of these so I can give back data on markets, systems, stations; since I use the data all the time.

What can you all say about the load this places on your computer?
My system isn't weak, but it's far from new and I wasn't a bleeding edge when it was. i5 skylake, 8GB ram, GTX 970 4GB, M.2 storage. I'm running max shader settings and only get occasional drops from 60 fps which I think happen when the game is doing something in the background like loading stuff in.

Will I notice any extra load to hiccups using any of these?
Click to expand...

EDMC, absolutely not, you wont notice it. It's a tiny footprint app which reads logs and posts them to various sites, it hardly does any processing .
EDDiscovery, probably not, but it stores a MASSIVE amount of data in your local AppData folder (12GB for me). In normal operation, you probably wont notice it, but there can be (always is for me) a long load and update process.
 

Codger

Codger
jnTracks said:
I'm considering installing one of these so I can give back data on markets, systems, stations; since I use the data all the time.

What can you all say about the load this places on your computer?
My system isn't weak, but it's far from new and I wasn't a bleeding edge when it was. i5 skylake, 8GB ram, GTX 970 4GB, M.2 storage. I'm running max shader settings and only get occasional drops from 60 fps which I think happen when the game is doing something in the background like loading stuff in.

Will I notice any extra load to hiccups using any of these?
Click to expand...

EDMC won't cause any delays, it's very lightweight. I've used it for years, and I had a GTX 970 previous to my current card.
 

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
jnTracks said:
What can you all say about the load this places on your computer?
My system isn't weak, but it's far from new and I wasn't a bleeding edge when it was. i5 skylake, 8GB ram, GTX 970 4GB, M.2 storage. I'm running max shader settings and only get occasional drops from 60 fps which I think happen when the game is doing something in the background like loading stuff in.

Will I notice any extra load to hiccups using any of these?
Click to expand...
My last PC was similar in spec, and EDDiscovery was getting a bit slow by the end. But how much of that was EDDiscovery and how much of it was the undiagnosed disk fault that eventually made it my "last PC" rather than my current one, is harder to say.

Tips:
- if you sync stars down from EDSM, that will rapidly become a multi-GB data source. That's optional, but enabled by default. It has its uses if you're a wide-ranging explorer, and you can be somewhat selective about which regions you download.
- if you have a *lot* of journals the memory usage for EDDiscovery can get pretty high. They've done some stuff to mitigate that in recent releases, but depending on how much you play you might start to run into trouble after a couple of years. (I was up to about 2GB RAM use on EDDiscovery on my old PC with about three years of accumulated journals and logs ... and it's basically unnoticeable on my new one)

Watch your RAM and storage usage and see how it goes - it should be fine. If you have multiple disks, it may be worth installing EDDiscovery (and configuring its databases) on a different disk to the one you have Elite Dangerous on. That helped startup times of both a lot, for me.

(It's a very good app - especially if you have an exploration focus - so if you can spare the resources to run it in my opinion it's worth it)
 

jnTracks

jnTracks
Thanks everybody. I'll get this going. I think not for the big data files stuff as I'm not doing huge exploring. But I'll be part of the mesh network!
 

jnTracks

jnTracks
well, I tried.

Installed EDMC and it shows my commander name and private group, and ship name. offers to log me in on a browser page but then says "Invalid Credentials". If I push update again I get "Frontier Servers are down" and the cycle repeats.

Some searching finds that this seems to happen to some people, usually gets blamed on whichever update was most recent, but doesn't have a solution. It's like, it just doesn't work on some accounts?

Verified credentials are correct...
 

jnTracks

jnTracks
ethelred said:
Have you tried running it, logging in and then playing the game?
Click to expand...

Update: it does seem to work when I play the game, but it still pops up a browser window asking me to log in at game start (when my ship cockpit appears). After that fails as usual and I give up and tab back to the game, it is seeming to send the data to the DBs. I see the status text flying by the bottom.
Then when I lad at a station it bounces me out to the browser window again to ask for a login, which still fails.

Any way to get it to stop asking for the login? I don't mind leaving it running so that I'm contributing data. I really don't need anything else from it at this point, but I don't like it interrupting the game...
 
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