The EDDN: How your 3rd party apps work

Published 2025-12-02 09:14:01.0836616 +0000 under 'games'.

The EDDN - or to give it its full name: the Elite Dangerous Data Network - is a relay that takes journal data from commanders, and passes it on to 3rd party apps. In this article, I will be exploring how it works, and why its really useful!

#0: Where does it get all this data?

From commanders running 3rd party apps on their computers, such as ED Market Connector or the Odyssey Mat Helper. As new data appears in the journal files when you play, they take it, anonymise it and send it off.

The settings in EDMC for the EDDN. Make sure yours is turned on! It really helps 3rd party apps :)

However, they do go to great effort to make sure that you cannot be identified from the messages you send to the relay. Only a few (well, 18) messages can be sent, to avoid sending private things like friend lists or things that are only useful to you, like material counts.

//EXAMPLE EDDN MESSAGE - FSDJUMP { //EDDN DATA "$schemaRef": "https://eddn.edcd.io/schemas/journal/1", "header": { "gamebuild": "r313544/r0 ", "gameversion": "4.1.2.100", "gatewayTimestamp": "2025-05-19T07:09:46.292934Z", "softwareName": "EDO Materials Helper", "softwareVersion": "2.170", "uploaderID": "8f19e712661c9e8b480563555090a01834f9a040" }, //GAME DATA "message": { "Body": "HIP 88996 A", "BodyID": 1, "BodyType": "Star", "Multicrew": false, "Population": 0, "StarPos": \[-65.8125, 15.53125, 167.5625\], "StarSystem": "HIP 88996", "SystemAddress": 633474159346, "SystemAllegiance": "", "SystemEconomy": "$economy\_None;", "SystemGovernment": "$government\_None;", "SystemSecondEconomy": "$economy\_None;", "SystemSecurity": "$GAlAXY\_MAP\_INFO\_state\_anarchy;", "Taxi": false, "event": "FSDJump", "horizons": true, "odyssey": true, "timestamp": "2025-05-19T07:09:10Z" } }

//EXAMPLE EDDN MESSAGE - FSDJUMP
{
//EDDN DATA
  "$schemaRef": "https://eddn.edcd.io/schemas/journal/1",
  "header": {
    "gamebuild": "r313544/r0 ",
    "gameversion": "4.1.2.100",
    "gatewayTimestamp": "2025-05-19T07:09:46.292934Z",
    "softwareName": "EDO Materials Helper",
    "softwareVersion": "2.170",
    "uploaderID": "8f19e712661c9e8b480563555090a01834f9a040"
  },
  //GAME DATA
  "message": {
    "Body": "HIP 88996 A",
    "BodyID": 1,
    "BodyType": "Star",
    "Multicrew": false,
    "Population": 0,
    "StarPos": [-65.8125, 15.53125, 167.5625],
    "StarSystem": "HIP 88996",
    "SystemAddress": 633474159346,
    "SystemAllegiance": "",
    "SystemEconomy": "$economy_None;",
    "SystemGovernment": "$government_None;",
    "SystemSecondEconomy": "$economy_None;",
    "SystemSecurity": "$GAlAXY_MAP_INFO_state_anarchy;",
    "Taxi": false,
    "event": "FSDJump",
    "horizons": true,
    "odyssey": true,
    "timestamp": "2025-05-19T07:09:10Z"
  }
}

#1: How does it work?

Every client connects to the relay, and declares themselves a sender or receiver. Senders clean journal messages, then send them. When the relay receives them, it checks that it is 1. a valid message, 2. the sender is behaving themselves1 and 3. it is a message that the relay accepts

Fields like 'gatewayTimestamp' ( when the EDDN received the message ) & 'senderID' ( a random string that stays with that client for 24H ) are added, then it is sent off to all of the receivers.

If you want to see the data that the EDDN sends out, https://eddn-realtime.space shows it in realtime. It turns out that a lot of data it being sent! The EDCD2 also have a page here.

The data from eddn.edcd.io as I write this.

#2: What do we do with all this data?

Different apps listen for different messages. Apps that focus on trade might only listen for commodity market and FSDJump events3, whilst ones for tracking res sites might listen to FSSSignalDiscovered4 ones.

For PowerPlay Assistant (The web app I run), I listen for FSSSignalDiscovered (for megaships) and FSDJump (for powerplay data) events. Having the EDDN means that you don't have to log in to each app, and they can update automatically in the background.

In fact, due to the way that the journal messages and EDDN have been designed, the whole system is fairly light on clients. The EDDN connector for powerplay assistant uses ~ 20 kilobytes per second.

To Conclude

Behind all of your favourite 3rd party apps is the EDDN, and I hope that this post has served to make it a bit less of a black box. Hope you enjoyed :)

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