The things worth knowing before you download it, plus a few that come up afterwards.
EDCA (Elite Dangerous Colonisation Assistant) is a free, local, browser-based HUD that tracks your Elite Dangerous colonisation construction sites and fleet carrier logistics automatically from your journal.
No. It runs entirely on your machine, reads your local journal and has no accounts, no cloud and no telemetry. The only thing it sends anywhere is an anonymous version check asking GitHub what the latest release is; it carries no identifier and none of your journal data.
Windows and Linux. On Windows, EDCA ships as an installer you download from the Releases page. On Linux it ships as a Flatpak bundle on that same page: install it with flatpak install --user edcolonisationasst.flatpak. It needs the Freedesktop 25.08 runtime, which Flatpak fetches from Flathub the first time. You can still build it yourself from a checkout or run it straight from source.
Per-system colonisation construction sites and their aggregated commodity shopping lists, station state, plus your fleet carrier's hold, market orders, capacity, fuel and jump range, balances and crew. It also tracks where each carrier is, including a jump you have booked but not yet made.
Because it reads every journal already on your machine once, to rebuild the colonisation history you have flown so far rather than starting you from empty. The splash names the file it is reading and how much is left, so it is a wait you can watch rather than guess at. It happens on the first run only.
Yes. Where you are standing does not change what your carrier is holding, so the hold, market and status are shown wherever you are, with a note saying the reading was taken the last time you were aboard.
No; nothing can from the journal alone. The game records no upkeep event; the balance movements it does record mix upkeep with tritium purchases, crew changes and trade income with nothing to separate them. EDCA shows the balance movements themselves and attaches no cause to them, which is the honest version.
Yes. EDCA serves a browser HUD on your local network, so you can open it on a tablet or phone on the same Wi-Fi and mount it beside your cockpit, with a keep-screen-awake option.
No. Elite Dangerous journals are local to each player, so EDCA tracks your own contributions only.
EDCA used to ship as a single executable that unpacked itself before running, which heuristic scanners objected to: one of them deleted it on sight wherever it sat. It no longer works that way. The installer now puts down an ordinary Python interpreter with the application beside it as readable source, so there is nothing packed for a scanner to be suspicious of. Nothing here is code-signed, being free rather than commercial, so an unsigned installer can still draw a warning of its own. The whole source is in the repository if you would rather read it before trusting it.
EDCA checks for a new version once each time it starts, from the tray, then prompts you when one is out, with a direct download for your platform (the installer on Windows, the Flatpak bundle on Linux) plus the choice to skip that version or decide later. You can also ask at any time with Check for Updates in the tray Help menu, which tells you the answer straight away. On Windows, run the installer over your existing installation and it upgrades in one pass, offering to close EDCA first if it is running; to remove it, use Apps and features, which clears the install folder, the shortcuts and the sign-in entry. On Linux, download the newer bundle and install it over the top; rebuilding from a newer checkout works too. To remove it, run flatpak uninstall --user uk.co.oernster.EDColonisationAsst, which leaves your database and your settings where they are. If you built it from a checkout, cleanup_flatpak.sh does the same and clears the build artefacts with it, purging your data only when you ask it to.
The problem it was built to solve, plus what it deliberately does not do.
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EDCA