The reasoning

Why this exists

Colonisation in Elite Dangerous is a logistics game the interface never quite caught up with. A station build-out needs dozens of commodity types delivered across several construction sites and the game shows you each site's needs only when you are docked at it. So commanders do what players always do when a game hides its own state: they build spreadsheets and tab out of the cockpit to update them by hand.

EDCA replaces the spreadsheet with the journal. The game already writes down every delivery, every dock and every market transaction; EDCA reads that journal as you play and keeps the whole colonisation picture current on its own. Each system gets one aggregated shopping list of everything still needed across its construction sites, with progress and average payment per commodity, plus the satisfying moment where a line goes green on full delivery. Your fleet carrier's cargo, market orders and capacity are rebuilt into the same picture from the journal and Market.json.

The HUD is a local web page on purpose. EDCA starts a small server on your own machine and opens the browser for you; the same page is reachable from a tablet on your Wi-Fi, so it can be mounted beside the cockpit with a keep-screen-awake option for long sessions. Immersion is the point: glance, load, fly.

The boundaries are stated plainly. It is local-first with no accounts, no cloud and no telemetry and it tracks your own contributions only: Elite Dangerous journals are local to each player, so squadron-wide colonisation tracking is structurally impossible from this data and EDCA does not pretend otherwise.

Full reasoning at crankthecode.com.