ED-PLG — ED Pillage & Payload

Author: R.W. Harper (CMDR Bocheaux)

ED-PLG extends Elite Dangerous Market Connector (EDMC) with a panel that tracks the on-foot microresources you loot in Elite Dangerous: Odyssey — components, items, and data — announcing every pickup with your new combined total, while also keeping an eye on your ship/SRV cargo hold. One panel covers everything you're carrying, on foot or in a vehicle. ED-PLG never touches the game itself; it only reads journal files via EDMC, the same way EDMC does.

Please report issues on GitHub.

Key Features

• Live inventory tracking across your suit backpack, ship locker, and fleet carrier locker.
• Pillage notifications on every pickup, with your new combined total (backpack + ship locker + carrier locker) — wording, a pickup sound, and which categories announce at all are configurable.
• Collapsible main panel with four colour-coded, click-to-open bars: Backpack, Ship Locker, Carrier Locker (once you're confirmed to own one), and your current vehicle's Cargo hold.
• Ship & SRV cargo tracking — a bar that automatically switches between your ship's cargo hold and whatever SRV you're driving, hidden entirely on foot.
• In-game overlay (optional) — pillage notifications and any of the four inventory bars, via EDMCModernOverlay or the older EDMCOverlay.
• Inventory window — a tabbed, filterable view of everything you hold, with a capacity bar per category.
• Ship locker capacity warning — an overlay alert the moment a category hits 90% full.
• Optional auto-update (off by default).

Requirements

• Elite Dangerous Market Connector (EDMC) 5.x, installed and running. ED-PLG is a plugin for EDMC, not a standalone application.
• Elite Dangerous: Odyssey.
• Optional: EDMCModernOverlay (or the older EDMCOverlay) for in-game overlay alerts — the plugin works fine without it.

Installation

1. Open EDMC and choose File → Settings → Plugins, then click Open Plugins Folder to reveal your plugins directory (%LOCALAPPDATA%\EDMarketConnector\plugins on Windows; ~/Library/Application Support/EDMarketConnector/plugins on macOS; ~/.local/share/EDMarketConnector/plugins on Linux).
2. Download the latest EDPLG-vX.Y.Z.zip from the Releases page and extract it — keep the EDPLG folder structure intact.
3. Copy the extracted EDPLG folder into the plugins directory, removing any older copy first if one exists.
4. Restart EDMC. You should see the ED Pillage & Payload (ED-PLG) panel — a neutral status until you load a commander, then Inventory synced.

To update manually, replace the EDPLG folder's contents with the new release and restart EDMC — or turn on auto-update (below).

First Run & Configuration

• The panel appears automatically once installed — no setup required to start tracking.
• Auto-update is off by default. Turn on "Automatically download updates" in File → Settings → ED-PLG if you want it: EDMC then checks GitHub for a newer release once per launch and stages it to apply on your next restart. A backup of your current install (3 most recent) is kept in backups/ before each update. If you're hand-editing a copy for development, drop an empty disable-auto-update.txt file in the plugin folder to override the checkbox unconditionally.
• Right after a staged update takes effect, the panel briefly shows "Updated to vX.Y.Z", then goes quiet again.
• Settings also covers: the pillage message template, an optional pickup sound (Windows only), which categories announce, overlay bar toggles and positioning, and a per-suit-loadout backpack capacity override (see below).

Using the Plugin

• Launch Elite Dangerous and EDMC as usual, load your commander, and go raid something — each pickup updates the panel, writes a log line, and (with an overlay installed) draws an in-game message.
• Main panel — click the title to collapse/expand. Expanded, a status line sits above four bars: Backpack, Ship Locker, Carrier Locker (once confirmed owned), and Cargo (whichever hold applies to your current vehicle) — each turns red when full. Click any bar to open the full inventory window.
• Ship & SRV cargo is tonnage only — ED-PLG has no idea what commodities are in the hold. It switches automatically between your ship, an SRV, or hides entirely on foot. Rhino SRV cargo shows a count but not a capacity yet, since Frontier hasn't published its fitted number.
• Pillage total is the sum of all three microresource stores (backpack + ship locker + fleet carrier locker) — not just what's in your backpack right now. Carrier locker data comes from Frontier's CAPI, which can lag the live game by 15–30 minutes.
• Backpack capacity isn't reported by the game at all — ED-PLG assumes unengineered defaults per suit type (plus the Extra Backpack Capacity mod), editable per loadout in Settings if yours is engineered or different.
• Known limitations: backpack contents may be incomplete if you log in already on foot; some consumable changes (like throwing a grenade) have no journal event and can drift until the next baseline; Rhino SRV cargo capacity is unconfirmed; the main-panel bar track colour may still be wrong under EDMC's Dark theme on some installs (cosmetic only — bar values and click-to-open are unaffected).

Troubleshooting

The EDMC log is at %LOCALAPPDATA%\EDMarketConnector\logs\EDMarketConnector.log on Windows; search it for EDPLG.

• Plugin not listed / no panel — confirm the folder is named exactly EDPLG with the .py files directly inside, then restart EDMC.
• Listed as disabled — a folder name ending in .disabled is skipped by EDMC; remove the suffix and restart.
• Overlay messages not appearing — confirm EDMCModernOverlay is installed and running; a greyed-out checkbox in Settings means EDMC couldn't import it at all.
• Wrong backpack capacity — expected for an engineered suit or the Flight Suit; see Using the Plugin above.
• Carrier numbers look stale — expected; CAPI is throttled.
• Anything else — please report it with the relevant log excerpt.

Support

Questions, ideas, or bugs? Open an issue on GitHub.

ED-PLG is a fan-made tool and is not affiliated with Frontier Developments or the EDMC development team.

Network access disclosure

ED-PLG makes network calls only for:

• GitHub, to check whether a newer release exists (once per EDMC start, only if "Automatically download updates" is enabled — off by default) and to download the release .zip if one is found. No telemetry, no inventory data is ever sent.
• Fleet carrier locker contents, via Frontier's own CAPI (the same companion API EDMC itself uses), if you own a carrier — this is how that bar's data reaches the plugin at all.

Backpack, ship locker, and cargo tracking is otherwise entirely local: it reads live journal events from Elite Dangerous while EDMC runs.

Developer Documentation

Want to modify ED-PLG, run it from source, or submit a pull request?

• docs/design-spec.md — user experience, requirements, and event flow.
• docs/tech-spec.md — architecture, module layout, journal event schemas, and the full EDMC plugin API surface used.
• docs/ATTRIBUTIONS.md — sources for journal event fields, suit capacity data, and third-party references.
• CHANGELOG.md — release history.
• TODO.md — open backlog items and known issues still being researched.