EDPPMT — Elite Dangerous PowerPlay Merit Tracker

Author: R.W. Harper (CMDR Bocheaux)

EDPPMT extends Elite Dangerous Market Connector (EDMC) with a PowerPlay panel: it tracks the merits you earn live, estimates the Control Points (CP) and credits they represent, keeps a history of every session, and adds a handful of optional quality-of-life tools (Rare Goods Finder, Auto-Honk, Interdiction Warning, Landing, Discovery). It never touches the game itself — it only reads Elite Dangerous's own journal files via EDMC, the same way EDMC does. See Developer Documentation below for architecture and internals.

Beyond PowerPlay and merit tracking, EDPPMT has grown a handful of general-purpose commander's-life features that aren't PowerPlay-specific at all (Interdiction Warning, Landing, Discovery) — added because they were nice to have, and because building them on EDPPMT's existing journal pipeline and overlay plumbing was easy. Some overlap with each other; all are opt-in and can be switched on or off independently from the Settings tab or the main panel's quick-toggle buttons, so you only run what's useful to you.

Please report issues on GitHub.

Key Features

• Live merit & CP tracking — merits and estimated Control Points for your current system and for the session as a whole, updating in real time. CP is estimated from editable merits-per-CP ratios (Acquisition, Reinforcement, Undermining) since Frontier doesn't publish an exact conversion.
• Session history — every session's totals save automatically (up to 200 past sessions), so you can compare sessions later, not just watch the live one.
• Rare Goods Finder — the nearest rare commodities to wherever you are, each with its origin system's current PowerPlay controller looked up live from Spansh.
• Auto-Honk (Windows only, off by default) — fires your Discovery Scanner automatically on every system jump.
• Interdiction Warning (off by default) — an on-screen heads-up via an optional overlay plugin. A hostile NPC's own "I'm coming for you"-style taunt usually wins the race and fires several seconds to tens of seconds before the interdiction actually begins; Status.json's flag or the resolving journal event are the fallback if no taunt arrives.
• Landing (off by default) — docking status, assigned pad, and a pad-layout diagram, shown on the in-game overlay and/or right in the EDMC panel.
• Discovery (off by default) — a gold overlay alert the instant you jump into a system nobody's ever scanned before, and a cyan alert the instant you're the first to scan or map a body. Silent on already-charted systems/bodies — it's a celebration of the rare case, not a running status line.
• Alt-friendly — every commander's merits, CP, and sessions are tracked separately, and switching commanders in EDMC switches the whole panel with them.
• Collapsible header and optional self-update (off by default) — see Network access disclosure.

Requirements

• Elite Dangerous Market Connector (EDMC), installed and running. EDPPMT is a plugin for EDMC, not a standalone application — it cannot function without it.
• Optional: EDMCModernOverlay (or the older EDMCOverlay) for Interdiction Warning's, Landing's, and Discovery's in-game overlay graphics. Without it, those features simply have no overlay to draw on — the plugin still works.

Installation

1. Open EDMC and choose File → Settings → Plugins, then click Open Plugins Folder to reveal your plugins directory (usually %LOCALAPPDATA%\EDMarketConnector\plugins on Windows).
2. Download the latest EDPPMT-vX.Y.Z.zip from the Releases page and unzip it. Do not download individual files — keep the EDPPMT folder structure intact.
3. Move the extracted EDPPMT folder into the plugins directory, removing any older copy first if one exists.
4. Restart EDMC. The plugin's settings tab appears under File → Settings → EDPPMT, and its panel joins EDMC's main window.

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

First Run & Configuration

• The panel appears in EDMC's main window automatically once the plugin is installed — no setup required to start tracking merits.
• Start EDMC before (or with) the game so journal events reach it live.
• Interdiction Warning, Landing, Discovery, and Auto-Honk are all off by default — turn them on from the Settings tab (File → Settings → EDPPMT) or with the quick-toggle buttons on the main panel.
• The Settings tab shows the installed version (a link to the Releases page) and lets you edit the CP ratios and clipboard format.
• Click the panel header to collapse it to just the title; the collapsed/expanded state persists across restarts.

Using the Plugin

• Main panel shows your pledged Power and rank, current game mode, the system you're in and its PowerPlay state, merits/CP for this system (switches live as you jump), and session-wide totals — updated as journal events arrive.
• Buttons: quick on/off toggles for Auto-Honk, Interdiction, Landing, and Discovery; Rares opens the Rare Goods Finder; Sessions opens the session-history window; Rescan re-reads the current journal file directly, recovering any merits missed if EDMC started after the game was already running.
• Interdiction Warning fires off two independent signals, not one — Status.json's "being interdicted" flag can lag up to ~1s behind the real moment (it's only checked once a second) and only flips once the interdiction has already begun, so a matching hostile NPC chat line is treated as its own, earlier trigger: real-world testing against this developer's own journal history showed these taunts precede the actual interdiction by a median of 17 seconds (up to nearly a minute). Only NPC-channel chat counts, to avoid other commanders chatting about pirates in system/squadron chat setting it off.
• Discovery watches the same "was this ever scanned/mapped before" flags the game itself reports: the arrival star's automatic post-jump scan tells you whether the system is a new discovery, and every subsequent scan or Detailed Surface Scanner mapping tells you the same for that body. There's no direct "is this system new" field in the journal, so the arrival star's discovery status is used as the best available stand-in for the whole system.
• Sessions window — a By System and By Activity breakdown for the current session, plus a History tab of past sessions and a cumulative all-time summary. A session spans one continuous game-client launch for one commander; switching to a different commander always starts a fresh session.
• How activity is classified: EDPPMT infers Acquisition / Reinforcement / Undermining from the PowerPlay state of the system you earned merits in, relative to your pledged Power — a best-effort heuristic (Frontier hasn't documented a merits→activity mapping), so a row that looks wrong is worth double-checking against the system state shown alongside it.
• "Credits earned" is a simple diff of your credit balance from session start to now — it covers all income and expenses, not just PowerPlay-specific income.

Support

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

EDPPMT is a community project and is not affiliated with Frontier Developments or the EDMC development team.

Network access disclosure

EDPPMT makes network calls only for features you can see are network-backed:

• Spansh, to look up a system's current PowerPlay Controlling Power for the Rare Goods Finder (live, since control shifts week to week).
• 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.
• Interdiction Warning, Landing, and Discovery send to a local overlay endpoint you configure (default 127.0.0.1:5010) — that's your own machine, not a remote service.

Double-clicking a Rare Goods Finder row, or a system link in a "Copy Progress" line, opens that page on Inara in your own browser — that's a link you click, not a request EDPPMT makes on its own.

No telemetry, and no merit/session data is ever sent anywhere. Session history lives in sessions.json inside the plugin folder and is never touched by an update — only deleting the plugin folder removes it.

Developer Documentation

Want to modify EDPPMT, run it from source, or submit a pull request?

• docs/tech-spec.md — architecture, module layout, data formats, the merit/activity/CP pipeline, and the EDMC plugin API surface used.
• docs/ATTRIBUTIONS.md — sources for journal event fields, merit/CP ratios, and third-party data this plugin relies on.
• CHANGELOG.md — release history.