What eddb.io/stations delivers for Elite Dangerous players and researchers
eddb.io/stations is a curated, community-maintained catalogue of every station in Elite Dangerous, offering searchable details on services, economics, ownership, and operational status. Designed for long-term reference rather than momentary news, the dataset helps players compare station capabilities, interpret market behavior, and plan routes with consistent, versioned information. Whether you are assessing landing fees, estimating trade margins, or auditing station economies, eddb.io/stations serves as a durable baseline for decision-making and community analysis.
How the eddb.io/stations dataset is structured
The resource organizes stations as individual records, each exposing standardized fields that remain stable across game versions. Key dimensions include identifiers, location, controlling faction, services list, and economic metrics such as buy and sell prices for major commodities. By normalizing naming and categorizing services, the dataset reduces ambiguity when you integrate the data into spreadsheets, scripts, or third-party tools. This structure supports reproducible research and long-term comparisons as the galaxy evolves.
Station identity and location
Each station record includes a unique name, the system it resides in, its canonical coordinates, and a stable identifier used across API calls. These fields let you map station-to-system relationships, compute travel times, and anchor economic or service comparisons to precise spatial references that rarely change.
Control, allegiance, and security status
Station ownership is recorded through controlling faction, allegiance, and government fields, which together describe who governs the starport and under what political regime. Security status indicates whether the station is governed, anarchy, or other defined conditions, affecting access rules, insurance behavior, and lawful trade opportunities within that space.
Key attributes that affect gameplay and economics
Beyond location and control, the dataset emphasizes attributes that materially influence player activities. Service flags denote ship repair, outfitting, commodity sales, market broker access, and other facilities that determine how a station supports operations. Economic metrics such as price spreads, demand levels, and estimated daily revenue provide a baseline for evaluating station market depth.
Service matrix and operational hours
Not all stations offer the same support. Service flags indicate the presence or absence of refueling, rearm, repair, outfitting, and market services, while detailed category flags differentiate between major and minor market roles. Operating hours and restocking intervals further clarify when and how often a station can reliably serve your needs.
| Attribute | Verified Detail | Source Type |
|---|---|---|
| Station name and EDDB ID | Canonical name plus numeric database identifier | Community-maintained catalogue |
| Coordinates (x, y, z) | Floating-point light-second positions within the system | EDDB community contributions |
| Controlling faction | Name of the faction that governs the station | EDDB community contributions |
| Government | Regime type, e.g., Anarchy, Feudal, Corporate | EDDB community contributions |
| Allegiance | Larger power block, e.g., Federation, Alliance, Empire | EDDB community contributions |
| Security status | Security rating such as Civilian or Anarchy | EDDB community contributions |
| Services offered | Flags for repair, outfitting, market, refuel, rearm | EDDB community contributions |
| Commodity prices (buy/sell) | Per-unit prices for major trade goods | EDDB community contributions, timestamped |
| Economy type | Primary economic role, e.g., Agricultural, Industrial | EDDB community contributions |
Practical use cases across common player activities
For traders, eddb.io/stations supplies price histories and current buy/sell spreads to identify where margins exist along routes. Explorers can cross-reference station locations with scan data to prioritize stops and estimate safe-leg distances. Commanders conducting market surveys use the service matrix to assess which systems support the full suite of upgrade and fitting options. Researchers studying factional influence track changes in ownership and service availability over time to understand how political shifts propagate through the galaxy.
Trading and route planning
By comparing standardized prices across stations, you can rank stations on expected profitability, adjust for estimated jump fuel costs, and factor in landing fees when multiple candidates are viable. The dataset supports iterative refinement: as you update price thresholds and incorporate real-time market snapshots, eddb.io/stations remains a stable reference for location and service attributes.
Exploration and infrastructure assessment
Knowing which systems host multiple stations with diverse services helps you plan fuel scooping, carry adequate rearm capacity, and avoid surprise accessibility issues. Because station coordinates are fixed to light-second precision, you can precompute optimal hop sequences and verify that planned waypoints align with actual starport positions.
Integrating eddb.io/stations data into your workflow
Accessing the data is straightforward: the station catalogue is available as JSON and CSV downloads, and an API endpoint returns current records in a predictable structure. For ongoing projects, leverage the built-in update notifications and version tags to detect when service lists, prices, or ownership change. Document your ingestion schedule and transformation rules so that future adjustments to filters or currency conversions remain transparent and repeatable.
Best practices for accuracy and maintenance
- Pin to a known data version and track changelogs rather than relying on live pulls for historical comparison.
- Normalize commodity names and currency units before joining station records with market snapshots.
- Combine eddb.io/stations with in-game verification for edge cases such as temporary market outages or event-driven price spikes.
- Cache expensive computations, such as route cost estimates, and refresh them only when underlying station data or market conditions change.
Limitations and responsible usage considerations
While eddb.io/stations is meticulously maintained, it depends on community submissions and may lag behind recent game updates or reflect contributor interpretation of complex systems. Prices reflect point-in-time snapshots and should be reconciled with in-game observations when timing-sensitive decisions matter. The dataset does not include transient market effects, event-driven fluctuations, or speculative projections, so use it as a stable baseline rather than a real-time trading oracle.
Complement the dataset with in-situ checks, pilot notes, and, when relevant, official patch notes to account for dynamic changes that the static catalogue cannot capture. Responsible use means acknowledging uncertainty, versioning your assumptions, and avoiding overconfidence in projections derived from historical snapshots.
Community contributions and long-term reliability
The long-term value of eddb.io/stations comes from coordinated community curation, transparent sourcing, and consistent versioning. By documenting how data is collected, flagged, and corrected, the resource remains useful for comparative analyses across patches and for retrospective studies of market evolution. Players who contribute corrections and updates help strengthen the dataset, ensuring it continues to support informed decision-making for traders, explorers, and commanders across the Evolved Display era and beyond.