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The Elite Dangerous is an amazing game with vast space to explore and a strong community providing websites and tools helping others with exploration, trade, mining, and other aspects of the game.
Elite Dangerous Star Map is one of those websites that pilots use to track their exploration progress or find interesting places to visit. It is also used by a set of other tools, that provides the community with a deeper experience in the game.
I played the game for a while and saw how exploration evolved over the last few years. As of today, it is quite simple to fly to a given system and scan it (honk) with an integrated discovery scanner then quickly look for interesting objects with full spectrum analysis.
Anybody who went on a long journey knows that after tens or hundreds of jumps, it is a bit boring to scan every single body in each system, but rather we just check for the most interesting objects and then move on.
I remember also that in the past, the discovery mechanism was much more complex. There were multiple types of scanners (Basic and Advance Discovery Scanner) that commanders could have equipped or not, and it was quite easy to leave some system bodies undiscovered in the visited system. I have noticed it at the very early stage of the game when I got a mission to deliver goods to the station which was not even listed on the system map (I had to discover it first, which also was not that trivial those days).
Having recalled these memories, I started wondering how many systems are there which are already visited but not fully discovered?
I went to edsm.net and looked for one of my sample past discoveries, let's say this system: Prua Dryoae HZ-S b9-4
The page shows only one star in the system, but also states that I have scanned 1 of 10 bodies - which means 9 are still to be discovered and scanned.
I wondered then how many of such systems could be near the bubble, and how to get that information?
Knowing the edsm.net page shows that information, I looked over the available API to check how it could be retrieved and found GET https://www.edsm.net/api-system-v1/bodies.
Let's take a look at the outcome of: https://www.edsm.net/api-system-v1/bodies?systemName=Prua%20Dryoae%20HZ-S%20b9-4
{
"id": 49801917,
"id64": 9483689928273,
"name": "Prua Dryoae HZ-S b9-4",
"url": "https:\/\/www.edsm.net\/en\/system\/bodies\/id\/49801917\/name\/Prua+Dryoae+HZ-S+b9-4",
"bodyCount": 10,
"bodies": [
{
"id": 185220804,
"id64": 9483689928273,
"bodyId": 0,
"name": "Prua Dryoae HZ-S b9-4",
"discovery": {
"commander": "Suremaker",
"date": "2020-03-10 21:34:28"
},
"type": "Star",
"subType": "M (Red dwarf) Star",
"parents": null,
"distanceToArrival": 0,
"isMainStar": true,
"isScoopable": true,
"age": 10914,
"spectralClass": "M4",
"luminosity": "Va",
"absoluteMagnitude": 9.52066,
"solarMasses": 0.335938,
"solarRadius": 0.45831297196261683,
"surfaceTemperature": 2899,
"orbitalPeriod": null,
"semiMajorAxis": null,
"orbitalEccentricity": null,
"orbitalInclination": null,
"argOfPeriapsis": null,
"rotationalPeriod": 1.7182038483796296,
"rotationalPeriodTidallyLocked": false,
"axialTilt": 0,
"updateTime": "2020-03-10 21:34:28"
}
]
}Based on that response, I see the bodyCount (10) tells how many bodies are in the system, but then bodies lists all discovered ones - only 1 in this case.
At this point I knew what I need to look for!
Moving on, I found GET https://www.edsm.net/api-v1/sphere-systems allowing to list all the neighbouring systems in the range up to 100ly to the specified origin system.
Combining those two API calls, I made the EdsmScanner.exe tool that gives me all the not-fully discovered systems.
Calling it for Ida Dhor system, i.e. > EdsmScanner.exe "Ida Dhor" made it going through 1100 systems in a range of 50ly and finding 2 partially scanned:
V463 Carinae [40.96ly] (34 bodies) (29 discovered) => https://www.edsm.net/en/system/bodies/id/9135/name/V463+Carinae
LTT 2952 [45.56ly] (22 bodies) (18 discovered) => https://www.edsm.net/en/system/bodies/id/7096/name/LTT+2952
Interestingly, there is quite a lot of systems like that, which are located in or near the bubble.
I have found this tool pretty useful after all and managed to complete the definition of several systems in one day.
Having the EdsmScanner implemented, I started wondering that EDSM will only report the systems that have been visited at least once by someone. It would be cool however to see the systems that nobody managed to visit yet.
After browsing the forums, I found this article stating that Frontier has implemented a method to import the visited stars with ImportStars.txt. I got excited and updated EdsmScanner to produce that file with fully scanned systems... just to find out that this functionality is broken :(
However, then I found another article describing the internals of the VisitedStarsCache.dat file.
I have managed to implement the VisitedStarCacheMerger.exe that allows updating players visited star cache file with a fully scanned systems list produced by EdsmScanner.
Note: As VisitedStarCacheMerger modifies the binary cache files of not fully known format, it may not work properly in some cases. Backup is advised!
If you find it useful and want to try the tools yourself, please go to home page and follow the instructions.