File Format

The Player Journal is written in line-delimited JSON format (see json.org and jsonlines.org), to provide a standard format for ease of machine parsing, while still being intelligible to the human reader.

Each Journal file is a series of lines each containing one Json object.

File Location

The journal files are written into the user's Saved Games folder, eg, for Windows:

C:\Users\User Name\Saved Games\Frontier Developments\Elite Dangerous\

The filename is of the form Journal.<datestamp>.<part>.log, similar to network log files

In addition to the incremental player journal file, the following files are written into the same folder:

Market.json – contains list of commodities available at a station, with price info (written when opening commodity interaction screen). See section §8.17

Outfitting.json – contains list of modules and prices at station (written when opening outfitting interaction). See section §8.31

Shipyard.json – contains list of ships available in shipyard, with prices (written when opening shipyard screen). See section §8.46

Status.json – contains frequently-changing info as displayed in the cockpit gui. This is updated when the data changes. See section §14

Heading entry

The Heading record has a Json object with the following values:

timestamp: the time in GMT, ISO 8601
part: the file part number
odyssey: bool
language: the language code
gameversion: which version of the game produced the log (will indicate if beta)
build: game build number

Example:

{
    "timestamp": "2016-07-22T10:20:01Z",
    "event": "fileheader",
    "part": 1,
    "language": "French/FR",
    "gameversion": "4.0.0.100",
    "build": "r114123 "
}

(If the play session goes on a long time, and the journal gets very large, the file will be closed and a new file started with an increased part number: the heading entry is added at the beginning of every file. See also the "Continued" event)

Event Records

Each event record is a json object.

The object has a "timestamp" value with the time in ISO 8601 format, an "event":"eventname" key-value pair identifying the type of event, followed by other key-value pairs providing additional information.

The rest of this document describes each type of event that might be written into the journal, and the data values for each event.

Localisation

Some values written into the log use internal symbol IDs, as used by the game to lookup localised text strings. These have the form "$symbolname;"

When such values are written into the log, the iocalised version of the string will also be written (UTF8 encoded), as a separate key-value pair, with "_Localised" appended to the key name.

Examples throughout this document have not been updated with this extra localised format

"Government":"$government_PrisonColony;", "Government_Localised":"Colonie pénitentiaire"

In addition, for v3.0, all commodity names and material names will also be localised, eg if we had "Material ":"hyperspacetrajectories", we will get the result "Material_Localised":"Eccentric Hyperspace Trajectories"

However the localised value will be omitted if it is exactly the same as the original, ie avoid: { "Name":"iron", "Name_Localised":"Iron", "Count":2 }