Skip to content

Market Database

Tanner edited this page Jul 13, 2026 · 2 revisions

Market Database

Frameshift's trading tools run on a local SQLite database of every station market in the galaxy — the same open data Inara and Spansh use, living on your disk, updated in real time.

Building it

⚙ SETTINGS tab → Build Database (once):

  1. Downloads Spansh's daily galaxy dump (~4 GB, deleted after import).
  2. Imports every station market into data/market.db — about 15 minutes, ~1.5 GB: 474k station markets, 36M prices.
  3. Done. Rebuild any time from the same button.

Rebuilds are safe by construction: the new database is built beside the old one, validated (including against a truncated download), topped up with any live updates that arrived during the import, and only then swapped in. Your old database keeps working the whole time, and a failed rebuild changes nothing. Commander history lives in a separate commander.db that rebuilds never touch.

Until you build it, trade routes fall back to the Spansh API (slower, still works).

Staying fresh: EDDN live updates

While the app runs, it listens to EDDN — the community's live market relay. When any player anywhere docks at a station, your local prices update within seconds. This is what makes WATCH route alerts, ▲/▼ price-trend arrows and the confidence scores on route results possible. (Legacy-galaxy reports are filtered out so 3.8-universe prices never pollute Live results.)

Exclude fleet carriers in Settings is honored end-to-end: it controls what the live feed stores and what rebuilds import, not just what searches show.

Contributing back

Markets you dock at are published to EDDN (the same way EDMC does), anonymously, keeping the network alive for everyone — including the players this app learns from. Opt out in Settings → Contribute market data. A separate extended reporting opt-in also shares outfitting, navigation, exploration, Codex and biological observations, validated against the official EDDN schemas.

Data location

Everything lives in one folder next to the app (or ET_DATA_DIR):

File What it is
data/market.db The galaxy market cache — disposable, rebuildable
data/commander.db Your history, watches, plans — durable, per commander
data/settings.json App settings
data/backups/ Automatic commander-data snapshots

Delete market.db and rebuild any time for a clean market slate — your commander data is unaffected.

Clone this wiki locally