ED Exo Compare 1.2.6 — portable

A journal-linked exobiology companion for Elite Dangerous. It reads your local journal, merges scans and organic signals, and predicts the candidate species on a body from FSS/DSS telemetry alone — with payout ranges, first-footfall tracking, a system map, a customisable HUD and a species encyclopedia.

This release is the single-file portable build. For the unpacked program folder plus the two console builds, see v1.2.6-zip — same version, same code.

Download EDExoCompare.exe and run it. Nothing is installed.

Backups, from the launcher.

New: Backups

A Backups tile in the launcher, under Exomastery. Each backup is one zip in a folder you choose, holding:

• your journals — the one thing nothing else can give back;
• this app's data — settings, on-foot scans, surface marks, the predictions log, the miss log, shared exomastery, species fixes;
• your exomastery and codex downloads, the same files the Exomastery menu saves.

Caches and downloads the app fetches again are left out. Your EDSM and LAN keys and the 0.5 GB bio-bodies file go in only if you tick them.

When. A minute after you leave the game; after a crash, once the journal has gone quiet and Elite is no longer running; on start, if the game closed while the app was not running; every 6, 12 or 24 hours if you like; and Back up now. Nothing runs on its own until you have chosen or confirmed a folder.

Every backup is complete. Keeping 5 means 5 whole copies, and the oldest goes when a new one is made. Files that have not changed are copied from the previous backup instead of being compressed again, so it stays quick.

Where. The launcher checks the folder against your journals and the app's data:

• red — the same partition (the Desktop, Documents on C:). A failed or wiped drive, or a Windows reinstall, takes the backups with it. If it is your only drive, backing up there is still better than nothing;
• yellow — another partition of the same physical drive: safe from a wiped partition, not from the drive failing;
• otherwise it says so, and names a USB drive — supported, and the best choice on a PC with one drive (most laptops).

The warning shows on the tile too.

Restore never overwrites. Your app data goes back when the app next starts, with every file it replaces kept in a before-restore folder; journals go into a folder you pick and never replace a file that is already there.

Closing the app during a backup asks first: wait and close when it is done, keep the app open, or exit and lose that backup.

Changed

• Import Spansh export is now in the Exomastery ▾ menu instead of a button of its own. When a newer export is on disk, the ▾ arrow lights up.
• The 3D galaxy map opens in a large window and remembers its size and place.

Fixed

• The Import panel's "A newer export is on disk" notice showed even when there was none.

Linux —

Still untested on a real Linux desktop with the game running. Both files are attached to v1.2.6-zip: EDExoCompare-1.2.6-x86_64.AppImage (launcher, tray, HUD overlays; needs FUSE 2 or --appimage-extract-and-run) and EDExoCompare-1.2.6-linux-x64.tar.gz (the browser build). Details in the README, under Linux. An issue saying what worked and what did not is welcome.

No journal re-read this time.

Where your data lives

%LOCALAPPDATA%\ED Exo Compare\ — settings, your LAN key, your EDSM credentials if you add them, the species you have scanned on foot, your Fix corrections, the journal folder you chose, your HUD layout, where your windows were, the systems you looked up on Spansh (kept 30 days), the shared exomastery folder, and the prediction caches. Nothing of yours is kept in the program folder, so replacing it on an update loses nothing. On Linux the same lives in ~/.config/edexo-compare.

Your journals are read, never copied out. Uploads to EDSM, Canonn and EDDN happen only if you turn them on yourself. Looking a system up sends only its name or number to Spansh.

Windows will say the publisher is unrecognised. The executable is not code-signed, so SmartScreen asks first: "More info" → "Run anyway".

Licence

MIT. The species photographs are not covered by it — see NOTICE.md, which names every contributor and says which images are borrowed from the ED-DSN community and on what terms. The list of Frontier-populated systems and looked-up systems come from Spansh.

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Licence correction (2026-10-01). This release contains data derived from EDAstro (CMDR Orvidius), whose content is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0. Those data files were shipped under the MIT notice by mistake: they are CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 — credit the sources, no commercial use, share alike — not MIT. ED Exo Compare is licensed in three parts: the code is MIT, the data is CC BY-NC-SA 3.0, and the species photographs are Elite Dangerous screenshots, Frontier's game art under Frontier's terms. Details in LICENSE-DATA.txt, attached to this release.