SrvSurvey is an independent third-party application for use with Elite Dangerous by Frontier Developments. It provides on-screen assistance when a player is near a planet in the SRV, on foot or in ships. It has 3 main functions:

• Organic scans: Track the location of organic scans and the distance required for the next scan.
• Ground target tracking: Aiming guidance towards latitude/longitude co-ordinates.
• Guardian sites: Track visited areas and the locations of items within Guardian ruins and structures.

The application works by analyzing journal files written by the game when played on a PC, tracking the location of the player at the time of various events. It uses this information to render overlay windows atop the game, updated in real-time as the player moves about. For the most part the application is fully automatic, players need to start the application and then just play the game. It will remain hidden until triggered by events from the game.

Overlays for organic scanning

SrvSurvey is distributed two ways:

• (Recommended) An official signed build is available through the Windows App Store. This is updated less often but with higher quality.

• An unsigned build is available through GitHub releases, updated frequently. Simply download the .zip file and run setup.exe. You will need to manually uninstall a previous version, but you will not lose your prior settings or surveys.

  • Alternatively, you can just unzip and run SrvSurvey.exe from anywhere.
  • Note: some firewall/anti-virus software will block if you attempt to run it from under the Downloads folder.

SrvSurvey uses various overlay windows that will appear automatically at suitable times, like when arriving at Guardian Ruins or when scanning for biological signals, and will close automatically when no longer useful. These can be disabled individually in settings if specific ones are not wanted.

For the most common uses of SrvSurvey, see:

• Organic Scanning
• Surveying Guardian Sites
• Ram Tah Missions

The main window of SrvSurvey is not really the interesting part but provides access to the features below. It otherwise shows a brief summary of your game status and can be safely ignored. It is worth looking in Settings once in a while as there are further abilities in there not enabled by default.

On the main window:

• Set target lat/long co-ordinates via Set target button, see Tracking ground targets.

• Set the central system for Spherical searching via Sphere limit button, see Spherical searches.

• View a table of all known Guardian Ruins, Structures and Beacons via All Guardian Sites see details here, or view survey maps from specific sites via Survey Maps[see details here] (./Surveying-Guardian-Sites#reviewing-surveys).

• See which logs are needed for Ram Tah missions, see details here

• In settings, Screenshot conversions, see details below.

Use the Set target on the main window to set target lat/long co-ordinates:

When you are close to a landable body an overlay will appear showing distance and the heading to that target location. The arrow points relative to the current ship heading: up is straight ahead, turn left if the arrow is to the left, etc. The arrow fills with yellow as you approach your target, suggesting when to engage orbital glide.

On occasion there is need or desire to visit all systems within some distance of a given system. Use the button Sphere limit on the main window to establish a central system and distance:

Once active an overlay will appear top right in the Gal Map measuring distances from that central system to the targeted system, showing green if within the distance or red if not:

Whilst similar abilities are available in other companion apps for Elite Dangerous, SrvSurvey optimizes the process for Guardian sites by:

• Stamping site details into the corner of images, eg: Ruins number, lat/long, heading, etc.

• Including Ruins number in filenames.

• Using Aerial assistance : shows a guide for keeping your ship aligned above the origin of a ruins as you ascend to a suitable altitude. This makes it easy to take whole site screenshots from a consistent position, accurate within meters. Once you reach that target altitude, visual guides appear to help align the external camera view exactly over the site in question.

• Making a copy of aligned aerial screenshots in folders per type. Hence you will have a folder Aerial Alpha with only Alpha site images, and another for Beta, Gamma, etc respectively.

• As Alpha sites are less square than the others, there is an option to rotate them. This takes advantage that monitors are typically aligned landscape not portrait, enabling higher quality images that are then rotated to be portrait:

Some aspects of SrvSurvey can be controlled by sending a local message in game, with a few abilities only possible through such commands. This is the complete list of all commands and when they can be used:

.target here Use your current location lat/long as the target location. Target lat/long guidance overlay will appear. See more info above.

.target off Hide the target lat/long guidance overlay.

.target on Show the target lat/long guidance overlay.

.note <stuff> Append "stuff" to your notes for this site. Notes can be seen in the table of all ruins and edited in the map viewer.

z <number> Change the map zoom level to the given number, there is no dot prefix. Valid ranges are "0.2" through "4.0". Best values are zoom out:"0.5", zoom in: "2", zoom middle: "1".

.site [ alpha | beta | gamma ] Set the current site type as given.

.heading Either: Invoke site heading mode with the aiming grid. Or if already in site heading mode: sets your current heading as the site heading.

.heading <number> Set site heading with the given number.

.tower Set Relic Tower heading using your current heading.

.tower <number> Set Relic Tower heading with the given number.

.empty Record the currently selected Item location as an empty puddle.

.aerial Invoke aerial assistance mode, for when taking aerial screenshots of the whole site.

.map Restore map mode, after using aerial assistance.

.aim Show the aiming assistance overlay depending on ...

• Relic Tower heading - if on foot.
• Aerial assistance for Alpha, Beta or Gamma sites - requires you reach target altitude to become visible.
• Aiming assistance is not shown when in the SRV.

.kill Immediately closes SrvSurvey.

+<name> Add a named tracker for your current location, you may add 4 locations per name. The locations are ordered by distance, closest on the left.

The name can be any single word. If the word is the first 3 letters of a genus, the full genus name will be used. Eg: +tus will add a tracker for Tussock, +bac for Bacterium. This applies to the following commands too.

-<name> Remove the closest tracked location with that name.

=<name> Remove the furthest tracked location with that name.

--<name> Remove all tracked locations by that name.

--- Remove all tracked locations from all groups. This is good for cleaning up when leaving or arriving at a planet.

Commands to help those participating in Canonn's Landscape signal expedition (https://canonn.science/codex/landscape-expedition/):

.submit <extra notes> Opens the Canonn Landscape signal survey form (https://canonn.fyi/landscape_report), pre-populated based on the number of planets you have FSS'd or DSS'd.

.nextSystem If you have reserved a block of systems to survey via (https://canonn.fyi/landscape_reservations), this will retrieve the next system reserved for your commander. It will display the name in the bottom left corner and copy it into the clipboard.