Next galactic tick in
Each point is a detected Elite Dangerous BGS tick, plotted by its UTC time of day. Drift over the days is the galaxy's heartbeat.
The Elite Dangerous server tick — often called the BGS tick — is the daily background simulation update. At the tick, the game recalculates minor faction influence, states, conflicts and economies across every populated system in the galaxy, based on what commanders did during the previous day. If you play the Background Simulation, Powerplay or colonisation, knowing exactly when the next server tick happens matters.
This page is a live server tick counter: it detects recent ticks from real player data and counts down to the predicted next one. Scroll up for the full-screen countdown, or check the graph above for the tick time on recent days.
The tick occurs roughly once every 24 hours, but Frontier does not publish a fixed time and it drifts from day to day. That is why a live tick tracker is useful — the countdown updates as soon as a new tick is detected.
Historically the tick has landed in the evening UTC, but the exact tick time moves around. The history chart plots the UTC time-of-day of recent ticks so you can spot the trend at a glance.
Detection watches live EDDN and player journal data for the moment many star systems start reporting changed faction influence. The next tick is then predicted from the average interval of recent ticks. Data is provided by the EDCAS project.
Elite Dangerous is a trademark of Frontier Developments plc. This is an unofficial fan-made tool and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Frontier Developments.