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The place that is not a place, the door that is also the key. That old nonsense.

You have found Rainbro's secret article on Raxxla! Congratulations! I don't think it exists.

Thanks for reading!

Alright, fine, I'll explain. But I'm gonna do it in a really obnoxious stream-of-consciousness style, completely different from the meticulously planned script you've come to expect from other GalNot News articles.

So, first let me clarify: maybe Raxxla exists in lore. It's basically unfalsifiable to say either way, it could exist in a footnote in some internal lore doc and we'd never know if it is never referenced. In all the years GalNet has run, I don't think it has had any material impact on any narrative.

Does it exist ingame, as something you can find? Also basically impossible to say. But the way Frontier acts makes me think no.

Frontier claim it exists, of course, but they're strangely reluctant to say it can be found. Which is a bit weird, given how much they hype everything else up, surely it would be an amazing selling point that YOU, dear potential customer, could be the first to discover some earthshattering secret?

Raxxla could be a placeholder inside an unobtainable permit lock, and they'd not be lying by telling us it exists in the galaxy. I think this is the most likely outcome, if it does exist at all. Why? Because if it can be found, why do the supposed clues to find it keep changing?

First we had the unique Dark Wheel missions, full of vague allusions to the Raxxla secret. They never went anywhere and were silently removed from the game. In the years of looking, not even a hint has been found on what they COULD have meant when they existed.

Then we had the Codex clues, and these are the big red flag to me. They're a string of random mythological allusions, and they were only added to the game several years in. So, how is that compatible with Raxxla always being a thing ingame?

If Raxxla has always been locatable ingame, then either it was moved to account for these new clues, or it was always hidden according to these clues and Frontier just waited several years to put them ingame. I don't find either possibility convincing, most of all because again, after years of analysis, not a single bit of progress has been made on decoding the clues.

I have seen people go down DEEP rabbit holes trying to find Raxxla. They'll post very convincing essays about how this piece of mythology can be connected to this and then that and therefore if we go to systems A B C D and blow up a container of Grain then Raxxla will be revealed.

Thing is, mythology is BIG. It is by its very nature interconnected, because silly humans on earth didn't have much to do in the olden days and spent a lot of time telling stories. They then travelled to new places and changed the stories a bit, or outright plagiarised them, which is why some gods exist in like four or five different cultures in slightly different ways. Thousands of years of stories tend to end up connected.

A lot of stars also got named after mythology, because coming up with new names is hard. And those names got added to Elite. The end result is that you can connect basically anything to anything, myth to star to myth to star, and the Codex clue is just a string of potential starting points. It is theorist bait. I called this YEARS in advance with Five Nights At Freddy's, who clearly had no clue what the overarching story was going to be and just kept adding in more and more Unexplained Clues until the whole thing just collapsed, I think they have multiple timelines now? This is the same! Just not quite as bad. We'd get to FNAF-levels if Frontier moved faster than an ice glacier.

Frontier are reluctant to even imply that these clues are correct. They've never spoken on why the Dark Wheel missions got removed, and the Codex clue is "alleged". To me, that looks like leaving themselves room to change things. No matter how far you look, if they ever decide to implement Raxxla, they can do it in some completely different way and just say the clue was a red herring.

I think the clues are red herring, and that there is no real herring to find. Like, okay, pretend you're in charge of hiding Raxxla. You've come up with the alleged Raxxla toast in the Codex as a clue. How on earth are you hiding an actual LOCATION inside that?

There's not enough data in the text itself to resolve to any sort of actual system name, so you're just blindly hoping that players will read the vague mythological references and triangulate something, somehow. Without going down any of the exponentially increasing number of false paths laid by millenia of myths. There's just no actionable information here.

It's also wildly different from any puzzles implemented elsewhere by Frontier, I believe because those puzzles actually had to be solvable?

At the end of the day, after over a decade, there is literally zero progress on Raxxla. Either there is no progress to be made, or Frontier have made a puzzle that isn't realistically solvable so you may as well just search randomly. And they won't even confirm if it can be solved.

So, yeah, I don't buy it.

BUT WHAT IF IT WAS REAL-

I don't really have much more to add on this topic, maybe I'll clean this mess into something coherent and well-referenced at some point (I won't), but let me just add one more thing because I feel the need to add more of my divine insight into this topic.

I see a lot of people talk about how Raxxla must be fairly close to Sol, because the first mention of it is before we had super-duper-magic FTL drives, so whoever found it can't have gone too far. Those people are wrong. Allow me to destroy your false hope of narrowing down the search.

Suppose there's an alien ruin, 35,000LY from Sol. It is the remnant of an underwater alien city, once ruled by advanced aliens before the city sunk and killed them all or whatever.

Human explorers happen upon this right now. They name it Atlantis, because underwater city etc etc.

So now Atlantis is a real thing. Does that mean that humanity discovered it thousands of years ago, because that's when the first mention of Atlantis was? The Romans or whatever (I'm not checking) made it 35kLY out and hid mentions of it in their documents?

No. The name can predate the thing. We are bad at coming up with names and love reusing them. "Raxxla" could have been a fairy tale before the space illuminati stumbled across an alien relic and named it Raxxla. It could have been discovered last Tuesday.

But that didn't happen either, because Raxxla doesn't exist. I do not know where Raxxla is, because it does not exist. I just wanted to make the search even more daunting than it already is. Have fun!

No, wait, ONE MORE THING - You know where Raxxla originates from, right? A short novel that came with the original 1984 game, talking about how Raxxla exists out there somewhere and you should search for it.

Every line of code in the 1984 game has been analysed. Raxxla isn't there. So why would they publish that little story? To hype players up and get them imagining what COULD be there! It was theorist bait back then, and it's theorist bait now! It's the exact same trick, they did this before, why are we falling for it again! Explain yourself, David! ANSWER ME-

GalNot News apologies for this unscheduled transmission. The individual responsible for allowing this has been fired, into a black hole. The black hole is called Raxxla.

raxxla is david braben talking about how ship interiors are going to happen

raxxla is this website when viewed with netscape navigator 2.0 on your old laptop you tried to download a free minecraft account generator on

raxxla is the tender look in the police officer's eyes when i explain why i need to be granted bail so i can carry on working on this website

raxxla is the sum total of all the woes the BGS has inflicted on my immortal soul

raxxla is the cool S

raxxla is elite dangerous odyssey if it was good

raxxla is how it feels to chew 5 gum

raxxla is a NFT

raxxla is Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective for the Nintendo DS. Remasters are available on Steam and most modern consoles, there's even a free demo! Check it out! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1967430/Ghost_Trick_Phantom_Detective/