This is an archive of Drew Wagar‘s lore guide, available here with his kind permission. Drew is no longer actively maintaining his lore pages, and they may not be accurate post v2.4 of Elite Dangerous.
Raxxla is, perhaps, the biggest mystery of the Elite Dangerous universe. Despite that, it is also the most obscure. There is virtually no information about it whatsoever.
The only lore reference to Raxxla is contained in the original Elite novella ‘The Dark Wheel’ by the late great Robert Holdstock.
Here it is.
Rafe chuckled and shook his head. ‘You see, that’s the big question. Your father was chasing the mythical planet Raxxla. Does it exist, or does it not? If it does, then on Raxxla there’s an alien construct that’s a gateway to other Universes, and all that’s in those Universes in the way of bounty, and treasures, and aliens, and life . . .
‘Jason Ryder was convinced that Raxxla existed. That’s why he trained for, and became a part of, the Dark Wheel, the legend-seekers. I hadn’t heard much from him or about him for some time until just before he died, when he told me he’d found evidence for the real existence of Raxxla. He came back from Deep Space to get a proper team together . . . ‘ Rafe smiled bitterly. ‘But just before he was due to go back, he decided to take a safe-worlds holiday jaunt with his son . . . and an assassin was waiting for him.’ ‘But why?’ Alex asked. ‘Why kill him for finding Raxxla?’
‘Because there are people on Raxxla already. This is only a guess, mind you, but from what happened to Jason I’d say it was close to being right. We’ve long suspected that a corps of élites lives there, and are exploiting the gateway. They’re powerful, twisted men. Powerful enough to hire an assassin to kill the threat to their dominance.’
Alas, the Dark Wheel is not considered ‘canon’ for Elite Dangerous so we cannot rely on this description of Raxxla, though my suspicion is that it remains fairly accurate.
A few missions from the “Dark Wheel” faction in Shinrarta Dezhra have been noted for referring to “The great mystery”. Thus far they have been simple cargo drops and it is not clear whether this ‘Dark Wheel’ is related to the original ‘Dark Wheel.’
There are two bits other bits of information that came from outside the game:
- Michael Brookes said “There will be no clues.”
- David Braben said “It’s out there and we (FD) know where it is.”
