There's something every player who takes Elite Dangerous seriously does at least once in their career as a space pilot. It's a mission, kinda, but invented entirely by the community. Developer Frontier has acknowledged it, and even rewards anyone who decides to complete it. But there's no real point to it, other than saying you did it, or proving to yourself that you can. It's boring to the point of farce, and absolutely mind-numbing, but thousands of players have willingly subjected themselves to it—myself included.
Hutton Orbital is a tiny, unremarkable backwater space station. One of thousands. Maybe even millions. Everything is so big in this scale replica of the Milky Way, the numbers involved just become meaningless. But the interesting thing about Hutton Orbital is that it's seven million light seconds away from its system's hyperspace arrival point. This means that, even in your ship's mega-fast supercruise mode, it can take an hour or more of totally uneventful flying to reach it. That's an actual hour too, not an in-game hour.
My first encounter with Hutton Orbital was, like many other new players, a moment of confusion and frustration. I picked up a generic mission in a nearby station, which asked me to deliver some random cargo to it. Not realising the absurd distance involved, I took the mission on, jumped to the Alpha Centauri system, and pointed my ship towards Hutton Orbital. Then, 15 minutes later, I didn't seem to be getting any closer. I wondered if there was something wrong with my ship, but nah. It's just stupidly far away.
And so Hutton Orbital became the stuff of legend. Players posting on forums complaining about not being able to complete the mission became an in-joke in the community. Then people started going there by choice, just to say they had. Flying there and taking a selfie next to Hutton Orbital has bec🔜ome a bizarre rite of passage, which Frontier responded to by making a unique commodity that you can only get there: the Hutton Mug. You can sell it, but most player🗹s keep theirs as a memento. I still have mine in my cargo hold.
Getting to Hutton Orbital is not difficult. This isn't a challenge in the literal sense. You don't need to be good at the game or have any kind of weird ship configuration. All you have to do is point your spacecraft in the right direction, slam the throttle, and occasionally adjust your heading so you don't veer off course—but only barely. The real challenge lies in having the patience to do it, because it's deeply, deeply d🎀ull. Even as a veteran Euro Truck Simulator 2, a game where ab🀅solutely nothing happens, player I found the inactivity stifling.
There's nothing to see and nothing to do. You just fly in a straight line in a dark, black void, watching the stars streak past. I got through it by listening to a podcast. The station is exactly 0.22 light years away from the starting point. As the minutes pass, and continue to pass, you question why you're even doing this in the first place. Is this a good use of the only life you'll ever have? But the desire to do it takes over. It's no more tedious than your average MMORPG fetch quest mission—it's just more honest about it.
There's a slight element of danger to travelling to Hutton Orbital. If you're playing online, there's a very slim, but very real, chance that a mischievous player might be waiting at the station, looking to blast newly arrived pilgrims to pieces for the sheer fun of it. Most people in Elite are pretty nice, at least in my experience, so I doubt this will happen if you try it. But it does add a little spice to the adventure. Imagine getting there and being blown up before you get a chance to take your selfie. Thankfully when I did it there was no one there.
It's only at the very end of the trip where you see anything other than star-sprinkled blackness: the planet Eden, which the station orbits. A dim, red-coloured shape, and then eventually the glimmer of the station itself in orbit. In an Asp Explorer, it took me 1 hour and 33 minutes to reach my destination. When I got there, I noticed the paint on my hull was worn away at the front: presumably the result of millions of tiny space-rocks battering it along the way. I grabbed my mug, took my selfie, and that was it. Mission... accomplished?
It's extremely silly, yes. But I love that Frontier noticed its players doing this, and reacted to it in such a fun, good-spirited way. Players are what make Elite's galaxy interesting, because without them it's a fairly lifeless and sterile place. Player-driven moments are the heart and soul of the game, whether that's actual heroes like the , or the thousands who've made the long, arduous slog to Hutton Orbital. It was a waste of time in the most literal sense, but I don't regret doing it at all. I might even do it again one day.