The extended tight binding (xTB) family of methods opened many new possibilities in the field of computational chemistry. Within just five years, the GFN2-xTB parametrization for all elements up to Z=86 enabled more than a thousand applications, which were previously not feasible with other electronic structure methods. The xTB methods provide a robust and efficient way to apply quantum mechanics based approaches for obtaining molecular and solid state geometries, computing free energy corrections or describing no…