Gathering the ESO community working on supernovae and unusual transients into one coherent team, the Public ESO Spectroscopic Survey of Transient Objects (PESSTO) has revolutionised the exploitation of wide-field surveys, developing efficient synergies with multi-messenger experiments and making the NTT a crucial global facility. In this talk, I will present the advanced ePESSTO+ programme on behalf of the collaboration, building on the success of our PESSTO consortium and bridging the gap to the SOXS instrument. Some of our scientific goals include gravitational wave sources, transients that evolve on the timescale of a few days, and those with extreme energetics. I will also present the transients followed-up by the ePESSTO and GROND collaboration, which represent the extreme (e.g. the brightest or the fastest) of the luminosity-space of cosmic transients, providing a new dataset to understand their nature.