Star Wars: The Force Awakens

One of Jakku’s sacred villages, Tuanul is little more than a few wattle-and-daub huts clustered around a large vaporator cistern. Here, worshippers guided by the Force live simple, self-reliant lives in isolation. That isolation came to an abrupt and brutal end when First Order stormtroopers arrived seeking the retired explorer and spiritual seeker Lor San Tekka.

After the Battle of Endor, the fragmented Empire made a last stand above the bleak frontier world of Jakku, battling a New Republic task force before retreating into the galaxy’s Unknown Regions. The battle left Jakku’s sands littered with wrecks of starfighters and capital ships from both sides. A generation later, Jakku’s scavengers eked out a living salvaging gear and components from the perilous area, now known as the Graveyard of Ships.

A lush green world in the galaxy’s Western Reaches, Takodana has long served as the base of operations for the diminutive pirate queen Maz Kanata, whose ancient castle is a haven for smugglers, brigands, scouts and spies from numerous worlds. Takodana has been largely spared war over the centuries, remaining neutral as galaxy-ruling regimes come and go around it.

Deep in the Unknown Regions, the First Order constructed a superweapon that used an entire planet as its weapons platform. The deadly Starkiller harvested energy from its system’s star, contained it within magnetic fields inside the planetary core, and then converted that energy into an ultra-powerful beam that blasted through hyperspace, able to sterilize the worlds of a distant star system with a single shot. Starkiller Base’s first shot obliterated the New Republic capital of Hosnian Prime. The planet was then destroyed in a daring Resistance raid.

The Jakku scavenger Rey lived in a unique home – an AT-AT walker toppled near the outskirts of the Graveyard of Ships. The walker was once Hellhound Two, from the Imperial Star Destroyer Interrogator; Rey made a home for herself in its former troop compartment. There she cleaned equipment scavenged from the sands, cooked, slept, and dreamt of the day her family would return and take her away from Jakku.

Jakku’s most significant settlement, Niima Outpost is little more than a bazaar, some hard-packed dirt that passes for a spaceport, and the compound of junk boss Unkar Plutt. The little settlement – named for its late founder, Niima the Hutt – is dominated by Unkar and his thugs, who control the market for salvage found by scavengers in the nearby Graveyard of Ships.

The ancient edifice known as Maz’s castle sits on the shore of a lake on Takodana, a site rumored to have been a battleground for the Jedi and Sith. The castle is simultaneously aged and state of the art, with sensor grids and advanced communications gear sprouting from worn stone battlements. Inside Maz’s castle, pirates, smugglers, spies and all manner of scoundrels mix and mingle, searching for loans, information, equipment, repairs -- or kicking back to enjoy music, food and drink or games of chance. All must obey their host’s prohibitions against politics or war. The First Order raided Takodana shortly before the Battle of Starkiller Base, leaving the castle in ruins and its proprietress indignant.

A harsh desert world, Jakku is a lawless place that’s home to thieves, outlaws and refugees. During the final years of the Galactic Civil War, Jakku was the site of a secret Imperial research base and served as a jumping-off point for warships heading into the Unknown Regions. The Empire made a last stand above the frontier planet, leading to a pitched battle between rebel and Imperial fleets. Jakku’s sandy wastes are littered with old wrecks, picked over by desperate scavengers searching for parts that can be salvaged and sold.

The capital of the New Republic, Hosnian Prime is a cosmopolitan world on the outskirts of the galaxy’s Core Worlds region. One of Mon Mothma’s reforms in establishing the New Republic was that member worlds would host the Senate on a rotating basis, a sharp break from the millennia in which Coruscant was the center of galactic power. But Hosnian Prime’s tenure as Senate seat makes it the target of a terrifying attack by the First Order.

A region of broken land and low hills on Jakku, the Goazon Badlands lies between Niima Outpost to the east and Kelvin Ravine to the west, and is bounded to the north and south by the Sinking Fields and Carbon Ridge, respectively. A trail known as the Pilgrim’s Road leads across the badlands. The Goazon is a harsh, forbidding place, with little vegetation or water. The scavenger Rey lived in a toppled AT-AT in the Goazon, not far from the Graveyard of Ships.

A lush world in the Outer Rim, D’Qar is the principal base of General Leia Organa’s Resistance. First surveyed by rebel pilots before the Battle of Endor, the planet’s obscurity and lack of native intelligent life made it a perfect choice when Leia’s new group needed a hidden base of operations. Resistance starfighters launched their attack on Starkiller Base from D’Qar, and were tracked back to the planet by the First Order. The Resistance hastily evacuated, narrowly escaping before the base was leveled by First Order turbolasers.