Left to right from the top: desert planet, ice planet, swamp planet, city planet, ocean planet and volcanic planet.Not featured:
Star Wars is a long-time bastion of Single Biome Planets.Canon
In general, the franchise is known for them: Hoth is an ice planet, Tatooine, Geonosis, Jakku, Jedha, and Pasaana are desert worlds, Coruscant and Hosnian Prime are city planets (until the latter is destroyed by the First Order), the "forest moon" of Endor (although see below under Star Wars Legends), Dagobah is a swamp planet, Bespin is a cloud planet (justified in that it's a gas giant that happens to have a narrow band of breathable air in the upper atmosphere), Kamino and Ahch-To are ocean planets, Mustafar is a volcanic planet, and Takodana is a lakeland planet. Nearly all the classifications described on the main page occur in the movies.- Hoth is only habitable on the equator. The rest of the planet is too cold for any sort of life (hardly enough to fill up a space cruiser). There are geothermal vents and underground (underice?) cavern systems that have liquid water and support lichens and other hardy plants, which the herbivores feed on, which feed the omnivorous tauntauns and carnivorous wampas. The tauntauns and some smaller animals regularly trek out across the surface to find new territory, mates and food. The wampas find the thermal areas too hot and are the only creatures to spend all their time in the ice and snow, only going into the warmer places to quickly grab a meal if they can't ambush one out on the ice.
- Kashyyyk, the Wookiee homeworld, is famous for its forests that greatly resemble Endor's, but, in Revenge of the Sith, there's a battle on a beach. It is still often regarded as a jungle planet, though. The Legends explanation is that the Rakatans terraformed Kashyyyk and used it for agricultural purposes, but after they fell from power, their terraforming machines went out of control and resulted in the large and abundant flora life it has now.
- The Hutts' homeworld of Nal Hutta is a swamp planet, most of its natural resources were strip mined, and its environment makes it close to a Death World. It's not just lack of concern for the environment by the notoriously greedy Hutts that caused Nal Hutta to end up this way: a planet-wide swamp is how they like it.
- There are at least three different junkyard planets: Ord Mantell, Raxus Prime (like Ord Mantell, but with much older junk!), and Lotho Minor (like Raxus Prime, but on fire and populated by cyborgs!). Star Wars can get kinda redundant with these things at times.
- Coruscant is far from the only city planet; there exist several others, like Denon, Christophsis, and Alsakan, and even a city moon in the form of Nar Shaddaa, which orbits Nal Hutta and is essentially a moon-sized City Narrows. According to The Clone Wars, Coruscant's natural landmarks have been nearly covered up, with only the peak of a single mountain being uncovered and a plaza
built around it. Christophsis, meanwhile, is actually a planet covered in crystal formations (a similar planet is Mygeeto), with cities built around and into them. - There are notable exceptions, however, such as Naboo, where the Everglades-esque area where the Gungans live in The Phantom Menace is contrasted with the temperate-forest-and-meadows area where Anakin and Padme vacation in Attack of the Clones, and the Earthlike Alderaan and Corellia. Almost all of Naboo was filmed somewhere in Western Europe — Southeast England, the Italian Vistas, Southern Spain, etc. — which (mostly) have a similar climate, so you could still say that Naboo is a Single-Biome Planet. This is subverted in the Star Wars Expanded Universe, wherein Naboo is shown to have non-alpine glaciers.
- Kessel is an interesting case. It was a gigantic single rain forest, but centuries of spice mining has turned the entire northern hemisphere into what can basically be described as a "mine and pollution" biome. The rulers of the planet had the foresight to preserve the southern hemisphere in its natural state, so they and their clients have somewhere to live.
- Starkiller Base from The Force Awakens can basically be described as Hoth if was hollowed out and fitted with a weapon able to destroy entire star systems (and its native population wiped out, that is).
- Mustafar from Revenge of the Sith wasn't always a volcanic world, although the explanation for its cataclysm varies between continuities. In canon, Mustafar used to be lush and green until Lady Corvax devastated the planet with an artifact called the Bright Star. After the events of the VR game Vader Immortal in which the Bright Star is destroyed, at least one forest has started growing back by the time of The Rise of Skywalker. In Legends, Mustafar's environment was the result of being caught in the gravity wells of two gas giants.
Animated Series
- Star Wars: The Clone Wars:
- By the present day, Mandalore is an ashen uninhabitable desert wasteland and its cities are in domes, due to continuous war and the Mandalorian Excision by the Republic. According to All There in the Manual, Kalevala is also a toxic desert wasteland.
- Ilum appears completely covered in ice. According to All There in the Manual, it was eventually turned into Starkiller Base.
- Abafar is a completely flat and featureless desert, and because there's no sun or satellites in the sky (presumably because the upper atmosphere is thick or something) as well as the fact that the towns are built into the ground, good luck trying to find a way back to civilization.
- Mon Cala is entirely oceanic, though Darth Vader: Dark Lord of the Sith shows that there are some islands and pockets of air on it.
- Quarzite's surface has a high-pressure atmosphere and is uninhabitable to most species. As such, all of the planet's known species live underground surrounded by crystal formations.
- Umbara seems to be covered in vegetation despite the planet being constantly enshrouded in darkness (a large number of these plants are bioluminescent, as well as the animals).
- Star Wars Rebels:
- Lothal is a prairie world, with strange rock formations littered throughout its landscape. Some of these rock formations are clumped together and called "mountains". On the other hand, there's an urban city next to an ocean, and the poles have snow on them. Near the end of the series, after the Lothal Jedi Temple near one of the poles disappears into the Force, the surrounding prairie landscape is replaced with a featureless and flat rocky wasteland. It's mentioned in All There in the Manual that there used to be more trees, but they were cut down by the Empire. Like Tatooine, it's supposed to feel small and boring.
- Garel seems to be a complete mesa.
- Bahryn, a moon of the desert planet Geonosis, is snowy and icy.
- Addressed in-universe about Mandalore, in which Sabine explains to Ezra why her homeworld is the way it is.
- Nixus is an inhospitable glacial planet with an outpost for the black market.
- "Twin Suns" shows one rarely-brought-up benefit of living on such a planet, however: It can make you harder to find, if all someone knows of your location is that you're on that planet, in its natural biome. As Darth Maul discovers the hard way when searching for Obi-Wan Kenobi on Tatooine.
- Star Wars Resistance:
- The show's main setting, the fueling station Colossus, is on Castilon, an Outer Rim ocean planet.
- Aeos Prime is another ocean planet but with more islands, some made of coral.
Legends
- Legends, particularly the Ewok cartoons and TV specials, show many other biomes on the moon of Endor, including plains, deserts, mountains, and oceans.
- It's stated that, in Tatooine's distant past, it was more diverse... until the Rakata bombarded it from orbit until the entire surface was molten glass. The glass eventually broke up into sand, making Tatooine as we know it today. Furthermore, the planet is divided into two hemispheres: a habitable one, and one even hotter than the sparsely inhabited areas. This is also Jakku's past according to the New Expanded Universe.
- Kashyyyk in Legends:
- The Legacy of the Force novels have gone and shown that the wroshyr forests range from very short, to half a kilometer tall, to many kilometers tall.
- According to Knights of the Old Republic, Kashyyyk's forests are the result of a hyperactive terraforming device.
- The Twi'lek homeworld, tidally locked Ryloth, is basically a three-biome planet: desert planet where it faces the sun, ice planet where it faces away from the sun, and a narrow habitable band in between the two.
- Dark Forces: Level 8 is set on Anteevy, an ice world like Hoth. It's home to an Imperial Robotics Construction Facility, until Kyle Katarn infiltrates the place and blows it up.
- Shatterpoint describes Haruun Kal (Mace Windu's homeworld) as mostly covered with toxic gases due to an extreme number of volcanos. Life can only exist on what is essentially a Single-Biome Mesa — a Hungry Jungle where Everything Is Trying to Kill You.
- Star Wars: Empire at War: Shola is a barren volcano planet with a dense, corrosive atmosphere and regular earthquakes. Polus is an ice planet similar to Hoth, with an average daily temperature of 50 below freezing with a brief seasonal warming period and a frozen ocean across the whole planet, but the native Pyn'gani have their settlements protected by heat generators (and one of these settlements can be seen with grass and trees growing).
- Star Wars: Honor Among Thieves: Seymarti is a swampy jungle world. There are vast brown oceans and forests with trees that support leaves the size of starships. It's also a Hollow World, with the entire mantle replaced by force fields that hold the crust away from the core.
Knights of the Old Republic:
- Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords: Subverted when you travel to the desolated Telos. Most of the planet has been bombed, and it's in the process of being terraformed. At first you land in a temperate forest, only to find out later that what you're really looking for is in the polar ice caps.
- Star Wars: The Old Republic:
- Lampshaded by Kira Carsen, who wonders if, should you mash Hoth and Tatooine together, you'd get a normal planet with decent weather.
- In a conversation between two Tatooine natives, they wonder about the strange alien phenomenon called "seasons" where the weather changes over the year and isn't composed solely of climatic extremes.Militia Guard 1: You know, some planets don't have to put up with this all the time. The heat, I mean.
Militia Guard 2: Yeah?
Militia Guard 1: Yeah. Most planets have these things called "seasons". Sometimes it's hot, sometimes it's cold, but most of the time it's downright tolerable.
Militia Guard 2: Huh.
