With Alderaan, it’s all about the timing. Alderaan ( A New Hope, Revenge of the Sith) It’s the perfect hideaway, as long as you’re not the finest engineer in the Galactic Empire. Far away from the hustle and bustle of the Galactic Core, this Outer Rim colony is home to a few hundred farmers, who were drawn to its fertile soil, mild temperature, and general lack of all the terrible things you’ll find on other planets. Nothing much seems to happen on Lah’mu, and that’s the way its inhabitants like it. Points will also be assessed for conceptual brilliance, whether or not the planet eventually gets blown up by an Imperial superweapon, and climate.Īh, the simple life.

Being inhabited helps (having company is fun), but can also hurt (if some of those inhabitants have a penchant for eating people).

Rankings will be based primarily on how much I, a normal-ass human, would like to live there. We’ll use a fairly loose definition of planet - any sort of natural space object with an atmosphere counts space stations do not, no matter how many people confuse them for moons. To keep things manageable, we’re only ranking planets that have shown up in the nine live-action Star Wars films so far. As Tegan O’Neil writes in her wonderful essay about the franchise, “The beauty of Star Wars is that so much care has been spent making the universe onscreen appear normal for the people who inhabit it … Everything feels real, carries authority that makes every frame seem like a portal into another world, perfectly plausible on its own terms.” But of all these immersive worlds, which one is the best? Well, that’s what we’re going to figure out.

I am not the first person to note that what separates Star Wars from the numerous space epics before and since is its sense of place.

Space engineers star destroyer