"Ilum's discovery is almost as old as the Jedi Order itself. A scout of the Jedi performed Force-assisted hyperspace navigation through hyperspace routes, taking her to the Unknown Regions. She was drawn to a powerful resonance in the Force, which brought her to Ilum. The scout reported that Ilum was devoid of any sentient life, but was rich with non-sentient animals. Though it wasn't the animals that caused such a reaction through the force. Crystals. Vast quantities of naturally formed kyber crystals were found, of many different sorts. The Jedi dispatched scholars, artisans, and warriors to secure the planet, and it was decided that it must be kept secret to the galaxy at large. Hyperspace surveyors mapped out an uninterrupted hyperspace route from the Core directly to Ilum, a fairly complex feat. For thousands of years, its existence was kept off the records. Until the Sith returned... the Jedi Council worried that the Sith might search for the world, or that its secret would be leaked to them. So far, they have not found it, but that did not stop the Council from sharing its location with the Republic, leading to the establishment of a small base staffed with a skeleton crew." - Knight Corvin Zell
lum is a snow-covered planet located in the 7G sector of the Unknown Regions, within the Ilum system. In the system, Ilum is fifth from its parent star Asar, a blue dwarf, located roughly equidistant from Asar and the system's cometary cloud. As an arctic world, the entire planet is covered in ice and snow, and is considered inhospitable to most species. Hidden beneath Ilum's frigid tundras and glaciers are rich deposits of precious minerals, and kyber crystals used in construction of lightsabers. It is these crystals that drew the attention of the Jedi Order, who established a humble temple on the planet where they bring initiates to harvest crystals from the deposits in a rite of passage known as the Gathering, in which the youngling attunes themselves to their first crystal. As such, Ilum is considered a holy site for the Jedi, and to visit the sacred place is a pilgrimage every Jedi undertake at least once in their lifetime.
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Astronavigation Data: Ilum system, 7G sector, Unknown regions
Suns: 1 (Asar)
Moons: 2
Day Length: 66 standard hours
Orbital Year Length: 301 standard days
Government: None
Terrain: Frozen lakes, mountains, ice steppes
Gravity: Standard
Major Imports: Nnone
Major Exports: None
Ilum is a small, obscure world located far out in the Unknown Regions. The fifth planet of the Ilum system, it orbits an exceedingly bright blue dwarf star called "Asar". Surveys of the system by ancient Jedi scouts show a handful of uninhabited, inhospitsable worlds that are either heavily irradiated, completely covered in ice, or both. The rest of the system is largely empty, with no asteroid belt and few navigation hazards. Due to its location in the Unknown Regions and its isolation from charted hyperspace lanes, nothing was known of the Ilum system until a wandering Jedi discovered it in the earliest days of the Republic.
Roughly equidistand from Asar and the system's cometary cloud, Ilum is the only world in the system that can support life. "Support" may be too strong a word for the relationship between Ilum and its flora and fauna, however. It is a large, terrestrial world orbited by two small moons and encircled by a wide set of rings made mostly of ice crystals. It is a land of broad continents, towering mountain ranges, and shallow seas locked in a perpetual ice age. Huge glaciers scour the planet's face, slowly grinding the land flat. Where the glaciers have passed, deep snows or sheets of ice dozens of meters thick entom the surface, making agriculture impossible. Ilum's few seas are shallow and broad, their waters choked with great floating ice mountains and thick sheets of drift ice. In addition to its frozen, snowbound landscape, Ilum has an atmosphere that is a near-constantly churning vortex of storms. High wind, sleet, thick snow, and freezing rain are to Ilum what gentle winds and soft rains are to Naboo.
Life, where it can thrive, does so primarly along Ilum's equatorial region. Here, at least, the temperatures are only in the double digits below freezing, which has allowed a small number of native plants and animals to evolve. A few eke out an existence on the planet's frozen surface, but most live either in the icy seas or deep beneath the ground in the uncounted thousands of kilometers of caverns and tunnels that worm through the planet's crust. Savage gorgodons, cunning asharl panthers, and the terrifying razhak call Ilum home, along with hardy species of small rodents, birds, and worms. Alongside these are tough plants and fungi adapted to sub-zero temperatures, many of them completely undocumented.