Star Wars fans are just realising that Coruscant is not what it seems

It turns out that there’s more to Coruscant than meets the eye, as Star Wars fans have realised.

Coruscant is the city-spanning planet featured across various Star Wars films and other media, most notably the prequel trilogy.

It’s such an interesting premise for a planet that I often spend lots of time thinking about how that works, logistically speaking. How does Coruscant have oxygen without trees? How does it have the resources to feed 3 trillion people?

In the words of Harrison Ford, “Hey kid, it ain't that kind of movie!” but it’s still fun to think about how Coruscant functions.

Another detail about Coruscant that we don’t really think about is what the planet was like before the city was built.

I mean, it’s obvious that at some point during Star Wars’ rich history, Coruscant was nothing but sticks and stones. And then built up over the thousands of years.

As a user shared on X (formerly Twitter), Coruscant also features the peak of the planet’s tallest mountain exposed for visitors to see. And it’s apparently the only part of the planet’s natural surface you can still see.

It’s located in Monument Plaza, which is seen only briefly at the end of Return of the Jedi’s Special Edition. Otherwise, it appears in some of the various shows and books that span the expanded universe. For example, it appears in The Clone Wars and The Mandalorian.

According to Star Wars lore, Coruscant was originally built up over 100,000 years, beginning with Level 1 and slowly being expanded upwards and upwards since then.

As new buildings are built on top of the old ones, it’s believed that a large portion of the planet has become uninhabitable.

By the time that the films take place, the population of the planet has grown to nearly three trillion, and has become the main seat of government for the galaxy.

It's pretty wild to think that underneath all the urban metropolis there once lay fields, rivers, and mountains. It sounds like a potential story that Lucasfilm could explore in a prequel of sorts.