Xo III is a medium-sized planet lacking any appreciable atmosphere. What little there is does not support life of any kind, the thin air being just enough to keep the dense glaciers that cover the eastern and western poles from sublimating. Like its sister planets in the system, Xo III revolves around a magnetic east-west axis, although the rotation is significantly slower than its sisters’. A solar day on Xo III lasts over one hundred and eighteen standard hours. This long day/night cycle gave rise to one of the planet’s most notable industries—integrated holo-panel manufacturing.

Due to the almost non-existent atmosphere, Xo III’s inhabitants live in domed cities. At some point in the past, an enterprising corporation covered the inside of one of the habitation domes with holoscreens, and began to display images of blue skies and starlit skies on a twenty-two-hour cycle. The morale of that dome’s inhabitants improved so dramatically that the government mandated that all dome cities implement the same technology. Nowadays, artificial day and night are the norms within dome cities, and important social, cultural, and sporting events can also be broadcast on a city-wide scale. This has helped improve the mental health and well-being of the populace to an amazing degree, making Xo III one of the most productive planets in this region of space.

Outside the dome cities, however, the planet remains a grim and forbidding place. While the poles are covered in deep glaciers that constantly emit a thick mist that hides cracks that may be more than a kilometre in depth. Falling into such an ice crevasse would be certain doom for almost anyone. The non-polar regions are comprised of fields of worn, broken igneous and metamorphic rock in hues of dark greys and browns. There is no indigenous life to speak of, and anyone who gets lost on the surface would need to have ample supplies of air, food, water, and heating to have any chance of survival. Only the planet’s rich mineral resources provide a reason for there to be any economic activity on Xo III. This wealth, concentrated in the regions between the two poles, is considerable, resulting in huge mining operations and their supporting infrastructure forming an almost unbroken belt encircling the planet. Lesser mining operations dot the glacier fields, extracting rarer minerals from deep within the ice.