A fairly typical Type III gas giant, Magatesso I is a hot planet with average surface temperatures of over ninety standard degrees. It’s relatively slow rotation means that local days are over one hundred seventy hours long, bathing the planet in bright sunshine for long periods and ensuring that the vast network of solar energy collectors are able to provide more than enough power to run the planets civil infrastructure even during the equally long nights.

In common with many similar gas giants throughout the galaxy, Magatesso I is covered in a planet covering ecumenopolis, with new buildings continuously built on the remains of old. In many zones durasteel and glass monoliths soar toward the sky, blotting out the sunlight and casting the older zones, largely abandoned by anyone with means to do so, into perpetual darkness, recycled water and the hazard of trash raining from the sky. Having been discovered approximately three millennia ago, the world-girding city has had time to grow high and deep. Although exact measurements are not available, it is estimated that the highest spire on Magatesso I is at least seven thousand metres above the oldest ruins known. It is also estimated that at least ten percent of the planet’s population lives in these deep undercities, eking out a living from whatever waste material trickles down from above, with gangs waging violent wars over the smallest resource.

With over ninety nine percent of the system’s population crammed into its skyscrapers, domiciles, flats and communes, the planet has also historically been the source of most of the system’s food. As there is little to no arable soil, this food has always been grown in huge greenhouses and farms. From the earliest founding of the cities, obtaining substrate for the planting of crops and edible fungi has been a problem for the planet’s government. In ages past, some disturbing practices were carried out, such as recycling the bodies of dead citizens into nutrient rich soil, and processing the population’s sewage into fertiliser for the rocky substrate. Such practices would have been frowned on, or even outright persecuted by the Galactic Republic, but the Magatesso system was far from the popular space lanes, and poor enough that it rarely if ever felt even the barest brush of the central government on Corruscant. The current government has brought a measure of prosperity, as well as ration biscuits, to the planet, enough so that such dark practices need no longer be carried out, but some of the older residents still remember the corpse collecting squads and deep seated revulsion of locally grown produce.