As the leader of the Jedi Council during the final days of the Republic, Yoda was one of the busiest characters in the Star Wars prequels. After what was little more than a cameo in Episode 1, we see him fight with a lightsaber for the first time in Episode 2. Then, in Episode 3, he is a full-blown field commander for the Clones, until they turn on him, that is. After Order 66 is given and his final push against Emperor Palpatine fails, he goes into exile, and that’s the last we see of him in the movies until Luke’s arrival on Dagobah in The Empire Strikes Back. But what happened in between?
Exactly 22 years pass in the meantime, and Yoda spends all of them on the swampy planet of Dagobah. As for his whereabouts and daily activities, there are two sources we can look at. The first one is the material that is considered canon by Disney. These include every book, comics, TV series and video games created after Lucasfilm was acquired. The other source is the old Expanded Un🐲iverse, which are now “legends”. These include every material created before the sale, except for the movies and TV series.
This list will look at✤ Yoda’s life on Dagobah through both sources. Even though they are no longer fully canon, the Legends contain so much information and crazy storylines thaꩲt it would be a shame if they were simply forgotten. For the sake of clarity, items from the Legends will be mentioned as such. With that out of the way, let’s take a look at what Yoda was up to during his exile.
20 🎃 ꧒ “Failed I Have. Into Exile I Must Go.”
When we last see Yoda at the end of Revenge of the Sith, he is overwhelmed by the power of the self-appointed Emperor Palpatine. With most Jedi having been eliminated through Order 66, Yoda feels like he and Obi-Wan alone are not enough to take on an entire Empire. This is why he goes into exile: the good guys’ numbers are drastically low, and it will take a 🌞long time to organize a resistance. Yoda is highly visible through the Force to other users (like the Emperor and Darth Vader), so his presence would put any effort to do so in jeopardy.
How does he end up on Dagobah, however? After stopping at Polis Massa to meet with Obi-Wan and Senator Organa, he stows away on a ship headed to a planet affected by the Clone Wars, where it is supposed to deliver food and medications. The ship drops out of warp for a split second near Dagobah, during which Yoda leaves for the planet in an escape🔯 pod. Undetected, he lands near a swamp (the whole planet is a gigantic swamp, really) and proceeds to make a new life for himself. As we will see in the nex♏t few entries, it wasn’t easy.
19 Purging The Jedi♕ Archives
It seems like with every new book or TV show taking place in between episodes 3 and 4, a new Jedi never seen before is introduced. When all of those Jedi are put together, we end up with a group sizable enough that one might wonder if Order 66 really worked as well as Revenge of the Sith would have you believe. So how did so many Jed🉐i survive the Great Purgeꦗ?
In the Legends novel Heir to the Empire, we learn that before making his escape, Yoda had thirty-seven lesser known planets erased from the Jedi Archives. These planets were to serve as secret shelters for the survivors of the Emperor’s hostile takeover. If you are wondering how so many planets could go missing without anyone noticing, just imagine how many stars are in a galaxy. Then remember that in the Star Wars universe, most of those are only a short trip through Hyperspace away. With millions, if not billions of planets registered in the Archives (and most of them being inhabited), it was easy for Yoda to pick a few uninteresting ones and make them disappear. As evidence, Kamino itself was erased from the archives during the events of Attack of the Clones, and that one had an entire cloning facility on it. Evidently, escape artists had it easy in Star Wars.
18 Building A Home 🎃
Back on Dagobah, Yoda decided to take it easy at first and keep things simple. After all, the planet was riddled with treacherous swamps and dangerous wildlife, as R2D2 experienced first hand in The Empire Strikes Back. In a place this dangerous and inhospitable, Yoda’s first order of business was to transform his modest escape pod into a shelter. According to the Ultimate Star Wars reference book, the escape pod was an E3 Standard Starship Lifeboat model. These were small, but were equipped with all the necessary amenities, especially for a creature ༒of Yoda’s stature.
More importantly, it provided protection from the various problems native to the area, such as parasites, predators, and torrential rain.
The escape pod itself was originally going to be seen at the end of Revenge of the Sith, but the scene was cut from the final edition. Thankfully, it was included in the DVD and Blu-Ray releases as a deleted scene, if you have a few seconds. The lifeboat is clearly visible all the way through, and the inside☂ can be peeked near the end. It definitely looks small, but it sure beats the alternative: living in the middle of a swamp without any protection from the elements.
17 🌜 Never Too Old To Be A Student
At the end of Revenge of the Sith, Yoda asks to talk to Obi-Wan Kenobi. He tells him that he has been talking to an old friend of his, Qui-Gon Jinn, which should be impossible since he passed away decades earlier. He then tells him that he has some new techniques for him to st♕udy while the two will be in exile, which I’m sure must have been a relief to Obi-Wan since there isn’t a whole lot to do on Tatooine.
The novelization of Revenge of the Sith goes into morওe details about this subject. The technique that Yoda was talking about is indeed the ability to transform into a “Force ghost” upon leaving this plane of existence, esse🍰ntially becoming immortal, although in a different form. Though he was made aware of the existence of this technique, Yoda had not yet learned to control it. Thus, he spent a good part of his years on Dagobah meditating, communicating with Qui-Gon Jinn, and eventually mastering the ability.
Now imagine if Qui-Gon Jinn had shared that technique with his fellow Jedi earlier than he did. Order 66 would have been a whole lot messier for the Empꦛire, with the ghosts of thousands of Jedi haunting the living and causing general mayhem for those responsible for their demise.
16 🦂 Keeping Up With Old Friends
Building a brand new shelter out of mud and derelict starship parts must have taken a while. Studying how to cheat the afterlife and become a ghost must have kept the master busy too. But on a planet as lonely as Dagobah, Yoda had more than enough time to take up new hobbies and habits. With all this fr🗹ee time, he decided to use the Force to keep tabs on the other Jedi of the galaxy which had survived the Great Purge. He was constantly on the lookout, which is how he was able to sense the arrival of Luke Skywalker.
The great comic book series Kanan: The Last Padawan gives us even more information on Yoda’s Jedi-watching habit. The Force helped Yoda simply keep an eye on other Force-sensitive beings, but it was also possible for him to talk to other Jedi face to face. He could do so through places that had a strong concentration of the Force, such as the Jedi Temple on Lothal. It was one of the only temples constructed by the Jedi Order that was still standing after The Empire took control of the galaxy. This is how he was eventually able to communicate with Kanan Jarrus, Ezra Bridger, and Ahsoka Tano, as depicted in the events of the series Star Wars Rebels.
15 ⛦ Act Of God
Ha! Speaking of living in the middle of a swamp without any protection from the elements, guess what happened next? As it turns out, even fancy, Republic-built, standard issue Starship Lifeboats are not ready for the harsh reality of an entire planet like Dagobah. The conditions there, consistently damp and rainy and humid, were enough to slowly chip away at the escape pod’s precious technology. Although it was designed to provide temporary shelter to passengers in case of a crash landing on an uninhabitable planet, it was 🌸not supposed to serve as a permanent base. As such, it started degrading within a year of Yoda’s arrival on Dagobah.
Still, you might be thinking that the outer shell of the pod could serve as good protection despite the technology inside failing, and you would be right if it wasn’t for one little detail. The Ultimate Star Wars guide confirms that just like Luke’s X-Wing in The Empire Strikes Back, Yoda’s escape pod was eventually swallowed whole by the swamp on which it was resting. Sure, Yoda could have taken it out🍬 of there using the Force, but as a wise creature, he knows when a fight is over. Without any obvious need or desire to leave the planet any ✃time soon, he finally decided to get serious.
14 Building A (Second) H🥀ome
With his first house finally out of commission, Yoda decided that it was time to build something more permanent. To do so, he would need something custom-made to fit Dagobah’s harsh climate, something more rugged and less delicate than a technologically-advanced but vulnerable pod. Once again according to the Ultimate Star Wars guide (seriously, get that book if you are a fan, it’s a gorgeous encyclopedia of everything Star Wars related),❀ Yoda coꦓnstructed himself a permanent shelter not too far from where he actually landed upon his initial arrival.
The shelter itself was constructed inside the base of a tree, using parts he repurposed from the escape pod for the structure, and packed mud to hold everything together. He used parts of the escape pod’s deck as foundations, as well as parts of the shell to create windows and doorways. Finally, he used the pod’s energy source to power the lights, the only technological parts of the ship that were still working. Other bits of scrap metal were transformed into various tools and cooking wares. Despite all of his efforts, the packed mud he used as walls was still vulnerable to the Dagobah’s weather, and according to the novel Heir to the Empire, he ♈had to use a little bit of the Force at all time just to hold it tog🦄ether.
13 Camouflage ꧅ 🎶
If the living conditions were so terrible, why did Yoda choose Dagobah out of all the other planets he had erased from the archives? The best explanation comes from the novel Heir to the Empire. We have seen at various times throughout the movies that Jedi can sense each other’s presence through the Force, and that this detection includes any living being. That is why, for example, Obi-Wan Kenobi senses Alderaan being destroyed, or more recently, it’s why Leia can sense the death of Han Solo in The Force Awakens.
With Dagobah being so full of bizarre creatures and life forms, Yoda believed that his presence on the planet would be undetectable in the middle of it all.
Furthermore, he had also scouted the Dark Side Cave, where Luke comes face to face with himself as Darth Vader in The Empire Strikes Back. Yoda was a powerful Jedi, meaning that his presence through the F๊orce shone brighter than others, basically pointing a neon arrow at his location. The presence of the cave, which was a focal point for the dark side of the Force, was so strong that he was al🏅most invisible to other Force users. As we will see later, the cave also had many unforeseen uses.
12 𝔍 Cooking ꦑKeeps Busy
Though Dagobah was full of life forms, few of them would have been considered edible, and even less would have let themselves be captured for these purposes. Not that it really mattered, as the Star Wars Legends have shown us that Yoda was a vegetarian. As such, he had to scavenge for most♓ of his food, mostly mushrooms, seeds, and tree bark. His favorite meal, however, was rootleaf stew. He liked it so much that he prepared it for Luke Skywalker when he arrived on the planet for his initial training.
The Star Wars Galaxies trading card game tells us that the rootleaf stew used a wide assortment of plants from the swamp planet. Eventually, the hearty meal’s recipe made its🍸 way to other parts of the universe. Space travelers could even buy approximations of the original recipe in faraway 🧸places, though most of those knock-offs used cheap filler, including fiberplast, a material usually reserved for making clothing and ship hulls.
Strangely, the rootleaf stew eventually made its way to the real world.
As part of a campaign to promote the radio version of The Empire Strikes Back, NPR asked renowned chef Craig Claiborne to come up with a recipe for the stew which would use ingredients available on Earth. It was published in different newspapers across the USA, but I was, unf🔯ortunately, unable to find a copy.
11 ♐ Helping The Neဣw Generation
The TV series Star Wars Rebels, w꧂hich is truly fantastic, shows the training of Ezra Bridger, a Force-sensitive apprentice, by Kanan Jarrus, a Padawan which never made it to the rank of Jedi Knight when his old Master was eliminated in the Great Purge. Jarrus was afraid that the fact that he never finished his training would make him a bad teacher for someone with the𒆙 potential of Ezra Bridger. That’s when Yoda’s Jedi peeping finally came in handy.
When Jarrus brought Ezra to the Lothal Jedi Temple to continue his training, he was surprised to find out that the temple allowed him to speak with Yoda himself. Jarrus was basically invisible to Yoda in the past, having let go of the Jedi ways after the fall of the Republi🐎c. Training Ezra Bridger was a chance for Jarrus to finally come to peace with his past. Yoda tells him that it’s a dangerous time to be a Jedi, with the Empire being on the hunt and all that. Then, because he is a tough teacher, he also tells him that this is his final chance, and that failure cou🐷ld be catastrophic. This somehow encourages Jarrus, who leaves the temple more confident than ever in his abilities to teach his Padawan. As for Yoda, his work had only just started.