Lars Homestead

Warning: This infobox has missing parameters: rebuilt, interest, type and unrecognized parameters: era

"It just isn't fair. I'm never gonna get out of here!"

―Luke Skywalker^[src]

The Lars moisture farm, also known as the Lars homestead, was a moisture farm on Tatooine owned and operated by the Lars family. Shortly before the Clone Wars, Cliegg Lars lived on the property with his second wife, Shmi Skywalker Lars, and son Owen Lars. Shmi's son, Jedi Knight Anakin Skywalker, visited the farm and learned of his step-family before discovering that his mother had been captured and, ultimately, killed by Tusken Raiders. After Skywalker fell to the dark side of the Force and helped destroy the Jedi Order, Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi took Anakin's son, Luke Skywalker, to the Lars homestead, where the boy was raised by Owen and his wife, Beru. Nearly two decades later, the farm was destroyed and Owen and Beru were killed by Imperial stormtroopers, who were searching for C-3PO and R2-D2.

Description

File:ITW Lars Homestead.jpg

Layout of the farm.

The Lars homestead was one of several moisture farms that made up the Great Chott salt flat community, located at the southern extreme of the Jundland Wastes on the Outer Rim desert planet, Tatooine. Located mostly underground and accessed through a pourstone entry dome, the homestead was a warren of interconnected rooms and vast storage areas. Being a moisture farm, there were multiple moisture vaporators scattered around the property, many of them decades old, capable of collecting water from Tatooine's dry air. Any water obtained was used either for consumption or to water the farm's marginally profitable hydroponic garden. The homestead was ringed by a rudimentary sensor perimeter of weather monitors and motion detectors, used to monitor weather conditions and detect incoming intruders, such as infamous Tusken Raiders. To conserve power from the property's supercharged bio-converter power generator and small fusion-cell generators, the compound was shut down after nightfall. The rooms making up the compound included a kitchen, dining room, refresher, storage room, power generator room, vehicle storage area, tech dome garage, and two living quarters. Several droids were used on the premises, including a WED 15 Treadwell repair droid and a several hundred year old EG-6 power droid.^[3]

History

Before the Clone Wars

In the waning years of the Galactic Republic, moisture farmer Cliegg Lars founded the Lars moisture farm and bequeathed it to his son, Owen.^[3] Shortly before the outbreak of the Clone Wars, Cliegg bought slave Shmi Skywalker from the Toydarian junk dealer, Watto, and freed her, proceeding to marry her shortly after. One month before the Battle of Geonosis, Shmi was out gathering in the morning when she was kidnapped by a group of Tusken Raiders. In response, Cliegg assembled a rescue party, but of the thirty farmers that went out looking for her, only four returned alive, including Cliegg, who had lost his right leg during the rescue attempt. Believing Shmi to be dead and unwilling to risk any more lives, Lars abandoned the rescue.^[5]

File:Owen'shouse screenshot2.JPG

The funeral of Shmi Skywalker.

One month later, Shmi's son, the Jedi Padawan Anakin Skywalker, arrived at the moisture farm, having sensed her distress through the Force. After reuniting with his old protocol droid, C-3PO, Skywalker went to confront the residents of the homestead. Learning of what happened to his mother, Skywalker decided to search for her, despite Lars telling him to accept her death. Skywalker eventually found his mother injured in a Tusken Raider camp, where she died in his arms. The following morning, Skywalker brought Shmi's body back to the farm, where she was buried and given a funeral.^[5]

Age of the Empire

Three years later, the Galactic Republic was reformed into the Galactic Empire, with Skywalker, now the Sith Lord Darth Vader, as its chief enforcer. To protect Skywalker's newly born son, Luke, Anakin's former master, Obi-Wan Kenobi, traveled to the Lars moisture farm and left him in the care of Owen and his wife Beru.^[6]

Nineteen years later, a group of Jawas arrived at the moisture farm in a sandcrawler, where they sold Cliegg's old droid, C-3PO, to Owen, as well as the astromech droid R2-D2. Tasked with cleaning the droids, Skywalker went below the farm's tech-dome, where he discovered the astromech contained a recording made by Princess Leia Organa, seeking help from his father's old master, Obi-Wan Kenobi. After nightfall, R2-D2 left the farm to go looking for Kenobi, which Skywalker discovered, and so the following morning he decided to search for him. After encountering Kenobi and learning that the Empire was searching for R2-D2 and C-3PO, Skywalker rushed back to the homestead, only to find it burned down and his aunt and uncle killed by stormtroopers. Having no reason to stay on Tatooine, Skywalker decided to go with Kenobi to Alderaan and learn to become a Jedi.^[2]

Owen-Beru-burned — The destroyed farm, among with the burned bodys of Owen Lars and his wife Beru.

In the weeks following the Battle of Yavin, Darth Vader searched for the Rebel pilot responsible for destroying the Death Star. Discovering that the pilot was, in fact, his own son, Vader, accompanied by Doctor Aphra, revisited the abandoned homestead and followed Skywalker's path. While assessing the remains of the farm, Aphra speculated that Skywalker would never have left Tatooine had his family not been killed.^[7]