Jedi Accountant
Image Debit: Izax's shrine with holograms at its base
OUT OF CHARACTER INFORMATION
- Intent: To expand on the lore of a location in SWTOR
- Image Credit: MMO Bits
- Canon: N/A (but alluded to in the War on Iokath)
- Links: Izax, Six Gods
- City Name: Valley of the Machine Gods
- Classification: Industrial park
- Location: Iokath
- Affiliation: Independent
- Population: Moderate (organic) Crowded (droid)
- Demographics: The Valley of the Machine Gods is much more densely populated with droids than with organics, given the high degree of automation of the various industries operating on Iokath. However, there is a wide variety of organic residents.
- Wealth: High: The wealth of the Valley comes from the vast industrial base of the Valley and the sale of its output to the outside galaxy. Also, since the fall of the Gods, and of ARIES, private enterprise has been a common fixture of economic life in the Valley. In addition, fiscal life on today's Iokath and, with it, the Valley, is based entirely on customs and excise duties, which makes it a prime destination for tax evasion for a wide range of service industries since customs and excise duties, as levied on Iokath, are levied exclusively on manufactured goods. However, for all of its attractiveness as a corporate (and even more so personal) tax haven, the Valley is still relatively unknown as such.
- Stability: High: Because the Valley's industrial output allows its organic residents to take care of all its needs, and then some, combined to its equally vast droid population, there are few calls for change. The organic population feels safe thanks to the frequent patrols of security droids in and around the Valley. Organic and droid residents of the Valley tend to regard Force-users as just ordinary people, even with the role Force-users played in destroying the Gods. Nevertheless, the Valley is regarded as capitalistic.
- Freedom & Oppression: The Valley of the Machine Gods is still a rather free area, to the extent law enforcement has frequent patrols, made by droids.
- Description: The Valley of the Machine Gods is split into five major districts, each of which has a major landmark, the heavy industry district, the warehouse district, the power generation district, the Godkin Command Nexus, and the Telecommunications District, all of which have a shrine dedicated to a specific god (or two in the case of the warehouse district) and have pneumatic tram stations not only to connect each other, but also to connect to the Iokath Expanse as well as the Tributary, Necropolis and Chromium Garden.
- Tyth Foundry: Located at the heart of the heavy industry district, the Tyth Foundry is a shrine to the namesake god, Tyth, which was fought in that location and featuring a full-size replica of the droid named as such, complete with a giant, non-functional saberstaff replica
- Primary Research Repository: Located at a prime location in the warehouse district, the PRR is a shrine dedicated to both Aivela and Esne, with a well-preserved lozenge platform that attempts to replicate the condition it was in when a strike team of 16 legendary heroes fought Aivela and Esne, with full-size replicas of both
- Singularity Generator: Among the oldest power generators in service on Iokath, the Singularity Generator is a shrine dedicated to Nahut, with a full-size replica of the droid, alongside its control candle
- Godkin Command Nexus: The central administrative facility of the Valley, accessed from the Valley's main garden, it also comprises in its shrine to Scyva, purported to be the location of Scyva's destruction, a full-size replica of Scyva, as well as its attendants and the railguns that were defending it
- Galactic Signal Broadcast Tower: At the summit of the highest skyscraper of the Valley, itself marking the center of the Telecommunications District, it comprises four antennae, and the full-size replica of Izax dominates today's landscape of the Valley. By far the largest statue on today's Iokath.
HISTORICAL INFORMATION
The history of the Valley of the Machine Gods is closely tied to the history of Iokath itself, as well as that of the eponymous Machine Gods themselves. When Iokath was created by the Iokath species, the Valley was, as the rest of the planet, built from the remnants of the actual planetary bodies in its system, and its existence predated the eponymous Gods, albeit as a mixture of adjacent sectors that was, at the time, only known by their administrative numbers. The Master Designers Council decided to dedicate several sectors specifically for certain industries: the heavy industry district for metalworking, the warehouse district for logistics, the power generation district for power generation, the Godkin Command Nexus for administration, accessed from the Valley's primary garden, and the Telecommunications District for telecommunications. The Gods themselves were built as superweapons for use during the Iokath Civil War, which saw the end of the original organic residents.
After the Iokathi holocaust, the planet was under the control of ARIES, under which there was no organic resident and the Valley was an industrial park where the eponymous Gods were parked. In that era, it was an entirely droid society, and a dictatorial one at that. Because most pieces of Iokath technology located offworld at the time had their memory cores locked, the location of the Valley, as that of the planet, was lost to the outside galaxy, and ARIES put virtually every organic visitor to death through extensive trials until 3631 BBY, at which time SCORPIO and the Outlander were able to overthrow, alongside their retinue, the totalitarian regime led by ARIES. Once the radiation that ensued from the destruction of ARIES' superweapon subsided, it was then that the Six Gods were reactivated, starting with Tyth.
The Valley became a major battleground not only between the Gods' forces and the Eternal Alliance, but also between the other two belligerents of the War on Iokath, fighting all over the Valley as the Eternal Alliance's special forces sought to destroy the Gods, with a core of thirty-two of the greatest heroes of the time, sixteen of Republican extraction and sixteen of Imperial extraction, led by the Outlander in person. The Gods were destroyed in the following order: Tyth, Aivela, Esne, Nahut, Scyva and Izax. After the demise of the entire pantheon, and especially Izax, organics once again populated the Valley, after being confined to the Fleet Spire and the Expanse.
With the Gods being defeated, the facilities used to house them were repurposed for a variety of industrial tenants, with each sector having some preferences according to their last uses by the subsequent, organic-led administration in place on Iokath, in an attempt to minimize the costs of reusing the Valley's facilities for other purposes than maintaining the Gods. However, most of the residential space for the organic residents in the Valley turned out to be situated around the tram stations as well as in the gardens surrounding the Godkin Command Nexus, the latter proving about as popular as the Selruvian Biome or the Chromium Gardens in later years.
Nevertheless, after the Gulag Plague subsided on Iokath, the administration of the time wanted to honor once again the memory of the gods that lived in the Valley and rebuilt full-size replicas of each of the droids, albeit devoid of any functionality as battle droids, and, today, form a network of museums that, along with the Chromium Gardens and the Fleet Spire, are among the most visited landmarks of today's Iokath. Of course, the post-Gods law of the area strictly prohibits the production of superweapons.
Note 1: The replicas of the Gods are simply statues that look like the Gods: they have none of the capabilities of the Gods proper
Note 2: The facilities of the Valley are incapable of replicating the Gods themselves, nor of producing any other superweapon
