If you’re anything like me, anticipation is half the fun of the vacation. So before embarking on our voyage aboard The Halcyon, there were five things I did to prepare myself for the jump to lightspeed.

A note from Seriously Nerdy: We penned this post before the announcement of the upcoming closure of Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser. We thoroughly enjoyed our voyage aboard The Halcyon and still wanted to share our tips and tricks for those travelers embarking on trips through Sept. 28-30, 2023.

Finally booking the immersive Star Wars hotel experience, Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser, felt like a dream come true. After saving up our credits, we were finally confirmed for a voyage in mid-April. Although I had some idea of what was in store for us, Alex had managed to stay spoiler-free for over a year. We’re going to keep this post spoiler-free as well, so you can enjoy your pre-trip prep without fear of having surprises ruined.

Let’s start at the top: what exactly is Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser anyway? Here’s the official breakdown:

Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser is an entirely new vacation experience: a 2-night, immersive adventure where you choose your own path within an epic Star Wars story.

Throughout your voyage, you’re encouraged to take part in the intrigue, mystery and adventure. There’s plenty to explore onboard the glamorous starcruiser with its themed accommodations, amazing activities and colorful cuisine from all over the Star Wars galaxy. Plus, you’ll visit planet Batuu during a daytime excursion to Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge.

Having returned from an epic trip, we can indeed confirm that it is a totally unique experience where you live out your own Star Wars story. You meet performers, crew members and even other travelers who all bring the world of this luxury starcruiser to life, and when events unfold onboard that pit The Resistance against The First Order, you make real choices that impact what happens next. From the second you step onto the ship to the last moment before you leave, everything feels very real and very Star Wars.

What follows is a list of things you may want to do to prepare for your experience, whether you know about every detail going in or you’re arriving with no idea what to expect. If it isn’t apparent, I’ll also share that these are wildly unnecessary. You can just as easily show up with no prior prep and have a terrific time! But if you’re looking for ways to extend the fun or just build anticipation before your trip, here are my recommendations.

As if any Star Wars nerd needs an excuse to re-watch the films. C’mon.

Nerdy Activity #1: Familiarize yourself with the timeline.

The events on Batuu and The Halcyon seem to center around the characters of the most recent trilogy, specifically centered around Ep. VII: The Force Awakens and Ep. VIII: The Last Jedi. We recommend at least watching those two films before your trip so you’re up to speed with the Resistance, First Order, and scoundrel happenings around the galaxy at the time of your voyage. If you want to learn more about the lore of The Halcyon, there is a Marvel comic that details the storied history of the ship, including MVP shipbuilder and our new favorite Anzellan, Shug Drabor. There’s also a romance novel of sorts, The Princess and the Scoundrel, detailing Han and Leia’s honeymoon on The Halcyon. There are a few bits of lore that make its way from these novels into the physical ship, if you want to get really nerdy. Our favorite was a bit of graffiti on Deck 4, but you’ll get no spoilers from us!

Alex and I established our back story in the Outlander Club on Coruscant, the bright lounge where Obi-Wan Kenobi definitely doesn’t want to buy death sticks.
*Image property of The Walt Disney Company and Lucasfilm Ltd.*

Nerdy Activity #2: Create your character’s backstory.

For us, we took our daily lives and translated them into how they would look in-universe, swapping things like where we had our first date (a bar in Los Angeles) for the Star Wars equivalent (The Outlander Club on Coruscant). In all, we ended up with a few paragraphs about where we grew up and how we live, and we used those little details to play along in conversations. You could also invent backstories that are totally different from your own! We found that every performer and crew member onboard acknowledged our information and even used our character names consistently. Hearing crew members yell “Hey, it’s Scoops!” at Alex across the Sublight Lounge is a new core memory for me. Here are some prompts to get your cogs turning:

Character Name - How you’ll introduce yourself to passengers and crew aboard The Halcyon. We used “Dano” for Dani and “Scoops” for Alex, but we overheard other passengers using a variety of names and titles, including just their normal names.
Home Planet - Once you choose a planet, it might be helpful to understand the basic geography of the world and where you live on it. StarWars.com is helpful for a basic summary of planets, but there are tons of other resources online.
Profession – How do you spend your time? Do you work or volunteer? Do you want to use your own profession and translate it into the Star Wars equivalent? For example, as a graphic design manager on earth, I considered myself a holocomms designer onboard. That way I could always use my real experiences if they ever came up in conversation.
Hobbies – Again, these are easy to translate from your everyday life, or a fun prompt if you’re inventing an entirely new backstory. It’s a big universe, so there are so many ways to pass the time. I chose mixology for Dano’s hobby and spent some very geeky time researching the role of beverage chemists and galactic booze, like how spotchka is brewed and where it’s imbibed. Is this necessary? No. Did I love it? Yes. It made conversations with the crew in the Sublight Lounge so much nerdier.
Pets and Droids – Several crew members asked us if we owned both pets and droids, as both are available to travelers on Batuu. If you have a kitty or doggo at home, the terms Loth cat and hound are pretty interchangeable. Droids you may have back home are also a fun conversation topic, and might help build out the kind of galactic life you lead.
Ships – Not everyone has their own Corellian corvette a la Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon, but many folks do have beloved ships that are their home away from home. If your character has a ship, knowing the model number and nickname might be a fun addition to your backstory.
Force Sensitivity and Faction Alliances – You get to make all sorts of choices onboard The Halcyon, and you can even change allegiances along the way. But for general backstory purposes, it might be helpful to know how your character feels about The Force and what they think about The New Republic and all these rumblings about First Order activity around the galaxy.
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The Dano Risu Backstory

Dano was born to a builder and a sculptor in the lower levels of Coruscant and lived a humble life with her younger sister Iggy. The small family moved level to level as their father found work with various construction projects across the galaxy. Upon graduation from academy, Dano moved to the Uscru District to study with the arts guild, and later found work as a Holocomms Designer with the Grand Coruscant Theater. Her favorite clients were the Naboo Puppetry Troupe. While living in the Uscru District of the planet, Dano became fascinated with the beverage arts, and she and her companions began to visit various cantinas around the city to sample the galaxy’s most exotic flavors. It was during these ventures that she first met Scoops Merrick while the two were at the Outlander Club.

After their first meeting, Scoops and Dano were inseparable and began to embark on many off-planet trips together. It wasn’t long before the duo purchased a Fondor Haulcraft, The Oyster, that they outfitted to meet their needs – expanding the workstation for Scoops’ tinkering hobby and installing antique Nabooan wallpaper in the sleeping chamber for Dano’s design love. Not content with sourcing her drink ingredients from their home world, Dano soon began bringing bottles and wares back to chemists on Coruscant. She’s no Jedi, but after a few drinks, she has been known to claim that she can perform mind tricks or make cocktail glasses move with her mind. Officially on the record, she is not Force Sensitive, and her loyalties lie with whoever has the credits at the time. In order to build a cover for her growing smuggling ventures, Dano began to freelance for the New Republic, contributing Pro-Centrist artwork in order to obtain ranking that would allow The Oyster to more freely pass through checkpoints. Part mixologist, part artisan, Dano continues to toe the line between smuggler-for-hire and fine upstanding galactic citizen. She has a fondness for galactic creatures and most recently tried to adopt a scurrier from Mos Pelgo on Tatooine. She was unsuccessful in convincing Scoops it should live on The Oyster. Her favorite cantina is The Restraining Bolt, a cozy Anzellan lounge on level 4060 of Coruscant.

The unspoken truth about building a galactic wardrobe: you will have so many returns. I’d estimate for every item I found and liked, I returned 5 others. I also ended up with a lot of mirror selfies as I tested color palettes.

Nerdy Activity #3: Build a galactic wardrobe.

If you’re one of those people who loves a Renaissance faire or theme party because it’s an excuse to dress up, hello and welcome to the club. Not every passenger on board dressed for the Star Wars universe, and you’ll be just as welcome in a t-shirt and shorts. But if you want to run around playing pretend for 42 hours straight, you might want to consider building a wardrobe that places you in the world. It also makes for awesome photos – or holoscans – because the entire ship is a stunning backdrop. We compiled a post about how we built an entire wardrobe on a budget here.

Alex and I spent a few days before our trip building out our datapad cases in colors and styles inspired by our backstories.

Nerdy Activity #4: Make phone cases into datapad holders.

When Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge first opened, my friend Amy posted her process for building a datapad case on Instagram. It was a new trend emerging among Star Wars fans who knew that the Play Disney Parks app would open a whole new level of activity inside Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge. And I’m so glad it caught on with #datapadbuilders on social media. These days you can find hundreds of images of fans who have used everyday objects and a little creativity to turn basic phone cases into props from a Star Wars universe! Just like on Batuu, Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser has a lot of interaction using the Play Disney Parks app, so you’ll have your datapad in hand constantly. Not only did making our own datapad cases help bring our characters’ backstories to life on The Halcyon, but the activity was a fun way for us to count down the days until our vacation. For a full process video, check out our YouTube channel!

Oh look! An example! This fantastic model of the ship has a description in Aurebesh. Sure, you could translate using the app, but you could also impress your loved ones with your translation skillz.

Nerdy Activity #5: Learn the basics of the Aurebesh letters.

Okay, okay. This is the nerdiest activity of them all. Aurebesh is a letterform language that’s specific to Star Wars, where English letters correspond to galactic letters. But before our trip, I made a goal of learning Aurebesh. I’m not fast at reading it, by any means, but I can recognize the letters and decode them without a reference. I’m pretty smug about it. There are resources onboard in your Play Disney Parks app that allow you to translate or scan Aurebesh into English, but I greatly enjoyed serving as the smug human translator for our trip. (Plus, once you know it, you’ll be delighted by all the words you can recognize in the background of shows like The Mandalorian or Andor.) Onboard The Halcyon, there are some fun plaques and easter eggs posted entirely in Aurebesh. If you don’t actually learn it, at least use the app to translate some of them, because they’re informative and often clever.

We hope that these tips were helpful as you prepare for your own adventures across the galaxy. And if you ever see Dano and Scoops in your travels, be sure to give them a nod! May the Force be with you.

Five spoiler-free activities to prep for Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser