When we’re first introduced to Rey in The Force Awakens, we discover a lot about her day to day life as a scavenger, as well as where she lives: a fallen AT-AT left from the Battle of Jakku that she’s converted into a shelter. You can tell she’s been living there for a while, not just because of the thousands of tally marks on the wall counting the days since her parents left her on the planet, but because of all the possessions she’s collected over the years. These items, though only seen for about 30 seconds in the final film (and are explained further in various resource books) inform us a lot about Rey. She’s resourceful, a skilled mechanic, and still manages to find beauty in the world around her.
Rey has no choice but to be resourceful while surviving on Jakku, and she’s managed to scrape by for 10 years after being left on the planet. Knowing water is scarce on Jakku and also necessary for survival, she stores water barrels in the front portions of the AT-AT. She’s also installed a cooling unit to preserve perishable items and a cook top to heat up food (primarily portions) when needed. These additions to her home provide a long term stock of resources to pull from so she’s not reliant day-by-day on survival. They also indicate that she’s not intending on leaving anytime soon, still hopeful as she waits for her parents to return.
We also find that Rey has made plenty of modifications to the AT-AT, salvaging pieces and removing parts to create her main living area & even welding the additional hatches on the body shut to ensure others don’t enter and steal her things. She’s created a lamp for light so she can continue to work after the sun has set, and even managed to use some solar arrays from crashed TIE Fighters to create solar panels that are hooked up to a power generator – providing power to her stove, cooling unit & lamp. Even her staff and speeder were made from salvaged ship parts found in the Graveyard of Ships left from the Battle of Jakku. It takes skill and knowledge to create all of these things, and scavenging old ships for parts is the perfect place to learn everything there is to know about ship mechanics. Rey clearly knows what parts provide specific uses to the ships, and is able to assess what is most resourceful for her – choosing to keep them for herself to better her living situation, or trade them for food from Unkar Plutt. And again, these projects she’s completed show that it’s worth her time to create solar panels & speeders to make her life easier assuming she’s going to be stuck on Jakku for a while.
Lastly, there’s a few items inside her home that are not purely meant for survival, but instead show she’s managed to find the occasional sliver of joy in an otherwise difficult existence. She has the X-wing helmet she’s found, which she puts on occasionally “just because” (as The Force Awakens script describes). She has a doll, handmade from scraps she found from a New Republic Cargo shipment – perhaps to keep her company as a young girl in the early years of her time on Jakku, just looking for a friend. There’s even a cup of Spinebarrel Flowers that she’s saved even after the petals started to fall. Rey details in her Survival Guide that she spotted the flowers in a tiny groove of her AT-AT home, and decided, “if that little spinebarrel could survive…so can I. Whether big or small, life finds a way on Jakku.” It serves as a reminder that there’s beauty – even on Jakku – if you look hard enough. Rey, despite 10 years of pure survival, still retains a hopeful nature, and finds bits of joy throughout her day when these silly things could be seen as a waste of energy and even a weakness in the life she has. Lucky for her, it’s that sympathetic outlook that eventually leads her to rescue BB-8, and help her find her place in the galaxy outside of Jakku.
Jakku Journal 