Tribute

Tribute is a human colony and one of the major colonies in the Epsilon Eridani system.

History
Tribute's first wave of settlers arrived around the same time as those on Reach, in 2319, followed by another colony ship a decade later. At the time, land claims or development were modest and many of the original communities died out before the influx of new settlers in the Domus Diaspora in the 2160s. Though Tribute's natural resources are more modest than those of Reach, it nonetheless became an important center of industry and commerce as the Epsilon Eridani system developed.

During the Fall of Reach, Tribute was spared the brunt of the Covenant invasion as the Covenant focused most of their might on Reach. The planet's most significant cities and industries were completely or partially glassed either by the Covenant fleet or by assorted raiding parties afterward, though a number of smaller settlements survived. Most importantly, the glassing was not widespread enough to destroy the planet's ecosystem and climate. In the days and weeks after the Covenant took over the Epsilon Eridani system, several Jiralhanae packs established strongholds on Tribute, along with miscellaneous scavenging operations in the planet's ruined or semi-intact cities and industrial facilities.

Though the concentrated Covenant loyalist opposition was eliminated in Operation: FORTRESS SIEGE in early 2553, a smaller-scale campaign was waged for some time to root out smaller elements of the occupying forces. Shortly thereafter, Tribute was prioritized for reclamation and resettlement. In the years that followed, Tribute became Epsilon Eridani's most notable short-term resettlement project, with hundreds of thousands of refugees flowing in from across the human sphere. Although several large-scale reconstruction projects overseen by the Phoenix Initiative quickly sprang up in the planet's ruined cities and elsewhere, the influx of population still caused various difficulties, and informal settlements with poor infrastructure remained common even two decades after the war.

Topography
The third of Epsilon Eridani's rocky inner planets, Tribute is a relatively standard terrestrial world. The planet is geologically active and home to many thriving industries, many of them centered on raw materials extraction but also shipbuilding, aerospace craft and surface vehicles. As the Epsilon Eridani asteroid belts are curiously metal-poor, mining on Tribute and Reach forms the backbone of the system's economy. What makes Tribute attractive in this regard its relatively light gravity and thus shallower gravity well than that of Reach, making it cheaper to transport materials to the shipyards in orbit.

A cold and arid world, Tribute has undergone subtle terraforming involving atmospheric processing to thicken its atmosphere and increase its oxygen content. Though rudimentary native life exists on Tribute, much of the planet's current ecology has been introduced since colonization. Tribute's native ecology shares many commonalities with that of the neighboring Reach, including the presence of unmistakably terrestrial-related out-of-place biota. Evidence indicates Tribute was more hospitable in the ancient past, until a climate shift and consequent mass extinction around 23,000 years ago as a result of a supervolcano eruption. However, models of the event suggest that the eruption was more disruptive than it should have been based on its projected magnitude. It has been hypothesized that the eruption itself may have been triggered by a failing ancient terraforming machine, though other scholars attribute it to an unusual chain of natural geological processes. Whatever the case may be, Tribute's geologic activity has raised concerns of similar events in the future, even as the human terraforming process has made the planet's climate more tolerable.

Ambient radioactivity is relatively common on Tribute thanks to the presence of ample deposits of thorium and uranium. The prevalence of radon gas makes several areas of the planet effectively unsuited for long-term habitation, and thorough ventilation is a must even in some of the inhabited areas.

Tribute has a single natural satellite, Emese. Similar to Mars' moons albeit larger, it is likely a captured asteroid.