Exegol was a dark, barren, and rocky planet with desert flats. Its dry conditions, combined with the rubbing of dust particles in its atmosphere, created enormous static discharges that appeared as lightning strikes from the planet, which made the atmosphere too dangerous to deploy deflector shields. The dead and desolate world was covered with enormous fissures that reached deep into its crust. These were excavated by Sith loyalists who were attempting to reach a transportative vergence they believed to lie beneath the surface.

The darkness of Exegol was so extreme that the astromech droid R7-FNG was needed to be optimized to work in its environment. Exegol’s nearby space was littered with the remains of megafauna, resulting in the formation of a cloud of red gas and stardust forming around the world, which posed a navigation barrier known as the Red Honeycomb Zone.