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Terra is a [[hive world]]; stripped long ago of all forms of resources; its soil is utterly barren and its atmosphere is a fog of pollution. Massive, labyrinthine edifices of state sprawl across the vast majority of the surface. Its oceans have long ago boiled away, though newer artificial ones were created by the [[Emperor]] after the [[Unification Wars]]{{Fn|21}}. Many mountain ranges have been leveled, perhaps all of them except the Himalayas, which seemingly remain all but untouched due to the laboratories said to be underneath and the chambers of the [[Astronomican]] that course throughout the whole mountain range.{{Cite ThisFn|6a}}

Despite being devastated during the [[Horus Heresy]] and earlier than that during the long Age of Strife, Terra is probably the most vastly-populated and built-up hive world in the Imperium. Beneath countless layers and millennia of urban accretion, catacombs hold older cultures completely different from the surface ones.{{Cite ThisFn|8a}}

Much of the population of Terra exists in the most terrible squalor, their greatest hope that one of their offspring might be accepted into the Adeptus Terra, the Priesthood of Terra, as a Menial, an [[adept]] of the lowliest sort.{{Fn|6}}{{Fn|7}} A square metre of land on Terra costs more than a palace on any [[Hive World]]; only the most wealthy can even afford to own a small section of land.{{Fn|8a}}.