What this is, so you can decide in one line: a spoiler-free route guide. Which order to take the planets, what you can permanently miss, and how to avoid the difficulty wall. It is not a step-by-step quest-by-quest walkthrough, and honestly, that is not what trips people up in KOTOR.
What trips people up is arriving somewhere too early, too weak, or too late to start a companion's story. That is all fixable in advance.
Spoiler policy
Nothing below spoils the story. We name planets and companions, which the game shows you on the galaxy map anyway, and we do not say why any of it matters.
The one rule everyone agrees on
Do Korriban last.
Guides disagree about plenty, but not this. Two reasons, and they stack:
- It is the hardest planet. Arriving underlevelled means repeated restarts on duels your gear cannot carry.
- There is additional story content that only triggers if you get there late.
Take Korriban first and you will have a worse time and see less of the game.
Where the guides disagree
The middle of the game is genuinely contested. Two common routes:
| Route | Order |
|---|---|
| Companion-first | Kashyyyk, Manaan, Tatooine, Korriban |
| HK-first | Tatooine (briefly), Kashyyyk, Tatooine again, Manaan, Korriban |
The second exists because HK-47 is bought on Tatooine, and a lot of players want the droid in the party for as much of the game as possible. The cost is backtracking.
Either works. If you want the simple version: Kashyyyk, Manaan, Tatooine, Korriban, and duck into Tatooine early only if you specifically want HK-47 along for the ride.
What is actually missable
Companion quests are the big one. They do not unlock from a menu. A companion has to be in your active party, and their conversations open up over time as you travel with them. Bench someone for the whole game and you will simply never see their story. If you are the kind of player who picks three favourites and never rotates, this is the mistake you are about to make.
Some companion content is order-dependent. Recruiting Jolee happens on Kashyyyk, and at least one follow-up of his is tied to arriving on Manaan afterwards rather than before. Meet him late and that thread does not fire.
Alignment gates some content. There is side content on Manaan that only opens for dark-side characters. This is normal for KOTOR: the game routinely gives light and dark players different material rather than the same content with a different coat of paint.
You can finish the game in any order and still finish it. Nothing here breaks the campaign. You just see less of it.
Practical advice for a first run
- Rotate your party. Not for fairness, for content. Two thirds of the writing in this game lives in companions you are not currently using.
- Do not rush to Korriban even when the plot points that way.
- Talk to everyone after every planet. Conversation triggers fire on arrival and after major beats, and they are easy to walk past.
- Play the sequel afterwards with the restoration mod. KOTOR II shipped visibly unfinished, and TSLRCM restores what was cut. Our 2000s ranking covers why that mod matters more than most.
Is it still worth playing in 2026?
Yes, and people are: KOTOR still pulls a few hundred players on Steam on a given evening, twenty-three years after release, which is why it tops our ranking of the decade. It runs on modern hardware without ceremony and is cheap in almost every sale.
The details
- Route advice cross-checked against community guides including GamersDecide's planet-order guide and the long-running Steam Community guides on the same question. Where they disagree, we said so rather than picking one and presenting it as settled.
- Player figures are our own Steam readings. Method in our player-count coverage.
- This page covers structure, not quest solutions. If you are stuck on one specific puzzle or fight, a quest-by-quest walkthrough will serve you better than we do here.