Harvest

Harvest was the seventeenth UNSC colony world, and one of the most remote. The colony was founded in 2468 by the UNSC Skidbladnir. Located in the Epsilon Indi System, the planet had the unfortunate distinction of being the first human planet discovered by the Covenant. After disastrous First Contact, the planet was subsequently razed by the Covenant during the First Battle of Harvest, and most of its population was killed due to the battle.

Population
Harvest was one of the UNSC's more productive and more peaceful colonies. Within two decades of its founding it had the highest per capital agricultural manufacture of any inner colony. Major crops, such as corn, wheat, watermelons, peaches, apples, grapes, and numerous other foodstuffs nourished the inhabitants of more than half a dozen other colonies. The population of Harvest was three million but was destroyed by the Covenant in 2525 by invasion and orbital bombardment. The capital city and its largest population center was Utgard, also home to Harvest's seven space elevators connected to the Orbital Space Station, Tiara.



Topography
Harvest was a small planet, approximately one-third the size of Earth with only a 4,000 kilometer (2,484 mile) equatorial diameter, slightly smaller than the Sol planet Mercury. In terms of surface area, Harvest possessed ~50 million km², roughly one-tenth the surface area of Earth. Harvest orbited Epsilon Indi extremely quickly, much faster than most UNSC colonies, at roughly 150,000 km/h, or ~41km/sec (by comparison, Earth orbits Sol at roughly 30 km/sec). Harvest had no natural satellites. Out of a total of five planets in the Epsilon Indi System, Harvest was the only habitable planet as well as being fertile. The super-continent Edda dominated the planet, taking up roughly 67% of its surface. Two low-salinity seas covered the remainder of the planet, Hugin to the north, and Munin to the south. . Almost 86% of Edda is within 500 meters of sea level, the only major change in elevation is the Bifrost, a escarpment that "cuts" Edda in half.

Harvest's surface was once beautiful, covered in grassland and forests, lush fields and rolling hills, and a thousand lakes swarming with fish. The orchards with luscious crops. At one point during his service on Harvest Sergeant Johnson noted both apples and pears growing on the same tree. At night, bats filled the skies. After being glassed, the surface was reduced to a layer of melted glass, the destruction visible from orbit. The environment suffered a catastrophic blow as a result, the once glorious landscape turning into a nearly frozen tundra, causing most species to quickly go extinct. Soon, all that remained of Harvest's original ecosystem were the scavengers, feeding off the rotting remains of the planet's once abundant wildlife, and even they perished before long.

History
In 2502, Avery Junior Johnson was involved in the assassination of Jerald Mulkey Ander, the head of the People's Occupation Government on Harvest as part of the ORION Project's Operation: KALEIDOSCOPE. Harvest was the first colony to be attacked by the Covenant and the first human world to be glassed. It was also the first place humanity officially made contact with the Covenant, after the incidents on This End Up and Minor Transgression.

In 2524, Staff Sergeant Johnson returned to Harvest along with Staff Sergeant Byrne and Captain Ponder, all survivors of Operation: TREBUCHET. They were to train a Colonial Militia and, unbeknownst to them, fend off what UNSC had believed to be Insurrectionist attacks on ships in the systems.

On February 3rd, 2525, the Harvest Long range orbital platform, the Tiara, made radar and spectroscopic contact with Rapid Conversion. Contact with Harvest was lost thereafter.

Escape from Harvest
The citizens of Harvest soon found themselves in the middle of the first battle between the Covenant and humanity, using their newly trained Militia to herd hundreds of thousands of civilian survivors from Gladsheim, Vigrond, and other locations to the Utgard Space Elevators to escape the planet. During the first Covenant attack on Harvest about +250,000 humans managed to escape the planet by packing into 236 freight containers which were then loaded into seven elevator depots in Utgard. Every five to seven minutes, seven pairs of freight containers were loaded into the Space Elevator. Loaded ahead of these freight containers were seven "grease buckets", maintenance containers, two which were loaded with Johnson's men and Jilan al-Cygni. The other five were decoys rigged with claymore mines which were used to soften the Brutes, Grunts and Drones which had boarded and taken control of Tiara. While the other two "grease buckets" holding Johnson and Co. stopped and they were fighting off the Covenant, the number seven strand of the Space Elevator snapped a few thousand kilometers above its anchor due to the stress caused by the load becoming unbalanced. There were 11 pairs of freight containers on the strand when it snapped, killing around 20,000 people. The remaining freight containers carrying the survivors of Harvest continued up the elevator, out into space, where they met up with propulsion pods that Sif had placed previously. Once Johnson and Co. finished fighting the Covenant on the Tiara, they joined the survivors and used the propulsion pods to enter Slipspace. It should be noted that at least one of the future candidates for SPARTAN-III Program could have been on the freight containers.

The prototype of the Brute Chopper was also made during the time it took for the citizens to escape.

The Battle of Harvest
By April 12th, 2525, the Colonial Military Administration sent the scout ship Argo to investigate. Other then confirming its arrival at Harvest no other transmissions were sent, and Argo was presumed MIA.

On October 7th, 2525, Fleet Command assembled a battle group to investigate, due to the fact that the Harvest situation was deemed to have become serious. The battle group consisted of the destroyer Heracles, commanded by Captain Veredi, as well as the frigates Arabia and Vostok. They entered the Harvest system only to find the planet's surface almost entirely melted down to glass. While there, the battle group encountered an unknown alien vessel. This vessel immediately fired on the inferior human vessels, and the Vostok and Arabia were lost with all hands. The Heracles managed to jump out of the system, but took several weeks to return to Reach due to damage sustained in the battle.

Vice Admiral Preston Cole fought and barely won the Second Battle of Harvest in 2531, six years later. This battle was the single most titanic battle ever fought by the two opposing forces before the Fall of Reach in 2552, and resulted in the creation and implementation of the Cole Protocol. The UNSC was able to retake the planet but with the massive loss of 2/3 of their fleet.

Soon after Admiral Cole's victory, the UNSC Spirit of Fire arrived in the system and found the Covenant had once again returned to the planet's surface, and more shockingly, had uncovered previously unknown Forerunner relics.

Trivia

 * Harvest is seemingly inspired by the Norse and Scandinavian outlying cultures and customs, they were practically hard-laborers fairly comparable to Harvest's populace as is one of its A.I.s, Sif.
 * It has Norse Mythological locations such as Gladsheim, Bifrost, Midgard, and Utgard amongst others.
 * Harvest may be named for its agricultural resources, because it's main commerce/trade is crops.
 * Another name for Harvest that the Covenant use in their event dates is the Alien colonized world, "Reliquary".
 * The finding of Humans on Harvest was the catalyst for the attempted Covenant genocide of the Human race, due to a mistranslation of Forerunner glyphs by the Prophets, as seen on many writs and machines amid Covenant technologies.
 * Harvest had no army when the Covenant attacked, only its Colonial Militia, which had been designed for possible Insurrection attacks was stationed on the planet. There would've been a more efficient force, if not for the attitudes of the people: they didn't want armed guards all over their planet.
 * Harvest is home to animals such as the Harvest Whale and the Arctic Beast.
 * The new Halo Wars trailer is based on a Battle at Harvest.
 * Halo Wars may be set on Harvest.
 * Harvest appears to be trapped in an endless winter after the Covenant orbital bombardment.