Permadeath

Who is at risk

Custom recruits, story squadmates, and Hawks follow the same injury and death rules on Normal and above. Exotic kits are locked to their owners: if Tel-Rea dies, Jedi Padawan leaves that save with her. You cannot recruit a replacement Jedi.

Astromechs are the flexible exotic — any droid from the builder can take the class, so a lost R-unit is painful but not a campaign-unique deletion.

Crashes and Ironman-style risk

Empire, PC Gamer, and several launch reviews documented mid-battle crashes that dumped the mission. On a permadeath file that is indistinguishable from a real death if the last autosave was poor.

Practical habit: return to the Den after a successful extract before you walk away from the PC. Avoid Xbox Quick Resume as your quit method. Verify files after a hard lock. Bit Reactor shipped a day-zero patch; reports after 27 August still mention freezes, especially on Linux/SteamOS and at mission-complete.

Softer options

Story difficulty exists to welcome players who want the Clone Wars plot without Ironman tension. Expert plus Beskar Mode is the opposite end — the Legend trophy asks for that pairing, and Beskar itself is a campaign modifier, not a fourth difficulty slider.