One of my complaints about the time compression in the otherwise excellent Season Two of Andor was that in BBY4 there is no base on Yavin, only a dozen aggressively incompetent idiots in a swamp, and then by BBY4 a serious rebel base is up and running. It bothers me that we see none of the progress, none of the path from A to B, because some of it could have been pretty interesting.
But also it occurs to me that maybe the next time a significant proto-rebel force landed on Yavin 4, sometime in BBY3, they found a handful of gaunt survivors of the Maya Pei brigade, a small group that managed to build a safe little house high up in a tree, and in their desperation and with no way off the planet, learned how to survive there. "We figured out how to eat Yavinian melon!" - they tell newcomers. "You're supposed to eat the vines, not the fruit, and you have to boil it first. But it's pretty good, like Rodian noodles." They figured out how to scare the bigger beasts away with spark bombs, and how to hunt the smaller ones with snares, they learned to predict the monsoons and the flash floods, they cut a path to the nearest ruin, and got started on cleaning out the spiders. "The spiders, it turns out: also edible!"
Their knowledge is piecemeal and haphazard, but it's the closest thing the rebellion has to up-to-date information on the moon where they plan to create a major hidden base, and every little piece of knowledge helps. The remainder of the brigade is essential in setting up and expanding the Yavin 4 base. Afterwards they spends the rest of the revolution working in the kitchens.
