When the Empire fell and the New Republic took its place, the clone army was already gone from the galaxy’s center stage. The soldiers who had fought the Clone Wars, enforced Order 66, and helped build the Empire were no longer marching in formation or standing guard over Imperial worlds.
By the time Palpatine was defeated, only a handful of clone troopers were still alive, scattered, aging, and largely forgotten. Most never lived long enough to see what replaced the Empire they helped create.
So what actually became of the clones once the Empire was gone?
Kix Became the Last Living Clone in Canon
For a long time, when we talked about which clone survived the Empire, the safest answer to which clone survived the Empire was Captain Rex. Dave Filoni has confirmed that the elderly Rebel veteran seen fighting at the Battle of Endor is Rex, meaning he lived long enough to witness the Empire’s collapse and the birth of the New Republic.
But as we later learned, Rex was not the last clone.
Canon later revealed that another trooper survived far beyond the Empire’s fall, not by enduring the galaxy, but by being removed from it entirely. That clone was Kix.
Kix’s story begins in Star Wars: The Clone Wars, where he serves as a medic in the 501st Legion. When we look back at those episodes, it’s clear how close he came to uncovering the truth. After the deaths of Tup and Fives, Kix quietly continued investigating the inhibitor chips implanted in clone troopers, unknowingly brushing up against Palpatine’s plan at exactly the wrong time.
What happened next wasn’t shown on screen. The rest of Kix’s fate is revealed years later in the short story The Crimson Corsair and the Lost Treasure of Count Dooku, part of Star Wars Adventures. That story explains how, on Count Dooku’s orders, Kix was captured by Separatist forces and placed into cryo-stasis aboard a transport ship meant to deliver him for interrogation.
The ship never arrived.
Instead, it made a blind hyperspace jump and crash-landed on a remote world, leaving Kix frozen and unaging for decades.
And this is where Kix’s story becomes something else entirely.
While he remained frozen, the galaxy moved on without him. The Republic fell. The Empire rose. The Jedi were wiped out. Then the Empire itself collapsed, and the New Republic took its place. When we line up the timeline, entire generations lived and died while Kix remained unchanged, preserved exactly as he had been during the Clone Wars.
When he was finally discovered and awakened years later, there was nothing left waiting for him. Every clone brother he had fought beside was gone. The war he was created for was ancient history. With no Republic, no army, and no place to return to, Kix joined the crew that rescued him, becoming a pirate simply to survive in a galaxy that had already forgotten the clones.
Legends Showed More Clones After the Empire’s Fall
In Legends, particularly through Karen Traviss’s Republic Commando novels, the fate of the clone troopers after the Empire’s fall plays out very differently. Instead of quietly aging out of existence, a small group of clones managed to survive, largely because of one man: Kal Skirata.
Kal Skirata was hired by the Republic to train clone troopers, but he never saw them as disposable soldiers. He treated them as sons. When he discovered that certain “defective” clones, known as the Null ARCs, were slated for termination by the Kaminoans, Kal intervened and took them under his protection.
As the Clone Wars dragged on, many of these clones grew disillusioned with the Republic they were fighting for. They wanted lives of their own, and Kal wanted to give them that chance. Instead of returning to Mandalore when his contract ended, he followed his clones into battle and eventually helped them disappear.
Kal established a hidden settlement on Mandalore called Kyrimorut, which became a refuge for clone deserters who chose to live as Mandalorians rather than soldiers. Their accelerated aging was still a problem, until Kal and the Nulls took an extreme step. They captured Ko Sai, one of the architects of the cloning program, and forced her to develop a cure for their shortened lifespans.
That cure worked. In Legacy of the Force: Revelation, the survival of Kal Skirata’s clones is no longer theoretical, it’s shown on the page. One of the Null ARCs, Jaing Skirata , is confirmed to be alive decades after the Empire’s fall.
The scene takes place in 41 ABY, long after the Clone Wars, the Empire, and even the early New Republic era. By that point, Jaing would have been 73 years old, yet Traviss makes it clear that the accelerated aging problem is gone. Jaing is described as appearing physically strong and healthy, with “fewer gray hairs and a heavier build than Boba Fett.”