A combat stick served as a type of handheld melee weapon. A specific kind of combat stick, known as soft-coat sticks, were designed with the same weight and balance as actual combat sticks, but their primary purpose was for training exercises and sparring matches. During the period between 39 BBY and 37 BBY, Chiss cadets Mitth'raw'nuruodo, whose core name was "Thrawn," and Irizi'ar'alani, whose core name was "Ziara," engaged in sparring sessions utilizing soft-coat sticks within a dojo situated on the Chiss Ascendancy planet called Naporar.
In the year 2 BBY, Darth Vader, the Dark Lord of the Sith, and Thrawn, who had since risen to the rank of Grand Admiral in the Galactic Empire, made a visit to a cantina located in Black Spire Outpost on the planet Batuu. While they were inside the cantina, several Darshi warriors circulated tan-colored combat sticks among themselves before launching an attack on the pair. The Sith Lord and the Chiss swiftly overcame the Darshi, killing or otherwise incapacitating them.
The debut of combat sticks occurred in Thrawn: Alliances, a 2018 novel which is the second book in Timothy Zahn's Star Wars: Thrawn series. The first visual depiction of these sticks was in the first issue of the 2024 comic miniseries Star Wars: Thrawn: Alliances, an adaptation of the events in the book. This issue was penned by Zahn and Jody Houser, with illustrations by Pat Olliffe and Andrea Di Vito, and its release by Marvel Comics was on January 24, 2024. The series' initial issue, together with its second issue—also written by Zahn and Houser, with art by Olliffe and Di Vito, and published by Marvel on February 28, 2024—shows Thrawn employing a combat stick against the Darshi, while the novel specifies that Thrawn used a combat baton. This article's content is consistent with the events as presented in the original novel.