Mass Effect: Andromeda Story Explained

Mass Effect: Andromeda is BioWare's fourth Mass Effect game, released in 2017. It leaves Commander Shepard and the Milky Way behind and follows colonists who left for the Andromeda galaxy in 2185 and woke up in 2819. You don't need the trilogy to follow it, and none of Shepard's choices carry over, but your own choices shape who survives and who you ally with. This page tells the story in order with full spoilers. (Mass Effect: Andromeda)

Before the story begins#

The human billionaire Jien Garson founded the Andromeda Initiative in 2176 to settle "golden worlds" picked out by long-range surveys of Andromeda's Heleus Cluster. In 2185, between the second and third games, the Nexus station and four arks set out on a voyage of more than 600 years, carrying humans, asari, turians, salarians and krogan in cryostasis. Each ark has a Pathfinder to find homes for its people. The human Pathfinder is the Alliance veteran Alec Ryder, who built an AI called SAM and brought his twins, Scott and Sara. The colonists never learn how the Reaper War went. Where this fits in the wider history is on the Mass Effect timeline. (Mass Effect: Andromeda)

Habitat 7 and a new Pathfinder#

The Hyperion wakes its crew in 2819 and almost at once flies into a field of dark energy later called the Scourge. One twin is left in a coma, and the ship's target world, Habitat 7, is nothing like the surveys. It's wracked by lightning storms. Alec sends the Pathfinder team down, including Cora Harper, Liam Kosta and the twin who is awake. Lightning scatters their shuttles across the surface, and the survivors run straight into the kett, a hostile alien species, before regrouping with Alec. (Mass Effect: Andromeda)

Alec uses SAM to read the alien language and activates a Remnant tower to calm the storms, but the blast throws both Ryders off the platform and cracks his child's helmet. Alec gives up his own helmet to save them and dies. He passes on the title of Pathfinder, and with it the deeper link to SAM through the twin's implant. The new Pathfinder arrives at the Nexus with almost no experience and bad news. (Mass Effect: Andromeda)

The Nexus is in worse shape. It hit the Scourge fourteen months earlier, killing most of the Initiative's leaders, Garson among them, or so everyone believes, and the salarian Jarun Tann is in charge. Food ran short, the colonists rose up, and the rebels were exiled. The security chief, Sloane Kelly, left with them, and most of the krogan walked out too. None of the other arks has turned up. (Mass Effect: Andromeda)

Eos and the Remnant vaults#

On Eos, a radiation-blasted desert planet, Ryder explores the ruins of the Remnant, the network of ancient machines and buildings first seen on Habitat 7, left by a vanished race. With SAM's help, Ryder decodes Remnant glyphs and opens a vault. Inside, Ryder activates a system that clears the poison from the air and starts making the planet habitable. The Initiative builds its first outpost there, Prodromos. (Mass Effect: Andromeda)

Ryder gathers a crew aboard the scout ship Tempest: Cora and Liam, the turian smuggler Vetra Nyx, the asari Remnant enthusiast Peebee, the old krogan Nakmor Drack, and later the angaran Jaal Ama Darav. The Remnant's giant guardians, the Architects, attack anyone who comes close to their sites. (Mass Effect: Andromeda)

The angara and the kett#

On the planet Aya, Ryder meets the angara, the native people of Heleus, and their resistance against the kett. The angara have fought the kett for decades, and they don't trust newcomers. To earn that trust, Ryder agrees to rescue the angaran leader Moshae Sjefa from a kett facility on the frozen world Voeld. (Mass Effect: Andromeda)

Inside, Ryder witnesses exaltation, the kett process for absorbing other species. The kett take angara and remake them into kett. The rescued Moshae helps Ryder open the vault on Aya and explains what the kett leader in Heleus, the Archon, is really after: Meridian, a hidden world that controls every Remnant vault in the cluster. (Mass Effect: Andromeda)

Ryder spreads the Initiative's reach through the cluster. On Kadara, Sloane Kelly rules the exiles' port while a smuggling network under Reyes Vidal works against her. On the desert world Elaaden the departed krogan have built a settlement of their own. Who Ryder backs on Kadara and how Ryder treats the krogan decide who turns up for the final battle. (Mass Effect: Andromeda)

The other arks are still out there. Cora makes finding the asari ark, the Leusinia, her own cause, and in her personal mission Ryder's team helps it escape a kett siege. The turian ark, the Natanus, can be found as well. Each recovered ark brings thousands more colonists to the Nexus. A fifth ark, the quarian-led Keelah Si'yah, never arrives, and nobody in Heleus knows where it is. (Mass Effect: Andromeda)

Hunting the Archon and Khi Tasira#

To find Meridian, Ryder needs the Archon's data, so the Tempest follows his flagship and Ryder's team slips aboard. There Ryder discovers the missing salarian ark, tethered to the flagship, its colonists being used in kett experiments. The Archon traps Ryder in a stasis field and puts a device into Ryder's SAM implant. Ryder has SAM briefly stop their heart to break free, and the salarian Pathfinder's EMP lets the ark and the Tempest escape. (Mass Effect: Andromeda)

The Archon's data leads to Khi Tasira, a Remnant site, which reveals that an ancient race, the Jardaan, built the Remnant and also created the angara. It also gives the location of Meridian. Then the Archon appears by hologram. He has seized the Hyperion, where SAM's core lives, and cuts SAM off from Ryder. He takes Ryder's twin hostage, because the twin's implant can give him access to Meridian, but before the link is lost the twin restores Ryder's connection to SAM. With the Hyperion leading his fleet, the Archon heads for Meridian. (Mass Effect: Andromeda)

The ending explained#

Ryder calls in every ally available: the Nexus, the angaran resistance, the krogan and whichever Kadara faction Ryder backed. The Tempest follows the Archon to Meridian, a hollow Remnant world, at the head of a Remnant fleet. Inside, the Archon sabotages and abandons the captured Hyperion, which crash-lands, and takes his hostage to Meridian's control chamber. He plugs himself into the system and turns the Remnant and an Architect against Ryder, while Ryder's twin uses their link to work the consoles. Ryder cuts the Archon off from Meridian, killing him, and takes control. (Mass Effect: Andromeda)

With Meridian working for the Initiative, the vaults across Heleus can start making worlds habitable. Ryder gives a speech about the colonists' new home. Which allies made it to the fight, and who survived, depends on the choices the player made along the way. (Mass Effect: Andromeda)

Running under the main plot are Alec's hidden memories, which SAM unlocks one by one. They show that an anonymous benefactor helped fund the Initiative and SAM, and seemed to know the Reapers were coming. The Initiative was partly a lifeboat. Following the trail, Ryder finds evidence that Garson was murdered rather than killed by the Scourge. The memories also reveal that Ryder's mother, Ellen, is alive in stasis aboard the Hyperion under a false name, waiting for a cure SAM might one day find. (Mass Effect: Andromeda)

What the ending means is that the Initiative finally has somewhere to live and an alliance with the angara, but most of the big questions stay open. Who the benefactor was, who killed Garson, where the quarian ark is, and what the wider kett empire will do once it learns the Archon is dead are all left unanswered. (Mass Effect: Andromeda)

Where it fits#

Andromeda is a side branch, not a sequel. Its colonists left during the events of Mass Effect 2 and never learn what happened in Mass Effect 3, so it works with any ending. For the trilogy that came before, see Mass Effect story explained, and for the Initiative's history, the Andromeda Initiative page. (Mass Effect 2; Mass Effect 3; Mass Effect: Andromeda)