Okeer: the krogan warlord who grew Grunt in a tank on Korlus

Okeer fought in the Krogan Rebellions, sold his own people to the Collectors for genetic technology, and spent his last years breeding a perfect krogan on Korlus. He died in the gas and left the prototype to Shepard.

By Joe GarrattPublished 9 Sept 2026

Dr Okeer, sometimes called Warlord Okeer, was a krogan veteran of the Krogan Rebellions and one of the names on Commander Shepard's recruitment list in 2185. He was a militant radical whose own species had turned on him, which takes some doing among krogan. Shepard went to Korlus to hire him for the fight against the Collectors and came away with something else entirely: a tank-bred soldier who would later take the name Grunt.

TL;DR

Okeer's reading of the genophage was that the population loss mattered less than the damage to krogan natural selection. Every rare newborn now gets cared for and raised to adulthood, weak ones included, and their genes go back into the pool, which he took as proof that his species was degenerating with every generation. He was not trying to cure the genophage. He was trying to work around it and produce krogan equal to the ones who fought the Rebellions, on the reasoning that even a limited, non-reproducing army of them could bring the galaxy down. Getting the technology meant selling large numbers of krogan to the Collectors, which made him hated at home and drove him off Tuchanka. A Blue Suns commander called Jedore then funded him a facility on Korlus in exchange for an army of tank-bred krogan loyal to her. Okeer built her one and considered it disposable. His real work was a single prototype, and he stayed in a room filling with poison gas rather than leave it behind.

What was Okeer trying to do?#

Okeer wanted to rebuild the krogan of the Rebellions in a tank, on the theory that the genophage's worst effect was not the falling birth rate but the collapse of krogan natural selection.

His argument runs like this. Births are so rare now that every one of them is protected, weak infants included, and those infants grow up and pass their genetics on. The old krogan philosophy that only the strongest survive and breed has been abandoned, and the species that fought the Rebellions has been reduced to a shadow of itself. Curing the genophage held no interest for him. He wanted to ignore it and perfect his people instead.

He also had a target. An army of krogan matching the ones from the Rebellions in strength, skill and wits would be enough to bring the galaxy to its knees, and it did not need to be able to reproduce to do it.

Paying for the research is what made him a pariah. Okeer sold a great many krogan to the Collectors in exchange for the technology he needed, which earned him a vile reputation among his own kind and made staying on Tuchanka impossible.

Jedore and Korlus#

Off world, Okeer found the sponsor he needed. Jedore, a Blue Suns commander, wanted a mixed-unit army: cloned krogan shock troops loyal to her, led by hired mercenary specialists. She gave Okeer a facility on Korlus and breeding tanks, and in some playthroughs she gave him an assistant as well, Rana Thanoptis, who is only there if she got off Virmire alive.

He delivered exactly what she ordered. Jedore and her mercenaries then complained that the krogan berserkers coming out of the tanks were uncontrollable, which Okeer read as a failure of command rather than a failure of engineering. The Suns began using the tank-bred as targets in live-fire exercises.

What Jedore never worked out was that her army was the waste product. Every one of those krogan was a reject measured against the single prototype Okeer had been refining, a warrior who had survived having Collector information written into him, which Okeer had only managed after learning how to do it without killing the subject.

The gas#

Shepard arrives to find Okeer already releasing his failed subjects in bulk to kill Jedore's people, buying himself time to finish the prototype.

He knows who Shepard is. He knows what happened on Virmire, and he approves: Saren's pale horde were not real krogan, and numbers on their own mean nothing to him. That is the whole of his interest in the Collector war.

Jedore works out that she has been double-crossed, vents toxic gas through the lab and calls a clean slate on the project. Okeer bargains with Shepard to save the prototype, because the technology inside it cannot be replaced, and he will not leave the room while Shepard goes to kill her. By the time the fighting is over the gas has already suffocated him.

He left a dying message telling Shepard to take his creation and use it against the Collectors. Grunt takes his name from the last word in it.

Everything Okeer knew about the Collectors died with him. In that final recording he says that if he had understood why they were taking humans he would have told Shepard, which is as close as he comes to cooperation. Grunt retains blurry memories of Collector ships from the technology used to make him.

What the krogan made of him#

Ask Wrex about Okeer and he makes his dislike clear. Wreav, leading the same clan in a different playthrough, takes the opposite view and treats the connection to Okeer as a reason to accept Grunt into Clan Urdnot.

Grunt's own position surfaces during his rite. If Shepard kills the thresher maw and Gatatog Uvenk offers him a place in Clan Gatatog, Grunt refuses in disgust and calls Okeer his father.

If Grunt survives to lead Aralakh Company, he mentions that Okeer went out of his way to make sure he knew about the rachni. Okeer respected them as worthy enemies and passed that respect into his creation.

The research that outlived him#

Okeer's work turns up again in Andromeda. A pair of krogan scientists at New Tuchanka on Elaaden ask Pathfinder Ryder to track down missing data containing some of his genophage research, in the belief it might lead to a cure. What SAM manages to pull out of the encrypted files includes references to Okeer's perfect krogan.