Mass Effect Astrographics (Introduction)

This is the first on what I expect to be a series of five posts (Introduction, I, II, III, IV) about the astrography of the Mass Effect galaxy — which happens to be our galaxy, just with... a few differences, let's say.

This post will be an introduction of sorts, providing a bit of context as to why in blazes did I do this and, better yet, what the hell this even is. If you only care about the raw data, feel free to skip to the next post in this series. Whenever that comes out.

ME & Me

The first time I ever heard of Mass Effect was when I and one of my cousins spent a weekend at my grandmother's house in the countryside. I was never much of a consoles guy, but my cousin had an Xbox 360 and he brought it with him, along with a small selection of games he owned. 

Among those games was one called 'Mass Effect 3', some sort of sci-fi RPG-shooter game? I asked him about it, and he dismissively gave a shrug saying it was 'all right, I guess. Plays fine.' That night we played some of his other games for a bit, and when he decided to call it a day and head to bed, I asked if I could try out that 'Mass Effect' game. He said 'sure, play as much as you like'.

And then I proceeded to play it for eight hours straight, up to around four in the morning.

 I remember being impressed by the story, sure, but what really floored me and had me hooked was the setting. Of those eight hours, a solid four were spent just reading the different Codex entries and planet descriptions in the system maps. To my young self, they presented a degree of worldbuilding that I had never truly seen before — and what's more, it all felt so real! The applications of the eponymous mass effect felt like natural consequences of that sort of mass manipulation and the aliens, whilst somewhat human-like at times, all had their characteristics that made them feel alien.

After that weekend was over and my cousin and I went back to our respective homes, I was left distraught. I didn't own a console, I didn't have a PC at the time (most of my life I've had second-hand Macs from my parents), and thusly had no way of playing Mass Effect. I went to class that Monday, and talking to my friends during the break, I found out that one of my best friends, João (or 'John' for the Anglophones), was also a huge Mass Effect fan.

Over the following years he's invited me over so I could play the whole trilogy, from start to finish, as a continuous play through. In total, I must've spent upwards of 80 hours playing ME over at his place. I never did actually finish the whole play through, having stopped making some headway into ME3 — somewhat poetically around the same place I had back when I first played it at grandma's on my cousin's Xbox. Quoth Lucas, 'it rhymes'.

Someone Else Did Get It Wrong

Mass Effect Codex, my beloved

In the intervening years, quite a bit has changed. I still love Mass Effect, don't get me wrong, but time and exposure to other things has slowly helped me see the cracks in its otherwise smooth, curved surface (ever noticed how everything in it is curved?)

I used to eat up its production design, pouring over my copy of The Art of Mass Effect in absolute awe. I still think it is an incredible artistic accomplishment, but now it no longer evokes that same sense of wonderment as it did. Similarly, where once I would think Eezo and the mass effect itself were brilliant pieces of practical world building, closer inspection reveals how utterly inconsistent it truly is — something which I'll almost certainly write a post about... some day.

But the thing I still love with the same intensity as I did nearly a decade ago, and also what causes me the most pain, is the Codex. Oh, the Codex! What a beautiful, wonderful piece of writing it is! It's a god damn shame the game's story writers seemingly don't agree, what with how they consistently ignore it in the actual story.

You see, when talking about Mass Effect as a setting, you actually need to specify which Mass Effect you're talking about: the one that's written down on the Codex, or the one that's shown in practice to the players as they make their way through the trilogy. Things which are outlined in the Codex are shamelessly ignored over the course of the games with shocking regularity. How many times have I landed on a planet in Mass Effect 2 where its blurb explicitly stated the air is toxic and it is devoid of life only to, on the ground, have Shepard stroll about without their helmet and stepping on grass-like plant life on the dirt paths. Or how every single time we see spaceships duke it out, it is markedly not in any way like the multi-paragraph long, in-depth dive on the dynamics of space combat outlined in the Codex.

What drives me mad is just how good this otherwise ignored material is! It's just such a waste, and I feel really bad for the person(s) responsible for writing all that. I see you and your work, and I love it! It is in part as a dedication to these individuals who have had their hard work trodden upon that I have made this series of posts.

Uncharted Worlds, Charted

If you actually care to look, you might be surprised at just how much detail you'll find scattered across Mass Effect's (star) maps. Each planet has its own little summary, with its particular characteristics, history and/or curiosities, in addition to the statistics provided for each world.

Considering Mass Effect The Firsteth™ alone had 41 individual star systems, each with an average of  ~4 worlds-ish, we have in the order of one-and-a-half hundred individual worlds, each with their own unique descriptions. Even if these descriptions are around a hundred words long, that still comes up to 16,400 words. That's an entire novelette's worth of bespoke information.

And it's not just any information either — it's plain to see that a lot of effort went into making these! The degree afforded to each world certainly varies, but someone laboriously sat down and seriously thought about these worlds, arguably just set dressing, with loving care, and it shows. It's a big part of what made me be so awestruck by Mass Effect and its world.

So once I got Mass Effect: Legendary Edition and started playing through the Trilogy, I decided to stop and note down all of the information on all of the worlds from all three games, and compile it all into one all-encompassing database with all of this information, as well as extra parameters calculated from the given ones, such as planetary and stellar masses, planetary densities and whatnot.

As of writing this, the document for Mass Effect The Original is fully compiled, and I just need to add in an Appendix to it before releasing, which I intend to do on Part I of this series.

The doc for Mass Effect 2 is almost nearly done as well, just missing a few worlds from one specific cluster, and a similar Appendix addendum which can just be copy-pasted from the first document. It'll be released in Part II of this series.

The doc for Mass Effect 3 however does not exist, as yet. I haven't finished ME2 and therefore not started 3, so yeah. God only knows when it'll be done — especially considering that it is both the longest of the three games and the one with the biggest map — but when it is done, it'll be Part III of this series.

Finally, once all three documents are out and about in this great wide world, I'll do a post-mortem/conclusions post where we can try to make sense of some of this data in Part IV of the series. In particular, I intend to try and locate the different clusters as to where they would be in the real Milky Way galaxy, or at the very least narrow down where they wouldn't be.

So put on Sam Hulick's Uncharted Worlds on a loop as we go on a deep dive into the Astrography of Mass Effect.

🎵 Doo Dee Doo, Doo-Dee Doo-Dee-Dee; Doo Dee Doo, Doo-Dee Doo-Dee-Dee...