Rachni Wars
The insectoid war that led to the krogan uplift.
The Rachni Wars are a conflict in the backstory of Mass Effect, more than 2,000 years before the first game. Explorers activated a dormant mass relay and encountered the rachni, a hive-minded species of intelligent spacefaring insectoids, who then started a galaxy-wide war with the other races.
Quick Facts
- When
- About 2,000 years before Mass Effect
- Belligerents
- Rachni vs. the Council races and krogan
- Outcome
- Rachni wiped out by the krogan
Facts from the source article.
Background
The rachni were winning the war against the Council when the salarians uplifted the krogan to fight them. Within two krogan generations, the krogan had the numbers to defeat the rachni, push them back to their homeworld and wipe them out, and were rewarded with former rachni worlds. Their rapid population growth afterwards drove the expansion that led to the Krogan Rebellions and the genophage.
Mass Effect's krogan-rachni war is one of several references to the Star Control series in its worldbuilding.
The memory of the war shaped Council policy: the First Contact War began when turian forces tried to stop human explorers opening a new mass relay, to prevent a repeat of the Rachni Wars. In the first Mass Effect, Shepard finds that Matriarch Benezia has captured a surviving rachni queen on Noveria, intending to breed an army.
More in History & The Reapers
Elsewhere in Mass Effect
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