r/masseffectlore • u/001DeafeningEcho • May 24 '26
Batarian first contact date
When do the Battarians make first contact with the citadel?
The wiki says they were contacted before the Rachni war, but that doesn’t really make sense. One world in the batarian home cluster was only colonized in 2154, while another was noted as being one of their earliest colonies, but only had a little more than six million people, which is only slightly more than some human colonies that are only 30 years old or even younger. There’s also the fact that they were outcompeted by a species apparently two millennia younger than them.
Do y’all have any idea on how to ballpark the actual first contact date and timeline for the batarians?
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u/GravityMentor May 25 '26
There's no exact date, but it's sometime between the Volus joining the Citadel and the Rachni Wars, since Batarians were around for that. So anywhere from 300 BCE to about 0 CE. Now, as for the colonies, I do agrees that some of the numbers don't make sense. Anhur has a population of over 200 million yet was only founded twenty years ago, meanwhile Adek is one of the Hegemony's oldest colonies and only has a population of over six million. That said, the planet description of Adek says it's a shithole people don't want to live outside of slaves, but even still, it should have a much greater slave population.
As for Camala - the world colonised in 2154 - it is possible the Hegemony just ignored it because they had better options elsewhere. Maybe they preferred to colonise planets on the relay lines? Remember that 'proximity' in this universe isn't the same as euclidean space. A system on the other side of the galaxy can be 'closer' to you because it has a direct relay link. That said, it's founding year and relatively low population also doesn't make sense. You'd expect a colony that important to have a population in the billions and be a century old at least.