Mass Effect 1: Where to Go First & Mission Order

Mass Effect 1 gives players a good amount of freedom. After completing the first few opening missions, players are free to take on side quests or pursue one of the three available main missions that Captain Anderson and Ambassador Udina offer you. If you’re here, you’re probably wondering what the optimal route is for where to go first in Mass Effect 1 once you have the ability to choose. While there’s no right or wrong answer, here’s what we would do.

Where to Go First in Mass Effect 1

So once you complete the Expose Saren series of missions, and have hopefully recruited yourself a rock-solid team of aliens, you can pick from one of three missions to go to next: Find Liara T’Soni, Feros: Geth Attack, Noveria: Geth Interest.

The most logical place to go to first, for us, would be over to Find Liara T’Soni. There’s a couple of reasons for this. First is that you will recruit your next, and possibly last, squadmate. Liara is a powerful biotic and having her on your side ASAP is not only nice, on higher difficulties, may be absolutely crucial.

Putting that aside, this mission lacks any major Paragon/Renegade checks as well, while giving you an opportunity to build some more up for the missions and assignments that do require them. Also, it gives you a head start on spending some time with Liara, that way you can start getting your friendship/romance going.

Another reason is that if you bring Liara with you to the Noveria: Geth Interest missions, you’ll gain some interesting insight as you will meeting her mother.

That said, if you’re looking for an extremely unique experience that most people probably don’t do, you could also save Liara until the absolute end and watch as she tries to catch up and process everything that has gone on so far. We wouldn’t recommend that though unless you’re a series veteran just looking for something new.

After completing Find Liara T’Soni, it really is your call where you want to go next. Noveria has a lot of Paragon/Renegade checks, so it may behoove you to save that one for last out of the initial three just to make sure you can get the most out of that mission by racking up some Charm/Intimidate points before heading over there.

The one thing we would also do is go to Virmire last, for reasons you can learn about here.

That’s all you need to know regarding the initial mission order and where to go first in Mass Effect 1. For more tips, tricks and FAQs answered be sure to check out our wiki guide that is filled with helpful guides.