Feros: Varren Meat

From Mass Effect Wiki

Feros: Varren Meat is an assignment given to you by Davin Reynolds in the Zhu's Hope colony on Feros. The colony no longer has adequate food supplies, but is unable to hunt for more because of a particularly fierce varren. The colonists would like you to find and kill this alpha varren.

[edit] Acquisition

Speak to Davin Reynolds inside the freighter at Zhu's Hope. This can be done at any time after speaking with Fai Dan for the first time and having your conversation interrupted by the geth attack. When you resume your conversation, Fai Dan will reveal that there are other issues beside the geth. He will then refer you to specific people that you must speak to in order to get a particular quest.

Davin Reynolds can be found standing inside the crashed freighter Borealis (near to Ledra, the salarian merchant). Davin will tell you that their food supplies are not enough. He suggests that they could supplement their resources with varren meat, but with the geth in the area and the presence of a particularly vicious male alpha varren, hunting them is impossible. You can agree to help him with this. Alternately, you can acquire this assignment by eliminating the alpha varren before talking to Davin.

Note: If you kill Davin during the main Feros mission you can still acquire, but not complete, this assignment. It also cannot be completed if you finish the Feros mission itself.

[edit] Walkthrough

The alpha varren is found in a small section of collapsed skyway attached to the tunnels. Head towards the elevator to the skyway, and continue down the stairs beyond it. Once down in the tunnels you will need to fight your way through geth, if you haven't done so already. You need to go through another set of doors which is about halfway down the path that you are on. When you enter the doors, you will see a short cut-scene showing some varren who seem ready to devour you. Kill all the regular varren and the alpha varren. You can then complete Feros: Power Cells as well by examining the crashed M29 Grizzly.

When all of the varren are dead, leave the tunnels and report back to Davin Reynolds for your reward. You can receive either Renegade (+2) or Paragon (+8), depending on whether you demand money or not.

Spoiler warning: plot and / or ending details follow.

Note: it is possible, but preventable, that Greta Reynolds dies during the main storyline mission on Feros. If this is the case, Davin refuses to speak with the player, making it impossible to complete the Varren Meat assignment.

[edit] Squadmate Pathfinding Bug

Occasionally in the Xbox 360 version, after entering the varren's lair as part of this assignment, your squadmates will cease to recognise the 'follow' command, stand stock still when not given orders to stand in a particular spot, and rush to engage enemies at point-blank / melee range instead of taking cover. This appears to be triggered by the cut scene which shows the varren waiting inside the lair, and often persists into the rest of Feros, making later enemies much more frustrating to fight.

One solution is to order your squadmates to remain outside the varren lair (beyond the door) and fight the varren alone. However, this is risky for Sentinel and Engineer classes, unless they have crowd-control bonus talents. It is also possible to restore normal squadmate behavior by saving, exiting to the Xbox dashboard, and re-entering the game.