Mass Effect: Andromeda’s side quests can often be involved, but ‘Contagion’ has more steps than most missions in the game. There is also the potential for future problems that can arise based on your decisions, so here is how to beat the mission and what can happen for either choice you make.

Mission Start - Email

To first get the mission, you must answer an email from Captain Dunn. Dunn requests you visit her on the Hyperion deck to discuss a sensitive matter.

The Hyperion

Once on the Hyperion, talk to Dunn. She will tell you to go talk to Dr. Carlyle in the Cryo Bay. Go talk to the doctor, and he’ll tell you about Ruth Bekker, a woman with a highly contagious and deadly virus who has run off on the Nexus. Time to go hunt her down.

Docking Bay

Go to the Docking area of the Nexus and find a Turian Immigration officer to talk to. She will tell you that Ruth was restricted to just the common areas, and your scanner should help you find her. Using your scanner, track Ruth’s last known locations to the Vortex bar in the Docking area.

After scanning Ruth’s last location at a bar in Vortex, talk to the bartenders. They’ll tell you to talk to Teron, who is in Addison’s office on the Nexus.

Nexus Ops

Travel to Nexus Ops and talk to Teron in Addison’s office. Teron tells you to go BACK to the Docking Bay and look around more. (Great mission structure.)

Docking Bay Again

Once back at the Docking Bay, find a man named Samuel sitting on a bench outside the Cultural Center. Samuel tells you about a woman who blindsided him and stole a shuttle. Time to go track down the shuttle.

Tempest

Once on the Tempest, you’ll want to investigate the Solminae and Anasa systems. Use your scanner in these systems to find anomalies that point to the Govorkam system and Kadara. Phew, that was a long, winding way to end up in a pretty obvious location. Go travel and land on Kadara.

Kadara

Go out to the planet, and travel to the northwest corner in Kurinth’s Valley. You’ll find the wreck of a shuttle. When you approach it, SAM will tell you there are no signs of life. Don’t think you’re done yet, because you also find a recording saying Ruth has been kidnapped. Scan around for footprints, and you’ll be pointed toward a building in the distance.

Go to the building, and you’ll find it’s crawling with Roekaar, the Angaran terrorist faction. Get inside the building and unlock the door to the second floor. Once upstairs, you must confront the leader of the Roekaar, who is holding Ruth at gunpoint. Not only will he kill Ruth, but he also has a sample of the virus to use in an attack.

Decision

Here comes the decision time, if you let Ruth die, you get to battle the Roekaar and defeat them. Ryder then takes Ruth’s body and puts it in a stasis pod. Alternatively, you can let Ruth live by letting the Roekaar leader leave. This results in a living Ruth being put in a stasis pod.

While the outcomes don’t seem that dramatic in the main storyline of Andromeda just yet, this likely will have a much larger ripple effect in the next Mass Effect game. It seems likely that the Roekaar leader will run away to make some sort of biological weapon with the virus sample, but a living Ruth could be used for some sort of vaccine. Alternatively, killing everyone seems like it will just shut the whole story down, and that’s that.

Regardless of your choice, you get rewarded with a large number of AVP for your troubles.

So what do you think? Are you going to let Ruth live or die? What other major choices have you made so far in Mass Effect: Andromeda? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.