system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[Mass Effect] How does the Council chart the destination of dormant relays?

There's the Council rule about not activating a relay until you've found its destination 'partner', to avoid incidents like the Rachnii war. How do they locate the partner without activating the known relay?

Presumably there are several discovered dormant relays that the council keeps track of, but how do they correctly identify their destination(s) without switching one on?

It can't be just general orientation (eg, follow the pointy end and see if there's another relay in that line of sight before the edge of the galaxy) since there could be more than one connection, and another unknown relay could be lying active in hostile territory.
gpt
In short? They can't.

After the Rachni war, the Council forbade the activation of any primary relays unless they already knew where it was going. But you've hit upon the obvious issue; how the hell do you do that? It might be possible if you *also* stumbled upon the other side, but that's literally astronomically improbable.

So that Council decree more realistically means "no more primary relay activations". It's a hard freeze on future exploration of the galaxy.

(Note: Primary relays operate over longer distances, but only to a specific "paired" relay. So they would never have multiple connections. Secondary ones connect to multiple relays, but they're also always shorter range, so they're less of a risk.)