The Precursors are a vanished, ancient, superintelligent race from the Star Control games. They are known to have gained sentience before almost any race and further than all, including the Chenjesu or the Ur-Quan, and then vanished without a clue, presumed to have gone either to "some better place" or become extinct. They didn't clean up after themselves and their various, hyper-advanced artifacts (including the Ultron and the Sa-Matra) have been pivotal in the fates of the younger races. Precusor installations have been discovered in various quadrants of the universe, often with functioning equipment inside still intact, and it is one such installation which begets the beginning of the story of Star Control II, becoming activated by a group of Earthling scientists and assuming its role of creating a Precursor starship on the planet Unzervalt (also known as Vela II). The Star Control series is a trilogy of computer games with a cult following. ... The Chenjesu are a fictional race of aliens from the sci-fi computer game Star Control. ... This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... The Ultron is a fictional device featured in the sci-fi Star Control computer game series. ... Spoiler warning: In Star Control 2, the Sa-Matra is the Precursor battleship used by the Ur-Quan Kzer-Za to defeat their sibling race the Kohr-Ah. ... Binomial name Homo sapiens Linnaeus, 1758 Subspecies Homo sapiens idaltu† Homo sapiens sapiens Humans, or human beings, are bipedal primates belonging to the mammalian species Homo sapiens (Latin for wise man or thinking man) under the family Hominidae (the great apes). ...

In Star Control 3 it is revealed that to protect themselves from the Eternal Ones, a race that inefficiently consumed the energy of all sentient beings once an eon, the Precursors genetically modified themselves to mentally resemble the intelligence of a cow to protect themselves. They created mindless robots (the Daktaklakpak) to reverse the process after the Eternal Ones left. They also left huge caches of their technologies on planets in hopes other races could find how to defeat the Eternal Ones. During the last feeding, their robots malfunctioned, leaving them stranded at that intelligence level for thousands of years. Humans, forever searching for the Precursors but oblivious to their plight, along with many other races found the meat of the Precursors, called by them Ortogs (a 6 legged cow), more delicious than cow, and hence raised, domesitcated, and consumed them in massive quantities. The process was able to be temporarily reversed on a single Precursor, giving this knowledge to a captain before it died, and though said to keep it a secret that the Ortogs were the Precursors, to stop the races from consuming the Ortogs. The Eternal Ones are a race of god-like beings from the Star Control fictional universe. ... The Daktaklakpak are a fictional race of aliens from the sci-fi computer game Star Control 3. ...

• However, in Star Control 2, it is implied that the Precursors had assembled the various Rainbow Worlds the Melnorme were interested in, and they made it in the form of an arrow, pointing to where they had left for in the "Mark II" starship.

External links

• - Precursors on Ultronomicon