How does Master Chief pee? An investigation

Master Chief’s iconic Mjolnir space suit, green and gray, is no longer seen in Halo. Rare glimpses of Chief are taken without his armor. The Halo series’ most famous Spartan has worn that suit for days, weeks, even years in a single stretch in the game’s fiction. This raises some basic, obvious questions like “How does Master Chief pee?” How and when is he doing it?

It’s a query raised by many Halo fans over the years, and those well-versed in the series’ lore have directed the bodily function-curious to the 2011 novel Glasslands, HaloThe answer is here. The book reveals that Master Chief and any other Spartan wearing Mjolnir armor pee in their suits. They are made to filter and recycle urine into water. In other words, Master Chief could be (and probably is) peeing at any given moment — maybe even while teabagging an online opponent.

A well-known passage taken from Glasslands by HaloThis is how Sgt. Geffen answers the crucial biological question. Mal Geffen (Orbital Drop Trooper) with the UNSC Marine Corps. ODSTs wear much simpler armor, and Mal learns just what a Mjolnir suit is capable of from Spartan Naomi-010, who’s in the process of being sealed into her armor.

Here’s how that scene from chapter nine of Glasslands: HaloPlays out:

Mal peered into the helmet with the look of a man who was making a note of all the tech that Spartans had and that ODSTs didn’t.

“Once you’re sealed in,” he said carefully, “you can’t just … you know, step out of it easily when you need to, can you? That rig’s got to dismantle it.”

“Correct. It’s a last resort to do it manually.”

Vaz had never before seen Mal without words. He blushed. “So … bathroom breaks?” he asked, very quietly.

Naomi took a pause for a beat. “I’m catheterized. That machine also needs to be precisely calibrated. This suit plugs into me in a lot of places.”

“I think I’m going to cry,” Mal said.

“Think of it as a weaponized life-support unit. It recycles the urine, too.”

Karen Traviss is the author Glasslands: Halo (and other books based on the Gears of War and Star Wars franchises), is widely credited with this addition to the series’ canon. Traviss told Polygon that she prefers to ground her work with small details — including details about how a supersoldier space marine pees in their suit.

“Because everything I write is driven by the characters I create (or develop), I have to know what it feels like to be in their heads,” Traviss said, “and small detail[s] like their daily routine is part of building that, even if it never actually appears on the page.”

Image: Bungie/343 Industries

While the minute details of writing her Halo novels have faded over the past decade, Traviss described the process of learning and conceiving those deep-lore bits and pieces thusly: “Overall, the process went something like this: I’d hit a point where I needed to know something very specific,” Traviss said, “I’d ask the Halo team if there was already something in canon, and if there wasn’t, I’d say, ‘I plan to do this, then,’ and they’d OK it. That covered everything from ‘Do you already have a device/weapon/technology that does this?’ to ‘How long does it take to suit up in Mjolnir?’ and ‘How do they take a leak?’ Because I write with a very different method and rely on very tight third-person POV (it’s like creating a computer model and seeing what the characters do), most of the stuff I need to know tends not to be covered by canon, either published stuff or the material that isn’t public.”

How Master Chief pees is just one component of lore that occupies the precious brain space of people like Frank O’Connor, creative director at Microsoft, whose work focuses on the creative, marketing, and business development aspects of the Halo franchise. O’Connor told Polygon in an interview that little details like Master Chief’s bathroom habits are in the Halo story bible and the stuff of conversations at 343 Industries.

“Yeah, we talk about that stuff all the time,” O’Connor said. “And often we have to put it down on paper” for things like the HaloParamount Plus to host TV Show next Year

Image: Bungie/343 Industries

O’Connor explained that “everything that Chief secretes in a normal day” goes into the suit and is recycled through capillary action powered by the Spartan’s body movement. O’Connor likened the Mjolnir armor’s waste recycling to Dune’s stillsuits, which process human waste and even the moisture from the wearer’s breath into safe drinking water. In other words, Chief’s suit may not plug into the Spartan super soldier as, well, aggressivelyAs one may think.

“There’s a noninvasive physical connection beneath and part of the base layer,” O’Connor explained in a separate email. “Spartans do not wince when they suit up. Although the Mjolnir term catheter is used to refer to invasion, it can also be used to mean a system of hygienic valves. Thanks to supermaterials of the 26th Century and tailoring, we are blessed. After the voiding, capillary action occurs. Recycling is almost perfectly efficient.”

Joseph Staten (a Halo longtime writer and Bungie early gamer) wrote the novel Halo: Contact HarvestServes as the head of creative Halo Infinite. He gracefully responded to this line of questioning by saying, “We don’t actively think about it every day, but yes, at some point we did, and it was part of the design of the under-layer of the grayish sort of suit that you see beneath the armor plating.”

Image: Bungie/343 Industries

As for when Master Chief may or may not be doing the deed in-game, Staten put it this way: “You know what? It’s just that Master Chief does it. [He] doesn’t have time to worry about bodily fluids. He’s got more important things to do, and clearly […] he just does that in the suit.”

Understandably, given Master Chief’s rare change of clothes and all that sweating, peeing, and, yes, pooping in his armor, he frequently smells terrible, O’Connor pointed out.

“We were having a conversation [recently] and someone’s like, ‘I wonder what Chief smells like?’ and I was able to rattle off a long explanation of just how awful it is,” O’Connor said. “He can stay in his armor for days and days on a mission and never come out of it. We had to create fiction for ‘Can Chief take his armor off on his own, or can he do it with simple assistance?’ […] If we’re on a properly equipped spaceship, this stuff can be taken on and off — more importantly cleaned and air conditioned.”