Relic core

Relic cores, also referred to as shrine-cores, are a kind of Forerunner technology generally used for the purposes of power generation. During its reign, the Covenant's relic-hunters and recovery teams located and secured many such cores for repurposing - usually installed into their warships to augment (or even replace) the ship's existing pinch fusion reactors. The use of an irreplaceable shrine-core was the only instance in which a Covenant ship may forgo the use of pinch fusion, using cores extracted directly from Forerunner starships.

The installing of relic cores is a process generally undertaken by Huragok engineers, as the inner workings of the cores' functions remain little-understood. The use of such cores was often inefficient and/or unsafe, but the Covenant viewed the recovery and repurposing of such relics as a high honour, and thus endeavoured to make use of them whenever possible.

Covenant vessels making use of Forerunner technology in their construction may be referred to as "examiners". The is equipped with an array of shrine-core power plants to provide energy to its control and weapon systems. In the three-letter transliteration codes used by United Nations Space Command analysts, vessels equipped with a relic core are given an O letter in the code - designating the vessel as Ordained.

The is built around an array of relic cores, referred to as weapon-cores, and used for the purposes of powering the ship's vast array of plasma lances. Due to the irreplaceable nature of the cores, these ships are impossible to replicate without a new trove of cores being discovered, meaning that their loss is a significant blow to the Covenant.