Ancient RuinsReport
English：Ancient Ruins · Factions
The empty faction the game uses to tag laboratories and workshops across the continent. It never appears on the faction tab and nobody living runs it — a page that says "Controlling faction, Ancient Ruins" is telling you the place has no owner, only spiders and security robots.
Took me three weeks to walk out to these ruins and there's nothing. Empty. Somebody stripped the place clean years ago. The boss is going to wring my neck when I come back with nothing... — a Tech Hunter working the ruins
Ancient Ruins is the internal faction the game uses to tag ruined sites. It is one of the "not real" factions: it never shows up on the faction tab, you cannot look up its relations, and there is nobody in it to negotiate with.
Plenty of location articles on this site list Ancient Ruins under "controlling faction". What that line actually means is this place has no owner.
What it holds
Fandom lists fourteen sites, all of them interiors:
Ancient Labs, Ancient Tech Lab, Ashland Dome Ruin, Crumbling Labs, Dead Workshop, Deadland Workshop, Lab Ruin, Post-Ancient Workshop, Ruined Control Tower and Workshop Complex, plus four with no article here yet: Empty Lab, Infested Lab, Reprogramming Workshop and Swamped Lab.
The faction patrols no zones and produces no homeless spawns. It exists inside buildings and nowhere else. It also has no town overrides, which follows: nothing takes these places over, so there is nothing to fight about.
What stands inside
Five character types, and they are always the same five:
| Character | Notes |
|---|---|
| Blood Spider | Organic, arrives in numbers, almost no health but real damage |
| Security Spider | Ruin guard, base stat 60, a clear step above the Iron Spider out in the wild |
| Broken Model 30 | A half-wrecked ancient machine |
| Broken Skeleton | Skeleton remains that still walk |
| Soldierbot | See below |
Security Spiders sit in three factions at once — Ancient Ruins, Old Machines and the Second Empire — so seeing them credited to different owners on different pages is not a contradiction.
What happens when you go in
Security Spiders are machines. They do not eat, so they will not finish you off while you are down. The problem is that they also do not leave: these interiors are small and there is nowhere for them to wander off to. Being knocked out in a ruin is therefore rarely a one-off cost. It is a loop — stand up, get knocked down, stand up again.
Which is why the advice on Locations of Kenshi for new players is blunt: stay out of Ancient Ruins sites.
Why people go anyway
The loot. These sites carry Research Artifacts and assorted ancient tech, and the whole Tech Hunter organisation lives off stripping them. Places classed as ancient tech labs — the Tower of Abuse, for one — even qualify for the Artifacts system, which puts their drops well above an ordinary ruin.
Ashland Trade Culture
The faction runs on Ashland Trade Culture, which strips books out of trader lists entirely. In practice that means the Ashlands and the ancient ruins around them will not hand you ordinary books, and will not buy them off you either.
Relations
One special relation only: Wildlife at 0. Toward the player it has no non-zero relation at all, so nothing you do moves it. Whether you get attacked depends on what is standing inside, not on this label.