Armour KingReport
English：Armour King · Characters
The Skeleton armour merchant hidden in a ruin at the bottom of a river, in business for nine hundred and thirty-seven years. He sells the finest armour in the game, and his own Armour Smith skill is level 1.
The Armour King is a Skeleton merchant who lives in a ruin at the bottom of a river. He sells the highest-quality armour in Kenshi, and his is the only shop that stocks Masterwork armour "naturally" — every other Masterwork piece in the world is a one-off roll from the artifact system, gone the moment someone buys it.
Right about now you are probably thinking: "I should kill the Armour King and take all his good armour." I would not advise it.
A shop in a sunken town
His shop stands in the Drowned Ruins — the half-submerged field of rubble in the middle stretch of the Wend, the river that separates Rebirth from the Hidden Forest.
There is exactly one way in: swimming. Either enter the water at the river mouth near Blister Hill to the south, or work upstream from the Floodlands side to the north-west. There is no land route. For a squad that cannot swim well, the least painful approach is to send a Skeleton character to do the shopping — Skeletons have no need to swim.
What he sells
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Items per restock | 32–48 |
| Restock interval | 48 hours |
| Relative quality weighting | Standard 2 / High Grade 80 / Specialist 110 / Masterwork 50 |
| Artifact-grade stock value | roughly 150,000 Cats |
That weighting is the whole point of the shop. An ordinary store's curve sits on Standard and High Grade; here the centre of mass falls squarely on Specialist and Masterwork.
Do not steal
Every NPC in the shop has combat stats above 90.
The Armour King's own six weapon skills all sit between 90 and 100, and Heavy Weapons runs higher still at 108–120. The floor is also held by four Armour King's Thralls and a Security Spider II turret. Those thralls' attack rating is tied with Eyegore for the highest of any humanoid unit in the game — higher than Cat-Lon.
He is also one of the few merchants who will follow the player around the shop, and even out of it.
An armour master who cannot forge
One oddity gets raised again and again: this "Armour King" has an Armour Smith skill of 1. What he sells is not what he made — at least the game data grants him no ability to make it.
The other oddity is that he grows more dangerous the less he is holding. His Martial Arts averages 80, which works out to roughly 141.1 unarmed damage, above the 135.1 he deals with a Mk III Falling Sun. Taking his weapon away is an upgrade for him.
He remembers how the Second Empire died
The Armour King says the shop has been open for 937 years, on the site of a town called Catch that was "doing very well" back in the Second Empire.
The weight of that line lies in the arithmetic failing to add up. 937 years ago falls near the collapse of the Second Empire, and yet an imperial town was still "doing very well" at the time. One reading holds that this shows the Second Empire was never overthrown in any single year, but rotted apart piece by piece over a long stretch of time, until all that remained was Cat-Lon's exile.
His own description runs in the same key:
It just rotted and fell apart. Like a sickness of the mind. Very strange. Nothing like the First Empire.
As for his thralls, he says he brought them back from the Ashlands himself and modified them with his own hands. He does not say whether those Skeletons were already broken when he found them, or whether he did something uglier. He also claims to have upgraded their armour — and yet they wear nothing at all.