Beak ThingReport

English：Beak Thing　·　Creatures

The apex predator also known as "Gutters" — faster than you on foot, able to track you by the smell of blood, and inclined to eat living prey one piece at a time, starting with the feet.

The Beak Thing has an uglier name in-game: Gutters. They are Kenshi's most notorious predator, and not because their numbers are the highest — in fact their base stats are only 35, far below the Gorillo's 60 and the Black Gorillo's 80 — but because they satisfy three conditions at once: they run faster than you, they can find you, and they will start eating you while you are still conscious.

Distribution: seven core populations

Beak Things range very widely, but the range can be summarised as seven core populations and their spread routes:

• Leviathan Coast, possibly spreading to the Cannibal Plains, then to the Purple Sands
• The Gut and the Unwanted Zone, possibly spreading to the Stormgap Coast and Venge, then to Shem
• The Bonefields, spreading into the adjacent High Bonefields and Flats Lagoon
• Vain
• The Crater
• Greenbeach

Of these, the Gut is the classic Beak Thing country. The zone is known for its sky-blue sand and iron trees, and Beak Things are numerous enough there to make it a dead zone — and also one of the game's most profitable sources of animal skins and eggs.

Density varies enormously within the same distribution list, and in practice they must be considered separately. The southern Stenn Desert falls inside Beak Thing range but does not actually hold many — one base-building streamer originally intended to raise Beak Things at his outpost and eventually gave up, for exactly the reason that he could not catch any locally and would have to make a dedicated trip to Vain^{[V1 0:33:31]}. The Gut and the Bonefields on the same list are an entirely different order of magnitude.

Why you cannot escape

The Beak Thing's speed skill has both a minimum and a maximum of 170, which means Athletics has no effect whatsoever on their movement speed — how fast they run is determined purely by age.

Elder Beak Things at age 1.9–2.1 therefore have the highest movement speed in the game, fast enough to catch a high-Athletics character wearing Masterwork Scout Legs.

A low-level character who meets a Beak Thing has only three genuinely viable options:

1. Do not get spotted in the first place. Moderate Stealth gives you a chance to walk right around them at night; even if you are spotted, breaking line of sight and re-entering stealth usually gets you out.
2. Steer it into someone else. If there is another group of enemies nearby, let them bite each other.
3. Run and change direction. Its attack is a downward slam of the head with a very long animation; simply backing up (not strafing — it will turn) dodges it completely. This is also the basis of the "kiting" tactic.

The mechanic of eating people alive

The Beak Thing is the only carnivore in the game with a sense of smell. It follows the scent of blood to a battle site — whether the fight is still going or long over with nothing but unconscious wounded on the ground.

The rule for being eaten is brutal: if a character enters recovery coma, the Beak Thing eats the body piece by piece from the bottom up (right leg first, then left leg, and so on), and almost never stops halfway. The only way out is for a companion to drive it off or draw it away.

Conversely, if a character is merely downed rather than in recovery coma, being gnawed on makes them stand straight back up, which actually scares the Beak Thing off.

That sense of smell also creates a positive feedback loop that is fatal in practice: the more corpses pile up, the more Beak Things are drawn in. Fighting a defensive battle on their turf therefore gets worse the longer it goes on — the pile of bodies you made yourself is the bait for the next wave^{[V2 0:08:13]}. This is also the most counter-intuitive part of building a base in the Gut: clearing the area does not make the surroundings safe unless you dispose of the bodies.

The mechanic is written into the setting as well. In a United Cities bar, two residents chat about an Anti-Slaver raiding party that left its captives tied up and abandoned, "for the Gutters" — in this world that amounts to a method of execution.

How to deal with them

• Heavy armour is the most effective protection. A Beak Thing's damage is 23 cut + roughly 0.88×(Martial Arts + Dexterity), and that 23 consists of 13 minimum cut plus 10 points of pierce. Pierce damage works on the same mechanic as harpoons and is heavily reduced by armour.
• Polearms and Naginatas are the best answer. Both get a +50% damage bonus against animals, and combined with very fast attack animations the value is overwhelming. Falling Sun can also clear them out in batches, provided you can swing it.
• Do not bunch up. Beak Things have 2 extra attack slots and can hit several targets at once; an Elder's weapon reach also grows with age, letting it sweep an entire line of people in one go. If you want to surround one, surround it spread out.
• Crossbow teams. One character tanks the attacks while the rest deal damage with crossbows from behind.
• Skeleton characters have an advantage. Animal damage is mostly cut, and stacked cut damage is extremely dangerous, but skeletons can handle it quickly with repair kits.

Limb health: head 75–267.5 (hit chance 50), everything else — torso and limbs — 120–428 (torso hit chance 100, limbs 50). An Elder's numbers explode to head 372–442 and torso and limbs 596–708.

Nests and eggs

Beak Thing nests spawn randomly in the Bonefields, Cannibal Plains, the Gut, the High Bonefields, the Leviathan Coast, the Crater, the Unwanted Zone and Vain. The nests' two standard squads are:

• Small nest group: 1–3, age 0.6x–0.85x
• Nest group: 1–5, of which 1–3 are 0.6x–0.85x and the rest are 0.15x–0.4x young

Wild roaming squads start at 1–3, while the Bonefields can produce squads of 2–6 and even stampedes of 6–14.

The loot in the nests is the real point: each nest can generate 1 to 30 Beak Thing Eggs. These eggs weigh 6 kg, occupy a 4×5 space, and average about 4,200 Cats — a delicacy on noble tables, and the most tempting early get-rich-quick route for players. The Gut is especially suited to egg farming: the nests are densely packed and easy to spot, and the nearby cities of Brink and Heng let you offload on site.

Nests also drop Basic First Aid Kits, animal skins, raw meat, and a batch of low-quality weapons (mostly "no name" or "Ancient" make, occasionally a Catun Scrapmaster Masterwork).

Using them as city walls

Turn that same feedback loop around and it becomes a base strategy. Beak Thing density in the Gut region is high enough to serve as fortification: one streamer built his outpost deep in the Gut, and the tax collector notification did indeed still pop up, but that squad was eaten before it ever reached the base^{[V3 0:47:42]}. The same filtering effect holds for bandit raids — putting wild animals between yourself and the outside world means the terrain intercepts every raid and tax event for you^{[V3 0:47:42]}.

The price, of course, is that you have to cross that layer too. This style of play normally only works once the squad can reliably handle Elder Beak Things, or once the base already has complete walls and turrets.

Obscure facts

• A Beak Thing's neck is typically about 2 metres long.
• The Gutters faction's relation with the spider faction is −100 (blood enemies), yet they coexist peacefully with the Western Hive.
• The faction has exactly one human member: No-Face, a Scorchlander living in a "strange camp" on an island in the Gut, carrying a 15,000-Cat United Cities bounty. There is an obscure trick: repeatedly buying him out of the slave market can turn the player neutral with the Gutters faction — in other words, you can make Beak Things stop attacking you.
• In older versions, a misplaced decimal point let Beak Things grow taller than mountains; back then they also had a crest membrane behind the head, and they could talk.

Related entries

Creatures, Blood Spider, Bonedog, Garru, Locations Overview

Video citations

1. Kenshi Base Building - Shek Storm FortressHeroInHisHead
2. Kenshi | The Nugget Mafia (Ep. 2)HeroInHisHead
3. Kenshi Base Building - The GutterHeroInHisHead