Black Desert CityReport

English：Black Desert City　·　Locations

The Skeleton city at the dead centre of the Deadlands, where not a single household needs to eat. Acid rain is its moat, and the memories living inside it are the oldest on the continent.

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Time flows slowly when you live in a bubble of lost time. — a Skeleton of the Black Desert City

The Black Desert City is the headquarters of the Skeleton faction and the only town in the acid wasteland of the Deadlands. It is stitched together from scrap, Metal Wallhouses and the wreckage of ancient megastructures, and its population is uniformly Skeleton Civilians and Skeleton Residents. It is one of the very few settlements in the game with no food supply chain at all — because not one resident needs to eat.

A town that does not eat

The barman states it outright: we do not sell food fit for people, so you had better have brought your own. That line is the most precise introduction the city could give itself. Edible food can nonetheless be scavenged from containers throughout the buildings, and the game never explains where it came from. The upper floor of the bar holds ordinary beds alongside Skeleton Repair Beds, making it one of the few spaces that serves flesh and machine at once; the shelves stock Bloodrum, Cactus Rum, Fuel and Electrical Components — alcohol is purely a social prop for a Skeleton, whereas Fuel is actually fuel.

Why build here

Every environmental value in the Deadlands is zero: water, fertility, stone, iron and copper all read 0, acid rain falls year-round, and the ground itself is corrosive. For organic life this is a lethal journey; for Skeletons, acid does nothing at all. The poison land therefore functions as natural immigration control: no Holy Nation expedition can march through permanent acid rain to conduct a heresy purge, and bandits will not take that road either. The city itself is in fact open to any visitor who can survive the conditions — what keeps outsiders out is not the guards but the weather^{[V1 0:05:04]}. The wiki's phrasing is unambiguous: this is the perfect place for a technological community to hide itself away from the world.

As for when it was founded, the wiki records "after the collapse of the Second Empire", while flagging that claim as unsourced. CivilizationEX gives a different version: the Skeletons who parted ways with Cat-Lon scattered, some going mad, some being reprogrammed, some turning to banditry, while another portion built a home of their own in the Deadlands. The two accounts point the same direction, but neither is stated outright by the game.

Districts and buildings

Those seven Skeleton Storages are where the city's practical value lies: each is stuffed with containers of hi-tech loot that can yield Power Cores and CPU Units, and each also holds several Skeleton Repair Beds with a water tank on the roof.

The metal buildings the Skeletons favour have one further property that players routinely exploit: place them side by side and their roofs connect, which effectively lets you walk the houses as if they were a wall^{[V2 0:18:36]} — and that is exactly how the Black Desert City ended up with its dense, blocky skyline.

A bridge at the edge of town leads up a hillock to the Scraphouse, a shop set inside the ruins of an ancient factory and widely held to be the finest weapon dealer on the continent^{[V1 0:05:04]}, kept by Quin. The Skeleton faction's armour quality distribution also runs opposite to that of human towns: High Grade 80, Specialist 110, Masterwork 50, with Shoddy and Prototype weighted at 0.

Inhabitants

The Robotics Shop holds five to six Skeleton Civilians, one of whom doubles as the shopkeeper. Elsewhere in the city are Skeleton Residents — NPCs with an extreme randomisation range (randomise value 20) who can roll negative Robotics skill, meaning they make themselves worse every time they attempt a self-repair.

The only non-Skeleton resident is Razor, a Hive Soldier Drone carrying a United Cities bounty of roughly 10,000 Cats. The charge is magnificently bureaucratic: "persecution of a distinguished person of the United Cities". Hiding in a city the living can barely walk into is a sound judgement.

Sadneil is the city's only unique recruit: a profoundly depressed Skeleton with neither weapon nor armour, who will sigh and join if the player pesters him long enough — "I am weak, and I cannot hold up under being asked." He requires no prerequisites whatsoever and will say yes to anyone^{[V3 0:07:16]}, which is why he is often cited as having the most absurd recruitment condition in the game: not loyalty, not payment, purely an inability to withstand peer pressure^{[V4 0:21:21]}.

The history this city lets slip

The Black Desert City is one of the central sites of Kenshi lore work, because the oldest memories on the continent live here.

• Where the Shek came from. Bring a Shek squadmate into town and the Skeletons will let slip the word "Enforcer", sneering that these people always did have a prickly disposition and have finally grown the spikes to match. This is among the hardest pieces of evidence that the Shek were once human.
• Resets and forgetting. Skeleton small talk in the city returns again and again to lines like "your CPU is close to burning out; reset soon or you will end up as mad as Cat-Lon." The community has long argued over whether resetting is a physiological necessity or a cover story for the First Extinction.
• Systematic evasion. Press the city's NPCs on the fall of the First Empire and the Age of Chaos and their evasion patterns are strikingly consistent — read by some as a consensual silence rather than damaged memory. From these mutually contradictory accounts one commentator infers a wider scope: what they are concealing is not only the truth about the First Empire's collapse but the Age of Chaos itself, because admitting a civil war happened means first explaining why it started^{[V5 0:14:40]}.

Practical notes

• There is no police station. As in other towns without one, being knocked out gets you carried outside the walls — and outside the walls is acid rain. For non-Hive, non-Skeleton characters this alone is fatal: do not pick fights with the locals here.
• The single purchasable building is a Metal Wallhouse (16,000 Cats), whose top floor has room for a Research Bench II or better, with space on the roof for a small wind generator. Since the bar contains a recruitable Skeleton, a player can research here indefinitely without worrying about weather or raids.
• Before entering, confirm the whole squad has footwear and acid protection; acid ground damages legs while acid rain damages the whole body, and the gear that stops one is not the gear that stops the other. An unprotected party of living characters has exactly one option: sprint and hope.
• This is the fastest place to stock up on Skeletons. Beyond Sadneil, ordinary Skeletons in the city are recruitable too, including defence-weighted heavy models — the price being that living characters must survive that acid rain first^{[V7 0:17:57]}. For a player planning a Skeleton squad, one trip to the Black Desert City can fill out the entire early-to-mid game roster.

See also

• Deadlands
• Skeleton
• The Second Empire
• Cat-Lon
• Locations of Kenshi

Buildings and shops

Armory, Large Storage, Robotics Shop, Bar, Metal Wallhouse x7 (Skeleton Storage)

Buildings for sale

Sells

Vendors here stock 7 items in total, grouped by category — every entry links.

Items

Bloodrum, Cactus Rum, Electrical Components, Fuel, Grog, Sake, Skeleton Repair Kit

Vendors and stock here

Compiled automatically from the wiki's vendor data: shops that can appear in this settlement and what they may carry. Actual stock varies with world state and randomisation.

Skeleton Bar

Bloodrum, Cactus Rum, Electrical Components, Fuel, Grog, Sake, Skeleton Repair Kit

Video citations

1. Kenshi: Major Powers | SkeletonsCivilizationEx
2. Kenshi Base Building - Gate of VengenceHeroInHisHead
3. Kenshi: Unique Companions | Shek, Hivers, SkeletonsCivilizationEx
4. Kenshi: All Unique CompanionsCivilizationEx
5. The Age of Chaos: How Cat-Lon Became OkranHeroInHisHead
6. What If Cat-Lon Tried To Take Back Kenshi?HeroInHisHead
7. Kenshi | The Nugget Mafia (Ep. 1)HeroInHisHead