BonedogReport

English：Bonedog　·　Creatures

The bone-faced canines that roam the wastes in packs — the easiest companion to acquire, the fastest-attacking melee unit in the game, and the only animal that will run around carrying a severed limb.

The Bonedog is the most common canine of the wastes: dark fur, a bony ridge along each flank, and the bone faceplate typical of Kenshi's animals. They roam in packs, hold territory, and will drive off anything that approaches their patrol routes or nests. They are also the most thoroughly domesticated of the beasts — the guards the Rebel Farmers trust most are Bonedogs. One other organisation that fields them as a proper fighting force is the Black Dog gang: they patrol The Outlands, the Bonefields, Flats Lagoon, the Grey Desert and the Stormgap Coast, but largely leave passers-by alone, drawing most of their income from protection money charged to anyone who settles on their turf^{[V1 0:05:38]}.

Scavengers, not predators

Bonedogs are drawn to the scent of corpses and will actively seek them out. This matters: they are scavengers and will not devour living characters, even ones playing dead. Collapsing in the middle of a Bonedog pack gets you bitten awake at worst, not eaten.

"Play 'Limb'": Kenshi's most famous animal behaviour

When severed limbs are scattered across a battlefield, a Bonedog may trigger the Play 'Limb' action: it picks up a limb and runs around with it as if it were a stick. Other Bonedogs will chase it with the status Limb Envy. You can interrupt this with a move order, but once the order finishes it will doggedly go back to playing.

The mechanic behind it is a set of hunger thresholds (hunger caps at 300):

How long it takes to eat the limb after picking it up depends on age and hunger:

• Age < 0.9x, hunger below 270 and not in a fed state: roughly 46 minutes of game time before it eats the limb.
• Age ≥ 0.9x: no "play" at all — it just holds the limb briefly and swallows it.
• Hunger below 260: older Bonedogs devour the limb instantly.

Each limb provides 30 nutrients. Since hunger cannot exceed 300, a common pattern for an Elder Bonedog is to grab a limb at ~275 hunger and eat it at ~274; the surplus 4 points merely delay the onset of the next hunger cycle slightly.

Combat: bite speed is the whole point

The Bonedog's base stats are only 20, which looks feeble. But drop its attack animations into Blender and you find a 20-frame bite and a 22-frame pounce — extraordinarily fast attack speed.

The practical consequence is that Bonedogs can reliably suppress opponents with far higher numbers than their own. A Bonedog with Melee Attack / Dexterity / Martial Arts around 75, in a 1v1 with the enemy backed into a corner, can lock Cat-Lon down so hard he cannot move.

Other combat characteristics:

• Damage formula: cut = 18 + roughly 0.78–0.90×(Martial Arts + Dexterity). The 18 consists of 13 minimum cut damage plus 5 points of pierce. Bonedogs share this formula with goats and raptors.
• A permanent nude bonus: the rule is "anyone wearing no clothing gets Dexterity ×1.1". A Bonedog has neither clothing nor a backpack, so it receives that 10% permanently.
• Combat movement ×0.7: once combat begins it slows noticeably, which is the main reason it cannot catch a fleeing target.
• Self-healing: so long as it is not knocked out, a Bonedog automatically "bandages" its own cut wounds without needing a first aid kit, at 0.4× the normal healing rate. Its heal rate itself is 1.5, higher than most animals.
• Weakness: the Desert Sabre deals +25% bonus damage to Bonedogs.

Limb health is a uniform 70–180, but the hit chance on head and chest is a full 150 — meaning that when you attack a Bonedog, the easiest parts to hit are precisely its vital ones.

Keeping a Bonedog

Bonedogs can be bought from Nomad animal shops and caravans, from some farm traders, and from the Holy Nation's Holy Farms.

Practical points:

• Train them as pups. A pup's displayed stats are suppressed by a 0.4x age multiplier, which is equivalent to fighting while permanently wearing debuff gear, so experience gain is enormous. Once it grows into an Elder, the suppressed portion is returned in proportion to its true level and age multiplier. It looks like slow levelling and is in fact a windfall.
• It eats anything. Including its beloved severed limbs.
• It cannot keep up with the squad. A high-Athletics party will leave a Bonedog behind, especially during the pup stage.
• It cannot enter buildings. Animals at adult size and above generally cannot go indoors. Players report that placing the move point directly opposite the building with the camera switched to a floor other than the ground floor gives the Bonedog a chance to walk in (this technique is unverified).
• Whole squad down = the dog gets butchered. A great many bandit factions will cut up the player's animals for meat. There is one exploit-based "anti-butcher" trick: open the animal's inventory while it is unconscious, wait for it to wake and stand (it must have a goal other than "get up", and must be neither unconscious nor playing dead), then remove the death items from that lingering "unconscious inventory". Pinning the animal in a cage makes this easier to perform.

Where they came from

The game never explains the Bonedog's origins, but one hypothesis connects them to the origin of the Shek.

The argument runs as follows: when Cat-Lon built the Enforcers (the precursors of the Shek), his mental state was still relatively sound, so his process was more rigorous, and he likely ran preliminary trials on animals first; Bonedogs and Pack Bulls could be among those animal prototypes — and over a thousand years they evolved along exactly the same lines as the Shek, growing hardened exoskeletons^{[V2 0:05:24]}.

The most persuasive part of this reading is appearance: the bone faceplate on a Bonedog really does belong to the same visual vocabulary as the Shek's bone plating. But the game has never confirmed that any animal is a product of Second Empire experimentation, and this remains a hypothesis.

Relatives and trivia

• Mountain Dog: a distinctly stronger Bonedog variant with base stats of 30. It does not spawn in the wild and has no nests, appearing only alongside Cannibal Hunters. Where it originally came from is never explained.
• Boneyard Wolf: a large relative found in the Bonefields, with base stats of 40 and brown fur. By build and colouring it resembles a bear more than a wolf.
• Like other non-pack livestock, Bonedogs retain a backpack slot, and in early versions could even be fitted with an ordinary backpack. The functionality was later removed; the slot is still there.
• The "Guy with a Dog" game start used to give a Mountain Dog pup rather than the Bonedog pup it gives now.

Related entries

Creatures, Beak Thing, Garru, Blood Spider, Cat-Lon

Video citations

1. History of Kenshi: Minor Powers | Gangs and Bandit CrewsCivilizationEx
2. All Life Came From Humans (Sort of)HeroInHisHead