Bounty and CrimeReport

English：Bounty and Crime　·　Game Mechanics

Crime in Kenshi carries a price tag and an expiry date — every 100 Cats of bounty buys 4 hours of being wanted, and anything above 10,000 Cats never washes off.

Kenshi has no judges and no trials, only a number hanging over your head. It decides who recognises you, who comes to arrest you and how long you serve — and it is also the price tag on everyone else's head, since the most reliable line in money making is hauling people with price tags to a police station.

Charges and prices

A crime must be witnessed to be priced. In the table below, "decay time" is the number of in-game hours for the bounty to fall to zero naturally, while "sentence" is the time served once you are locked up.

The conversion is simple: every 100 Cats of bounty = 4 hours of decay time, and the prison sentence is half the decay time. Turning yourself in is therefore mathematically the better deal.

The most common way to come unstuck in actual play is exactly this clause: attacked by mercenaries first, then landed with a 500-Cat assault charge for fighting back, with the character dragged off to a United Cities prison and held until the sentence expires^{[V1 0:07:08]}. A bounty at that level merely wastes time; what genuinely blocks a whole playthrough is a serious charge such as Terrorism, which once attached prevents the character from even doing business in a town^{[V1 0:07:08]}.

Who can recognise you

Being wanted is not the same as being caught immediately. What the system models is recognition:

• Police and bounty hunters have the sharpest eyes.
• Civilians only recognise the most notorious of wanted characters.
• Recognition takes time. Walking into a town with a bounty is not automatically a disaster, but do not draw attention and do not linger.

Units classified in the Bandits category are a special case: they can witness crimes but cannot have a bounty attached, and attacking them does not make you wanted. This is why clearing out bandits is always legal.

Characters with diplomatic status (such as the various factions' Pacifiers) count as bounty targets in the eyes of hostile factions; the determination is based on the captor's standing, not on the captured character's bounty.

Notorious: above 10,000 Cats it never washes off

Once a bounty exceeds 10,000 Cats, that unit becomes Notorious and the bounty stops decaying naturally. From there only two routes remain:

1. Serve time — if the bounty is at or below 25,000 Cats, serving a sentence can still clear it.
2. Bail — above 25,000 Cats, only another character can negotiate with that faction's Police Chief, Inquisitor or Hundred Guardian, at twice the bounty. If the Police Chief happens to walk within conversation range, the imprisoned character can also pay it off themselves.

There is a third route, with a rather distinctive price: being enslaved by a faction clears your bounty with that faction. See Prison and Escape.

Collecting other people's bounties

The hand-in rules are simple, but a few details decide your take:

• Alive pays in full; a corpse pays half. Who did the knocking down does not matter; what matters is who hands them in.
• Handing over via dialogue with the Police Chief is what grants +2 faction relations; stuffing the target into your own cage gets you the money only, with no relations. The Holy Nation gives +5 if you decline payment.
• Only male humans can hand bounties to the Holy Nation for relations. Women and non-human races can still cage the target and take the cash, but get no relations bonus.
• After hand-in, the target's gear is stored in the police station's chest and can be bought back at a 25% discount — so strip them before you hand them over is the correct play.
• Wanted posters can be bought or looted at police stations and bars, and are used to check who is carrying a price.

Some bounties do not require hauling a body: Fog Princes and the King Gurgler instead drop a high-value head that can be sold to any vendor. These bounties grant no relations, but they also spare you carrying someone across half the map.

The big bounties

Random bounties

A great many roaming units carry randomly generated bounties, which is one of the most reliable early cash sources. The rule is "minimum plus a random variance", and the FCS variance value only adds, never subtracts.

Bounty hunters

Bounty Hunters are an independent minor faction whose members mostly come from the United Cities (+60 relations). They patrol Heng, Stobe's Gamble, Stormgap Coast, The Great Desert and Watcher's Rim, and their headquarters camp is fitted with harpoon turrets. Some of them will talk to you about the Bugmaster — every one of them is waiting for that fight.

The only condition for them to notice you is: your bounty is big enough.

Known anomalies

• Bounties above 10,000 Cats sometimes vanish on their own.
• Units occasionally spawn without their bounty.
• The hand-in process contains several repeatable-reward exploits (the Police Chief accepts a hand-in with both hands full; corpses get thrown back out when the cage is full; the system never checks whether this person has already been turned in). These are program defects, not design.

See also

• Prison and Escape
• Money Making
• Economy and Trade
• Slavery
• United Cities
• Game Mechanics

Video citations

1. Kenshi | The Nugget Mafia (Ep. 2)HeroInHisHead