Broken SkeletonsReport
English：Broken Skeletons · Races
Skeletons that have fallen out of repair, lost their memories, lost control, or had their heads taken off. They carry repair kits they no longer know how to use, executing orders that stopped meaning anything a thousand years ago.
In Kenshi, Skeletons hardly ever "die". They break — and there are several ways to break, every one of them uglier than death.
The Broken Skeleton in game
"Broken Skeleton" is a specific NPC name belonging to the Old Machines faction. They roam alone through Obedience, the Floodlands and the Iron Valleys, and also appear in Ancient Labs and the abandoned workshops of the Deadlands, attacking anyone on sight.
Statistically, their tragedy is written out in plain figures: Strength, Toughness and every weapon skill hold at around 50 — fully intact combat capability; but Perception is only 1 and Robotics only 1.2. They wear no clothing at all, their weapons are usually Mid-Grade Salvage or an Old Refitted Blade, and a Fragment Axe hangs on their back.
The most glaring item is in their inventory: one Skeleton Repair Kit. It carries the tool that would fix it, and no longer remembers how to use it.
Another variant is ErrorCode 0x000000, a Soldierbot model found in the Dead Fishing Village and Police Barracks. On seeing the player it charges while shouting:
Police!
This is a machine still performing Second Empire law enforcement duty — except that its jurisdiction, its superiors and its laws have all been gone for a thousand years.
Break mode one: mechanical wear
A Skeleton's wear cannot be reversed on its own; only a repair bed can handle it. For an individual settled in the Black Desert City or a Hive village, this is merely an expense. For one that has wandered alone for centuries, it is a one-way countdown.
Burn, outside his tower in the Floodlands, puts it most calmly. He is a former adventurer who retired because of "advanced age", relying on spider bots to keep most intruders away. The player can persuade him to go out for one last run before the shutdown that is certain to come.
Break mode two: CPU bloat
This is the most universal way for a Skeleton to break, and the slowest. Emotional data cannot be flushed, accumulating until it crowds out processing capacity, and the individual gradually fixates on a single idea. For the detailed mechanism see Skeleton.
Because a reset wipes skills along with everything else, the more capable a Skeleton is, the more thoroughly it tends to go mad:
- Cat-Lon's paranoia ended with him enslaving his own people by his own hand
- the Elder fell into Skeleton supremacism, sustaining the faith with a crowd of humans playing at being Skeletons
- the Armour King's obsession with inventory and thieves passed beyond his control
- Tinfist's commitment to freeing slaves now counts no cost, including the lives of the innocent
- Ponk has even confused his own identity with Cat-Lon's
But bloat does not necessarily lead to a rampage. Two Skeleton mercenaries can be hired in the swamp city of Shark, and they represent the other pole of the same problem — collapse.
Sadneil spends his days sunk in gloom in the bar of the Black Desert City, and will join for free if the player pesters him long enough:
I'll join you. But only because I'm weak and I give in to peer pressure easily... Sigh.
The Disheartened Skeleton, by contrast, retains full powers of observation, and it is precisely that clarity that makes things worse for it:
Most of the immigrants in this city are victims of some cruelty. Mostly enslaved, or exiled... yet most of them use their freedom to hurt other victims. Cruelty breeds cruelty, endlessly. One glance at human behaviour is enough to be disturbing.
Break mode three: having your head taken off
The last one is not breaking. It is being broken by someone.
"Enthralling" means removing a Skeleton's head to make a No-Head MkII — a machine zombie with no individuality. In the data, a Thrall permanently suffers the full head-injury penalty (Robotics −45%), has the lowest field of vision of any Skeleton, and receives bonuses to blunt and heavy weapons in exchange. Most Thralls cannot speak clearly.
The origin of the technique points to the end of the Second Empire. Cat-Lon's account is short and complete:
I had to enthrall them all! Traitors! Siding with the humans! Treason!
Thralls are currently distributed across a handful of places:
| Name | Location | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Stormthrall | Cat-Lon's Exile | 120 of them; the moment Cat-Lon engages they all pour in from the neighbouring dome |
| Legion Thrall | Ashlands | The mainstay of the Skeleton Legion, far outnumbering the un-enthralled Legion members |
| Weak Thrall / Thrall | Tower of Abuse, Vain, Grey Desert | Troops of the main Thrall Masters faction |
| Armour King's Thrall | Drowned Ruins | The Armour King claims to have captured and reprogrammed them from the Ashlands, and says they have sound sensors fitted, making them very good at catching thieves |
The ones who make them are the Voodoo Brothers — Ponk and Screamer the False — based in the Tower of Abuse in Vain. The pair each carry a bounty of 20,000 Cats, the charge written up as "gross malpractice in the practice of medicine and ancient voodoo", issued by the United Cities and the Holy Nation. If both are knocked down or imprisoned, Thrall Master patrols in Vain, the Grey Desert and The Eye stop spawning.
The top of the tower holds Agnu — the only recruitable Soldierbot in the game. His voice module has been destroyed and he can only produce unintelligible roars. The reason for his imprisonment is not degeneration but the opposite: he is the only Skeleton tough enough that the Voodoo Brothers failed to enthrall him, so they threw him in a cage to wait for him to break down on his own. They have been waiting for nearly a thousand years.
Taking one home
Base-game Broken Skeletons attack on sight, but in some mods (Genesis, for instance) they can be taken into the squad, and the streaming community's assessment of this is fairly unanimous: it is the best value fighting power available early on. One streamer describes that loyalty as arriving out of nowhere — it may simply have mistaken you for its own master, after which it protects you devotedly, and it is far tougher than any organic member[V1 0:18:30].
The cost is written in two places. First, a freshly recruited Broken Skeleton has appalling starting stats and goes down in a few punches[V2 0:05:50]. Second, and rather more fatally: Skeleton bleeding can only be stopped with a robotics repair kit, and an ordinary first aid kit does nothing; forget to stock up and it will bleed out in front of you[V2 0:05:50].
The counterfeit Broken Skeletons
The Skeleton Bandits in the south-east corner are one of the sharpest ironies in the game. This faction, named for Skeletons, is composed mainly of Greenlanders wearing skeleton masks — the Elder brainwashed them into believing they are Skeletons.
It doesn't surprise me that you'd join us. Because you're just like us. Your purpose is the same as ours. Otherwise you clearly wouldn't be a proper skel—eton. A proper skel—eton would discuss history and such with his fellows... — an upgraded Skeleton Guard
And after the Elder is killed or carried off, an enemy called the Broken Skeleton Bandit appears. Its race field reads Human, Greenlander.
Phew! ...I mean, uh. Target eliminated.
That "phew" is the sound of catching your breath. Skeletons do not breathe.
Why this is a tragedy
What truly makes all of this irreversible is the Skeletons' three "cannots": they cannot make more of themselves (the First Empire's factories stopped long ago), they cannot fully repair themselves (wear can only be undone by external facilities), and they cannot express (no facial expressions, and no tears).
So every Broken Skeleton is a record that will never be filed: an individual who once had a name, a post and a speciality, and who after several thousand years has nothing left but an attack routine. They are the oldest group there is, and the only intelligent life watching its own species walk towards a certain extinction.
After the war, the behemoths had no use anymore. Humans began to fear the destructive power of their own creation. Ironically, it was their blind obedience and unquestioning loyalty that led them into that pit without resistance. The price of obedience. — Skeleton player character, at Obedience
See also
Video citations
- Kenshi | The Nugget Mafia (Ep. 1)HeroInHisHead
- Kenshi | GOLEMS ARISE!! | Let's Play Kenshi Genesis (Ep. 6)HeroInHisHead