BugmasterReport
English：Bugmaster · Characters
Ruler of the Arach crater and a centuries-old madman who fields a spider swarm as an army; the obsession of his life was never the Shek Kingdom, but a certain someone deep in the Ashlands.
The Bug King lives in a tower at the dead centre of the Arach crater, surrounded by fifteen Skin Spiders and six to ten Blood Spiders. He wears no armour and no headgear — nothing but a rag loincloth and a Meitou-grade Foreign Sabre. He is one of the most famous superbosses in Kenshi, and one of the few characters who arrives as rumour long before he arrives in person.
Rumour comes first
Long before the player gets anywhere near Arach, the stories start. Skeleton characters will tell you that this man has been here for centuries, that nobody knows what he is or where he came from, only that nobody who went looking for him ever came back. Human and Hive Prince characters go further into myth — some call him a god of insects, some the last living member of the ancient race that ruled the First Empire, some claim he holds the most precious treasure in the world.
What the outside world can actually assemble is an outline and nothing more: a mysterious man, said to be hundreds of years old, squatting in an abandoned outpost in Arach, bound to the local spider population by some connection nobody can articulate, and using them as a private army[V1 0:09:13]. For the Shek Kingdom he is the sharpest thorn in their side after their foreign enemies[V1 0:09:13]. Even the question of what he is has only two mutually exclusive answers on offer: that he is the last remnant of the ancient humans who ruled the First Empire, or that he is a piece of Second Empire genetic engineering[V2 0:03:00][V3 0:10:35]. What the two camps share is that neither can explain how he has lived for centuries, and neither can explain his link to the spiders of Arach[V2 0:03:00].
The only thing that is certain is… he does not welcome guests.
One more rumour keeps resurfacing: he collects human teeth[V2 0:03:00][V3 0:10:35]. That one eventually gets physical corroboration inside his tower (see below).
The game files classify him as an ordinary male Greenlander. That is a fact about the data layer, but it only tells you which race template the developers picked; it is not enough to overturn the claim that he has lived for centuries — on everything that matters about him, the game never answers.
Five charges on the wanted poster
Outposts of the Shek Kingdom and the Tech Hunters both carry his bounty notice, at 100,000 Cats — one of the highest bounties in the game. Five crimes are listed: banditry, raiding, mass murder, cannibalism, genocide. The notice openly admits the authorities know nothing about him:
- Attacks anyone who comes near
- Appears to command an army of spiders, for reasons unknown
- Motive unknown
The only thing the follow-up intelligence adds is that he holds a great deal of treasure, and whoever brings him in may keep it. That line says everything — law enforcement's grasp of him stops at "valuable".
As for physical evidence of the cannibalism and the killing, it is scattered across the floor of his tower: eight hundred to twelve hundred human teeth. This is one of only two places in the entire game where human teeth appear (the other is a Holy Nation temple, and there it is extremely rare).
That map
The item in his treasure chest is more interesting than the treasure itself — a map covered in gibberish and graphic symbols. The item description is quite explicit: the Bugmaster may be insane, but he has lived long enough to know too many of this world's secrets, and from the fragments one can piece together that he has been training himself in order to go somewhere and kill someone. That is his obsession.
The place is in the Ashlands. Using the map marks Cat-Lon's Exile directly on the world map.
The indirect evidence for this reading is the content of the intelligence he gathered: the fragments are almost entirely about the exiles of the Second Empire and about Cat-Lon himself, not about the Shek[V3 0:10:35]. Hence the observation that the widely held impression of "the Bugmaster massing an army to attack the Shek Kingdom" comes purely from a coincidence of geography, while the evidence points elsewhere[V2 0:03:40].
Put differently: this monster, wanted for mass murder and genocide, is also one of the very few people in the world who treats Cat-Lon as a problem that must be solved. What his motive is, and what lies between him and Cat-Lon, the game does not say.
Unsettled readings: whose creation is he
The Bugmaster is one of the most thoroughly blank characters in Kenshi, which is exactly why so much theorising has accumulated around him. Everything below is hypothesis put forward by the community and by lore channels; there is no direct in-game evidence for any of it, so do not read it as canon.
The most widely circulated strand holds that the Bugmaster was one of the lead engineers on the Second Empire's genetic engineering team, and perhaps even a co-creator of the Shek as a race[V4 0:07:19]. Building on that premise, one version runs as follows: after the famine broke out, Cat-Lon went back to the scientist who had produced the Enforcers and asked him to reshape the population into a labour force that ate less, obeyed more readily and bred efficiently; that man became the Bugmaster, and his product was the three engineered Hive Queens[V5 0:08:55].
What makes this strand attractive is how many open questions it closes at once. Its proponents argue that the failures from the Hive Queen programme became the Skin Spiders, and that the job of exterminating them was handed to the Enforcers — which would account both for the almost instinctive, cultural fixation the Shek have on hunting the Bugmaster and his spiders, and for the unnameable resemblance between Skin Spiders and the Hive (a kinship on the order of humans and primates)[V5 0:09:27]. Others identify the Bugmaster outright as the man who directed that round of genetic engineering, and hold that the Enforcers came from his hand as well[V6 0:09:19].
Finally, the same hypothesis is used to fill the largest gap in this article — why he hates Cat-Lon. The reasoning: if the Bugmaster really did take part in the Second Empire's genetic experiments, then the Skin Spiders are victims of Cat-Lon's madness, which explains both why he loathes Cat-Lon so deeply and why he is taking precisely this swarm of spiders along to settle the score[V7 0:08:08][V6 0:09:19].
Combat and weak points
His Strength, Toughness, Dexterity and all six weapon skills sit at 95, near the numerical ceiling; he is also one of the strongest melee units in the game, and between a Meitou-grade weapon and maxed Field Medic there is essentially no winning a straight fight.
But his stat block hides two obvious holes: Perception 1 and Stealth 1. The first means his awareness of his surroundings is dreadful — he will stand fixed on top of his tower and will not even notice the spiders downstairs being picked off one by one. A character with high Stealth and high Assassination can therefore walk straight up to the roof and knock him out, though his Toughness of 95 keeps the assassination success rate low.
He also has a habit: he picks up intruders he has knocked out and stuffs them into cages. Bring someone with Lockpicking, or carry tools and a hacksaw.
Who to hand him to
Once subdued, the Bugmaster can be hauled in for the bounty, and which side you deliver him to leads to completely different outcomes.
| Delivered to | Bounty | Side effects |
|---|---|---|
| Shek Kingdom (Admag) | 100,000 Cats | +100 relations with the Shek Kingdom; unlocks dialogue with Esata the Stone Golem, and through her the recruitment of her daughter Seto; −10 with the The Holy Nation |
| United Cities | 100,000 Cats | Only +2 relations, but no offence given to the Holy Nation |
The Shek regard him as a national nemesis. Carry his corpse or unconscious body past any Shek warrior and they will tell you to take him to the Stone Golem. This route is one of the main ways to obtain Seto, a unique companion.
That hostility leaves traces on the landscape. The Shek at the southern end of the Stenn Desert hunt silk spiders year-round for a simple reason — they are at war with the Bugmaster to the south; so Shek outposts in that area sport trophies such as weathervanes made from dead silk spiders[V8 0:20:04]. For the Shek this is not a bounty contract but a standing southern front.
How the world reacts
Bringing down the Bugmaster changes two things:
- The Berserkers come calling — in the name of "challenging the undefeated", at least two Berserker squads will march on the player's base.
- The Band of Bones stands down — these Shek outcasts are won over by the player's record and stop raiding the player's base from then on.
In a game with no main storyline, this chain of "kill someone and the world treats you differently" is Kenshi's principal narrative form.
See also
Video citations
- Kenshi: History of the Shek KingdomCivilizationEx
- Kenshi: Major Powers | Shek Kingdom and HiversCivilizationEx
- History of Kenshi: Major Powers | DocumentaryCivilizationEx
- The Origins of the ShekHeroInHisHead
- The Origins of the HiversHeroInHisHead
- Kenshi Lore Master AMAHeroInHisHead
- All Life Came From Humans (Sort of)HeroInHisHead
- Kenshi Base Building - Shek Storm FortressHeroInHisHead