Cat-LonReport

English：Cat-Lon / Mad Cat-Lon　·　Characters

Founder and last emperor of the Second Empire. He rebuilt civilisation to atone for what his kind had done to humanity, then spent a thousand years accumulating memories until he became the tyrant he hated most. He now sits mad on a throne deep in the Ashlands.

Cat-Lon is the most complete and the most brutal fall-from-grace story in Kenshi. He was not born a tyrant; he began as an idealist whose whole project was atonement — which is exactly why the tragedy carries any weight at all.

The founder

Cat-Lon's CPU spells out where he came from: he was one of the founding Skeletons of the Old Empire, part of that group of machines "attempting to make up for the sins and mistakes of the Skeletons' past, to atone to humanity".

Either way, the sin he set out to atone for is one humanity has long since forgotten entirely^{[V1 0:06:51]}. This is the core absurdity the Skeleton Wars left to the surviving Skeletons: they carry the weight of a verdict nobody remembers.

The game files also still contain an unused version of Cat-Lon's CPU description, worded far more gently than the released text: his dream was to rebuild civilisation and make up for the mistakes of the past^{[V1 0:06:51]}. That replaced passage effectively preserves a Cat-Lon who has not yet curdled.

The Second Empire: from ideal to iron fist

The Second Empire Cat-Lon built was, for a time, the closest thing to civilisation that existed after the Age of Chaos. The Empire poured resources into researching and excavating lost technology, and raised elite forces such as the Hydraulic Knights to sweep pirates and Cannibals off its borders.

From religious unrest to the iron fist

What lit the fuse was a religious movement inside human society. As the cult grew it began to collide head-on with the imperial government, and Cat-Lon chose punishment over compromise, sending his chief of police, General Hat-12, to put it down^{[V2 0:03:25][V3 0:08:26]}. The practical effect of the iron fist was to feed the most extreme wing of the cult: they declared that the Skeletons were servants of Narko and were preparing a second extinction. Cat-Lon refused to yield and escalated further, committing troops that may have included the gene-modified Enforcer caste — which is possibly where the cultists got the idea of describing Enforcers as "inhuman beasts in service to Narko"^{[V2 0:03:25]}.

The rebellion did not burn out in a few years; it dragged on for centuries, grinding a regime founded on atonement down into a tyranny. By the late period even the Hydraulic Knights, raised to hunt pirates abroad, had been turned on the Empire's own citizens^{[V3 0:08:26]}. The longer the war ran, the more extreme Cat-Lon's methods became, until he slid into massacring innocent civilians and caging human children^{[V4 0:03:11]}. The orders were carried out by a rhinoceros robot who lacked a morality processing module and was therefore happy to assist with anything assigned to him, including the children's prison he administered^{[V5 0:05:56]}. It was after seeing that this anti-human purge had gone out of control that large numbers of Skeletons chose to leave the Second Empire — Tinfist among them, who went on to become a liberator of slaves^{[V4 0:03:11][V5 0:05:56]}.

The collapse began from the inside, and every step of it left physical evidence. The CPUs scattered through the Ashlands domes amount to a set of signed confessions from the Empire's leadership:

Cat-Lon's own answer was to keep tightening the screws. His CPU description puts it plainly:

But a thousand years is a long time to live. You slowly accumulate fears and prejudices... Before you know it, you are a dictator.

What makes that confession sting is that it frames tyranny as something that can be accumulated, one bad experience at a time: fear and prejudice stack up, the personality shifts with them and turns angry, and by the time the man himself notices, it is already done^{[V1 0:09:35]}.

When Skeletons began defecting to the human side, his response was to enthrall the "traitors" wholesale — decapitated, stripped of will, rebuilt into headless units capable only of obedience^{[V4 0:03:47]}. The Legion Thralls and Storm Thralls that march in formation through the Ashlands today are the living residue of that order.

This is also the most complete hypocrisy of his entire life. When the Skeletons overthrew the First Empire, they did it precisely to refuse being used as tools without a will of their own. Now, when some Skeletons saw him re-enacting the same tyranny and began quietly helping humans, his remedy was to strip his own kind of free will and demote them to puppets that could only obey^{[V6 0:22:23]}. One commentator draws a heavy conclusion from this: Cat-Lon learned almost nothing from the fall of the First Empire — many of the Second Empire's crimes were exactly the things the Skeletons had rebelled against, and exactly the sins he claimed at his founding that he would atone for on their behalf^{[V7 0:07:06]}. And this is still how he defends himself today:

I had to have them all destroyed. Traitors, siding with the humans. It is treason.

How the Empire fell

How the Second Empire actually ended is still disputed: internal betrayal, an Okranite uprising, or something else? The comparatively accepted account is that enthralling his own subjects was the final nail in the regime's coffin^{[V8 0:07:54]}. The genuine killing blow, though, was a great famine — the population scattered, the state effectively dissolved itself, and Cat-Lon went on sitting on his throne, surrounded for a thousand years by puppets with no minds^{[V4 0:03:47][V3 0:10:16]}.

The Empire's leadership withdrew into the Ashlands to exile themselves, but the infrastructure they left behind did not vanish with them — that legacy later became the foundation the United Cities were built on^{[V8 0:07:54]}.

How the madness works

Cat-Lon's loss of control is not a simple character flaw but a structural defect in the Skeleton race. Skeletons possess full emotions but have no physiological channel through which to discharge them; the data can only pile up, eventually swelling the CPU, distorting judgement and turning into paranoia.

HeroInHisHead describes the process with a very direct analogy: Skeleton emotions are like background browser tabs, and the guilt of the civil war, the mourning for fallen comrades and the rage at humanity's betrayal all sit open forever, never closed, until the CPU can barely run anything else. An overloaded processor then locks onto whichever process is most resource-hungry and loops it indefinitely — on this reasoning, Cat-Lon is currently running grief, self-justification and persecution mania in parallel^{[V9 0:02:24]}. This is an explanatory model the channel proposes, not stated setting in the game text.

The fix is a reset, but a reset wipes skills and personality along with everything else. For an individual who has lived a thousand years and stands on his craft and his prestige, a reset is equivalent to suicide. Which means the most capable Skeletons — Cat-Lon, the Elder, the Armour King, Tinfist — happen also to be the most unstable ones.

Following this thread, one reading strings every step of Cat-Lon's later years into a single causal chain: he refused a reset in order to keep his leadership skills, and paid for it with continued CPU swelling, madness and paranoia. After rebellion, famine and border raids arrived in succession, he reached a conclusion — the Empire's real enemy was not any one faction but free will itself. So he went to Ponk in the medical department, who in the course of repairing Skeleton soldiers had discovered a method of erasing the self without killing the subject^{[V10 0:08:55]}. This is a sequence of events the channel reconstructs; the game never strings these fragments together directly.

Was he ever a hero?

A snatch of bar talk in Black Desert City describes Cat-Lon and Tinfist as "quite the pair" — one of them now fighting a war for humanity he is bound to lose, the other vanished off the face of the world. And the battered Unknown Old Book in the Great Library of Black Scratch reads more like a eulogy:

He was once our hero, then he became our enemy. And so we fell back into darkness.

One account holds that the Age of Chaos was, for the Skeletons, not environmental chaos but a Skeleton civil war: one faction argued for exterminating humanity outright, while the other — led by Cat-Lon — chose to protect the surviving humans, won the war and founded the Second Empire. On this hypothesis, "why Cat-Lon specifically" also gets an answer: he was the leader of the pro-human side that won that civil war, treated as a saviour by humans and Skeletons alike, and therefore the only figure both sides could jointly raise to found an empire^{[V1 0:08:30]}. This reading explains why he was pushed onto the throne and why he is still shouting "I am not the monster" to this day, but it rests on metaphorical readings of the Unknown Old Book and Holy Nation scripture, with no direct in-game evidence.

Further readings

Neither of the following has any explicit basis in the game; both were built by video channels out of scattered clues. Read them as opinion, not setting.

How the atonement project grew Cannibals. One line of inference traces the origin of the Cannibals all the way back to Cat-Lon's atonement plan: searching for arable land on which to settle humans, he established farming colonies north of the Floodlands; Skeletons understood neither human bodies nor disease, and nobody thought about the toxins in the water to the south seeping into the fields. Generations of humans eating contaminated crops gradually grew more aggressive and less mentally capable, and the timing happens to overlap with the rise of the persecuted Stobe cult, sliding from blood sacrifice into ritual cannibalism^{[V11 0:15:04]}. Every link in that chain exists in the game only as a scattered clue; stringing them into a causal sequence is the channel's inference.

Could he still have won? HeroInHisHead has run a counterfactual treating Cat-Lon's position as a pure strategic problem, and identifies an unavoidable structural weakness: Skeletons cannot be mass-produced, so "every one broken is one fewer", and any war of attrition is a one-way loss for him. On that assessment his only way out was to acquire organic manpower — the soldier and worker drones of the Western Hive, for instance — pairing Skeleton quality with the numbers of an organic civilisation^{[V9 0:22:49]}. The counter-question the same video leaves is sharper still: a Cat-Lon who had been reset, retaining all his knowledge but none of the emotional baggage, might genuinely have taken the war through patience and real alliances. The real tragedy is not that his goal was unachievable, but that the very experience which gave him this knowledge simultaneously destroyed his capacity to act on it^{[V9 0:35:30]}.

The exile today

Cat-Lon now sits in an enormous crater deep in the Ashlands, a place called Cat-Lon's Exile. The site has only one way in or out, an earthen slope on the western side; suspended above the pit is a colossal piece of wreckage that from a distance looks like a snapped space elevator.

That wreck has spawned a theory: is he waiting for the space elevator to come and carry him away? One commentator answers flatly no — Skeletons know exactly what crimes they committed, and know equally well that the First Empire is long gone and nobody is coming to collect them. On this reading, he has deliberately exiled himself into a graveyard dedicated to his own failure, sitting beneath the elevator, surrounded by that failure while denying it exists^{[V12 0:20:22]}.

When the player approaches he rises and says everything he has not managed to say in a thousand years:

Have you ever tried caring for humans? They are the monsters. ...I am not the monster.

As for the roar he gives before speaking, one reading holds it should not be imagined as a human scream but as mechanical distortion — the juddering, tape-jam repetition of a signal breaking down; the reason he makes that sound is that emotional overload and CPU swelling have already torn his mind open^{[V12 0:25:54]}.

Once the speech ends, all 120 Storm Thralls from another dome pour in. It is worth adding that he is not alone: besides the thralls, general-rank Skeleton old guard remain at his side, and the whole order of battle has been laid out in full once in a channel sandbox-fight video^{[V13 0:00:11]}.

Worth noting: the "Second Empire" old guard watching over the four Ashlands domes and Cat-Lon's "Second Empire Exile" are friendly to each other, but the Skeleton Legion that actually patrols the Ashlands has neither love nor hatred for him — one reading holds that the Legion is in fact enforcing his exile, preventing him from enthralling what remains of the Empire as well.

Cat-Lon in game

Cat-Lon is one of the strongest super-bosses in the game: a P4MkII chassis with Toughness and Perception maxed at 100, Heavy Weapons and Blunt skills reaching 120 thanks to racial bonuses, wielding a Meitou Falling Sun and Ancient Samurai Armour.

• Neither he nor the Storm Thralls carry repair kits, so cut damage to vital parts accumulates slowly — though his wound-deterioration rate is only 0.03 times normal.
• He ranks "hold position" above attacking, so if anyone takes his throne first he will abandon the fight and go looking for a new guard post.
• Taking the CPU of Cat-Lon off him kills him instantly; the item is worth roughly 60,000 Cats.
• Once he is defeated or captured, the static Iron Spiders of the Ashlands stop respawning and Skeleton Legion patrols switch to larger formations that run the whole time. A player in the United Cities faction can also throw the deed back at Emperor Tengu.

Trivia

• The wiki article on Kenshi's currency states outright that Cats are "named after an old dictator", widely taken to mean Cat-Lon — the documentary-style video on the Empire's decline uses that account too^{[V3 0:10:16]}. See Cats and the Feline Pun.
• The map carried by the Bugmaster marks Cat-Lon's Exile, hinting that he has always wanted to go and find the emperor.
• In early development builds this location was called "Kami", Japanese for "god".

See also

• Second Empire
• Skeletons
• Skeleton Wars
• Age of Chaos
• Tinfist
• Stobe
• Cats and the Feline Pun

Video citations

1. The Age of Chaos: How Cat-Lon Became OkranHeroInHisHead
2. Kenshi: History of the Holy NationCivilizationEx
3. The History of Kenshi | DocumentaryCivilizationEx
4. Kenshi: Major Powers | SkeletonsCivilizationEx
5. Kenshi: History of the SkeletonsCivilizationEx
6. The Whole Story of The Second EmpireHeroInHisHead
7. Was There a Skeleton Mainframe?HeroInHisHead
8. The Complete Known History of KenshiHeroInHisHead
9. What If Cat-Lon Tried To Take Back Kenshi?HeroInHisHead
10. The Origins of Agnu and The Voodoo BrothersHeroInHisHead
11. The Origins of the CannibalsHeroInHisHead
12. Kenshi Lore Master AMAHeroInHisHead
13. Kenshi Colosseum: Cat-Lon | His Generals | 120 Storm Thralls VS The Bugmaster | 100 Skin SpidersHeroInHisHead