Cats and the Feline PunReport

English：Cats (currency)　·　Game Mechanics

Kenshi writes its currency as "c." — an abbreviation that spawned a long-running translation argument and a pun that ties Cat-Lon to a ruined town called Deadcat.

Kenshi writes its currency as c., with prices shown on screen as c.5,000. It abbreviates Cats — and that name carries the setting's sharpest irony, along with a translation argument Chinese-speaking communities have never settled.

What the abbreviation stands for

In the game, c. is short for Cats. The game files and the wiki title the article Cats, NPCs say the word in dialogue, and trade goods are valued in it. Even the currency item's own average-price field reads c.1 and c.10 — a unit, not an approximation.

Cats exist as physical coins in the world: they can be looted from enemies such as nobles or found in containers, but the moment they are picked up they fold into the player's running total and the item disappears. A "String of Cats" bundles coins on a loop of cord.

How this wiki writes prices

In English, prices here are written 5,000 Cats — never c.5,000.

The reason is that c. is already spoken for in English. Its ordinary use is the Latin circa, "about": c. 1500 reads as "around the year 1500". Dropped into a sentence about money, c.5,000 therefore carries two readings at once — "five thousand Cats" and "roughly five thousand" — and a reader has no way to tell which is meant. A sentence like costs approximately c.14,000 collapses into "costs approximately about 14,000".

Spelling the unit out closes the gap. Cats is the currency's real name, it has no second meaning, and it leaves approximately and roughly free to do their own job when a figure genuinely is an estimate.

Chinese and Japanese do not have the problem, because circa is not a convention in either language. Those editions keep the on-screen c. and attach their own unit:

The translation dispute

Chinese-language communities never settled on one rendering. Three camps persist:

This wiki uses "開幣 c. N" in Chinese, which keeps a readable unit while preserving the c. string players actually see on screen.

The Cat-Lon connection

This part is not speculation. The wiki's Cats article states outright that the currency is named after an old dictator, and derives from one of the old civilisation's monetary systems.

Only one figure in Kenshi fits "old dictator" and has a name beginning with Cat: Cat-Lon, last emperor of the Second Empire.

The thread holds up narratively. The Second Empire was the last large-scale civilisation before the collapse, and the infrastructure it left became the foundation of the United Cities. A documentary on the empire's fall adopts the same reading^{[V1 0:10:16]}.

The irony sits here: Cat-Lon himself has been exiled to the bottom of a pit in the Ashlands for a thousand years — yet his name still passes through every transaction on the continent.

Deadcat

The same word turns up a third time. In the northeast sits a settlement called Deadcat, a battered village held by a faction of the same name.

Laid side by side, the association the community enjoys runs:

• Cat-Lon — the emperor, the original "cat"
• Cats — the currency he left behind, the empire's one surviving export
• Deadcat — a "dead cat," a place that exists only as ruins

One reading holds that the thread is deliberate: the empire died and its emperor sits exiled in a pit in the Ashlands, yet his name still appears in every transaction on the continent — while a place literally called Deadcat survives on the map as a footnote to that.

Orders of magnitude

The currency itself behaves simply: no exchange rates, no inflation, no faction-specific coinage. Price differences come from merchant margins and local supply, not from the money.

A few frequently quoted orders of magnitude, useful as a sense of scale:

See also

• Cat-Lon
• Second Empire
• Economy and Trade
• Bounty and Crime

Related items

Colour Scheme

Video citations

1. The History of Kenshi | DocumentaryCivilizationEx