The Age of ChaosReport
English：The Age of Chaos · World & History
The blank between the collapse of the First Empire and the founding of the Second — no records, no dates, and one question still being covered up: what were the Skeletons doing in that time.
The Age of Chaos refers to the stretch of time after the destruction of the First Empire and before the Second Empire took shape. It may cover the later phase of the Skeleton uprising, or it may refer only to the smouldering period after the Empire fell — most likely a blend of both. Its length is equally unclear: anything from a few hundred to a few thousand years is defensible, and it has left no record of a single concrete event[V1 0:00:33]. It is the only interval in the whole History of Kenshi with no written record whatsoever.
In terms of content, the period is described as a pile-up of disasters: riots by surviving Skeletons (possibly reprisal for Obedience), celestial anomalies, natural catastrophes and plague. The order of events is entirely lost; only the outcome is certain — the First Empire disintegrated and humanity was all but wiped out[V2 0:03:55].
A name nobody wants to discuss
A detail worth noting: humans do not use the term "Age of Chaos". Almost everyone who calls it that is a Skeleton, and their tone when they raise it is usually evasive. One commentator treats this as circumstantial evidence in itself: the turmoil of that period happened mainly inside Skeleton society, which is why only the Skeletons needed a name for it[V3 0:06:18].
Skeletons in bars will use it as a punchline — "he probably took a knock to the head back in the Age of Chaos" — but push the topic any further and the conversation dies. That state of "a proper noun, a collective memory, but no narrative" is itself the clue: whatever happened then, the Skeletons remember. They just do not say.
What happened at the level of the world
Even without written records, the environment has left several hard pieces of evidence.
Sea levels dropped hundreds of metres
Multiple dialogues mention "this used to be a great port" and "the water was hundreds of metres higher back then". After the great extinction the seas withdrew, islands became peaks, and the seabed became today's lowlands. This explains why some ruins turn up in completely nonsensical places — they were originally on the coast.
The Skeleton production line stopped
The enormous factory halls in the Floodlands are believed to be the First Empire's facility for mass-producing Skeletons. Skeleton NPCs standing there will say "this is where I was born", and add that "in the end they couldn't keep up with its appetite".
Whether the cause was resource exhaustion, lost expertise, or destruction of the facility in the cataclysm, the conclusion is the same: no new Skeleton has been born since. Add combat losses, self-termination and long years of component wear, and the Skeleton population entered irreversible decline from that moment. Every Skeleton wandering the wastes today is an individual who survived that era.
One account ties the geography and the production line together directly: the region containing the mass-production facility later became the Floodlands, which shut the line down, while over the same period the Skeleton population continued to be thinned by mass suicide[V4 0:04:40].
Humanity regressed to zero
The surviving humans shrank to a handful of isolated tribes, scraping by on gathering and hunting. That state lasted long enough — long enough that they forgot not only what the Skeletons had done, but also what they themselves had once possessed. The technological level of modern wasteland dwellers grew back from here.
Worth noting is that this was a two-way decline. Humanity fell back into a primitive, savage state; and while the Skeletons became the de facto masters of the entire continent during this period, their numbers kept falling because they could no longer manufacture their own kind[V5 0:01:24]. This is the root reason every Skeleton today is an antique — they won that war, and then began dwindling one by one.
Stobe's sacrifice
The only "event" of the Age of Chaos with a physical remnant is the death of Stobe.
He was the one Behemoth who escaped the executions at Obedience. Two place names, Stobe's Gamble and Stobe's Garden, are named after him, and his body lies in the latter. Not far off, half-buried in the sand, is a rocket or missile — not randomly generated space junk, but a world object deliberately placed there.
From this comes the most widely circulated reading: someone tried to complete the final cleansing of humanity with a doomsday weapon, and Stobe stopped it at the cost of his own life.
There are obvious holes in this account: the missile wreck is a whole mountain away from the body, it is essentially intact, and anything that actually hit something should have detonated. The game confirms no version of it.
Still, the Skeletons' attitude toward Stobe is consistently strange: Skeletons passing his body produce mourning reactions, and the Elder, leader of the Skeleton Bandits, publicly calls him "exterminator of the human plague" and a martyr. When the player punctures this claim while playing as a Skeleton, the Elder will admit it is a lie.
Exterminate humanity? That's a lie, and you know it.
Where Okran and Narko came from
The Holy Nation's Book of Sacrifice records an ancient deity called Chitrin: betrayed by his own children, he forgave them anyway and sacrificed himself to "cleanse the sickness of this planet"; the task was too great, and in the end he split in two and was reborn as light and dark — Okran and Narko.
The book is banned in the Holy Nation. The reason is not hard to guess: it writes a non-human being as the saviour.
Most lore researchers hold that Chitrin is what Stobe became after dozens of generations of oral transmission and distortion. If that is right, then the entire theology of the Holy Nation originates in the sacrifice of a Skeleton — a fairly complete irony for a religion whose doctrinal core is hunting Skeletons.
The Skeleton civil war hypothesis
A bolder reading has circulated in lore circles in recent years, shifting the "chaos" of the Age of Chaos from the environment to politics.
In the great library at Black Scratch there is an Unknown Old Book, so damaged that only a few passages remain readable:
We fought for justice together, we endured the chaos together, we mourned our fallen comrades together. … He was once our hero, and in the end he became our enemy.
The subject of that passage is "we", the content is war, casualties and victory, and then disillusionment. It explicitly says that Cat-Lon ruled "with a light heart and a heavy hand", and that order finally slipped through his fingers.
The chain of reasoning runs like this: Stobe's sacrifice split the Skeletons into two camps — those who argued for the complete extermination of humanity, and those who chose to follow Stobe and protect what was left of it. Cat-Lon led the latter. The Age of Chaos was "chaotic" because the Skeletons fought a civil war among themselves that lasted centuries, and Cat-Lon's side won.
The hypothesis has a pivot that is often overlooked: Skeletons can survive an environment like a nuclear winter perfectly well, so natural disasters do not constitute "chaos" for them. Given that, the only thing that could have made the period cataclysmic for Skeletons is internal conflict[V3 0:00:44].
The hypothesis incidentally explains several otherwise odd facts:
- Why Cat-Lon could become a leader acknowledged by humans and Skeletons alike — he had once been a hero who genuinely protected humans
- Why the Guiding Light scriptures write that Okran and Narko "fought in the sky for thousands of years" until light triumphed over dark
- Why the Skeletons cover up even the Age of Chaos — to explain the civil war you must first explain what caused it
- Why Cat-Lon, once mad, screams "I am not that monster"
Why there are no records
Two reasons stack.
First, Skeletons have no need to write. Their memory capacity is near-limitless and information stays directly in their heads. When the only surviving intelligent species of a civilisation has no need for writing, centuries of history can go entirely unrecorded on paper.
Second, they later decided not to talk. The collapse of the First Empire, the massacre at Obedience, and the Skeletons' part in both were systematically buried. The evasion pattern of Skeleton NPCs at Black Scratch and Black Desert City when pressed points not to amnesia but to consensus.
And the irony is that time took the memory anyway: long-lived Skeletons lose their memories to CPU degradation, and those who hold on rather than wipe them descend into madness. Whoever still remembers the Age of Chaos in full may be only the one sitting on the throne in the Ashlands.
See also
Video citations
- The Whole Story of The Second EmpireHeroInHisHead
- The Complete Known History of KenshiHeroInHisHead
- The Age of Chaos: How Cat-Lon Became OkranHeroInHisHead
- The History of Kenshi | DocumentaryCivilizationEx
- Kenshi: Major Powers | SkeletonsCivilizationEx