CreaturesReport
English：Creatures · Creatures
Kenshi's animals are not respawning XP fodder — they are part of the terrain. Their age is their level, almost all of their damage is piercing, and pulling a single tooth off an unconscious one kills it outright.
In Kenshi, most "dangerous zones" are dangerous because of the wildlife, not because of bandits. The Gut is a death trap because of Beak Things; the Swamp swallows entire caravans because of Blood Spiders. Animals cannot be negotiated with. They simply stand on the map and decide which roads are open to you.
Two categories
The engine (FCS) files every non-humanoid character as an "animal", but they split into two lines. Fauna are organic: they get hungry, they bleed, and they can be skinned for hides and meat. Robots bleed engine oil, count as robots for racial damage purposes, drop CPU units and robotics components, and occupy the wildlife niche in zones where the environment is badly enough wrecked that nothing organic survives. Both obey the rules below.
Five shared rules
1. Age is level. The stat sheet is only a base value; combat performance is base × age multiplier — juvenile 0.40x, adult 0.60x, elder 1.10x. An adult with "base 40" is really running on 24. A few special spawns are handed 1.6x–2.1x outright, and those are the genuine monsters.
How many days each stage takes varies by species — the figure is the stage multiplier times that creature's own lifespan. A Skin Spider has a lifespan of just 6 and reaches adulthood in 3.6 days; a Goat is 25, a Boneyard Wolf 45 and a Megacrab 100, reaching adulthood at 15, 27 and 60 days respectively. To see how fast something grows, check its own article rather than borrowing another species' numbers.
lifespan, by contrast, is a field on every creature page.2. Invisible weapons, rerolled quality. Every animal carries a weapon you cannot see. It comes in three qualities with a substantial spread between them, and it is rerolled on every load, seeded from squad data. Shuffle your characters' order in the squad list, save, reload, and you have rerolled your own animals' weapon quality.
3. Damage is almost all piercing. Animals have very poor cut and blunt numbers; their terrifying output comes almost entirely from the piercing multiplier, which works like a harpoon and is reduced heavily by armour. The consequence is blunt: a bare-handed rookie loses a leg in one hit, while a veteran in heavy armour can stand there and take it.
4. Death items are a life switch. Every species carries a set of death items (animal skin, teeth, claws, raw meat). Take them off an unconscious animal and it dies instantly. That makes them a safe way to finish a downed beast, and it also means that if your squad wipes, there is a good chance the bandits will butcher your animals for meat.
5. Animals are never staggered. Humanoids stumble and can be locked down by combos. Animals cannot, at all.
Behaviour types: who eats you
| Type | Behaviour | Representative species |
|---|---|---|
| Carnivore | Eats living unconscious characters | Beak Thing, Blood Spider, Skin Spider |
| Scavenger | Eats corpses only | Bonedog, Boneyard Wolf, Gorillo, raptors, Landbat, Skimmer |
| Territorial | Attacks anything near its nest or patrol route | Beak Thing, Bonedog, Crab, Gorillo, Skimmer, Leviathan |
| Defensive | Neutral until you walk too close, then enraged | Garru |
| Hungry | Comes to eat your crops | River Raptor, Swamp Raptor |
| Neutral | Never initiates | Goat, Swamp Turtle, Wild Bull |
Only Beak Things have a sense of smell, letting them track blood to a fight in progress; spiders only eat what they knocked down themselves or happened to stumble across. There are two ways of eating: Beak Things and Bonedogs chew limbs off from the bottom up, while spiders, Landbats and Skimmers drain nutrition, emptying the victim's hunger bar directly.
Threat table
Base FCS stats below (multiply by the age multiplier for combat values), plus health and movement speed (mph).
| Creature | Base stats | Health | Speed | Main zones | Threat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Swamp Turtle | 10 | 101–196 | 4–8 | The Swamp, South Wetlands | Minimal |
| River Raptor | 10 | 118–263 | 5–11 | Okran's Pride, Northern Coast | Minimal |
| Goat | 10 | 47.5–83 | 10–21 | Everywhere | Low |
| Domesticated Bull | 20 (Str 24) | 131–206 | 6.7–14.1 | Holy Farms | Low |
| Bonedog | 20 | 107–228 | 8–21 | Border Zone, Spider Plains, Vain | Low |
| Wild Bull | 20 | 153–259 | 9–31 | Skinner's Roam | Low (passive) |
| Pack Beast | 22 | 101–155 | 12.3–30.5 | Travels with caravans | Low |
| Pack Bull | 25 | 153–259 | 8.9–30.5 | Travels with caravans | Low |
| Swamp Raptor | 30 | 140–382 | 5–11 | The Swamp, South Wetlands | Low (eats crops) |
| Garru | 30 | 101–154 | 12.3–30.5 | Everywhere | Moderate (passive) |
| Landbat | 30 | 95–251 | 7–18 | Southeastern zones | Moderate |
| Mountain Dog | 30 | 107–288 | 8–21 | Accompanies Cannibal Hunters | Moderate |
| Crab | 35 | 66–323 | 6–13 | Eastern coast, Howler Maze | Moderate |
| Skimmer | 35 | 56–174 | 6–23 | Skimsands, The Great Desert | Moderate |
| Beak Thing | 35 | 190–421 | 19–38 | Gut, Bonefields, Vain | Extreme |
| Skin Spider | 40 | 26–52 | 7–14 | Arach, Spider Plains, Bonefields | Moderate–high |
| Blood Spider | 40 (Str 27) | 24–29 | 7–14 | The Swamp, South Wetlands | High (in packs) |
| Boneyard Wolf | 40 | 124–466 | 8–28 | Bonefields, High Bonefields | High |
| Iron Spider | 40 | Engine oil | 6–12 | Deadlands, The Iron Trail | Moderate–high |
| Cleanser Unit | 50 | Engine oil | 4–9 | Ashlands | High |
| Gorillo | 60 | 150–414 | 9–19 | Vain, Greyshelf | High |
| Security Spider | 60 | 250 (oil) | 6–12 | Ancient labs, armouries | High |
| Black Gorillo | 80 | 125–345 | 8–19 | Stobe's Gamble, Sonorous Dark | Extreme |
| Leviathan | 50 (Str 80, Melee 75) | 2,600–7,440 | 4–9 | Leviathan Coast | Extreme |
Giants and one-offs
A handful of locations hide oversized versions, most of them owing their overwhelming numbers to extreme age multipliers: the Great White Gorillo (the locked lab in the centre of Mourn, 1.70x–1.80x), the King Gorillo (the Crumbling Labs in Stobe's Gamble, base 100 across the board), the Megacrab (Lost Town, close to 1,400 HP), and the Megaraptor (the Drowned Ancient Citadel Ruin on Raptor Island — up to 2,472 HP, and the only animal in the game with a 100% chance of being female), plus the three champions of the Crab Tournaments. The Elder Beak Thing and Elder Blood Spider are not new species, just individuals that lived long enough.
Purchasable animals
The young ones ain't so bad. They'll eat more as they grow up, but if they're carryin' a bag on their backs you can carry more food around can't ya'? Can't live without 'em on a long journey. — Nomad animal trader
Animals can join your squad like any other character, but the moment you buy one it loses 75% of its Toughness, Melee Attack and Defence, Dodge, Martial Arts, Athletics, Swimming and Stealth. You are buying potential, not a fighter. The main vendors are the Nomads (goats, Pack Beasts, Bonedogs, Pack Bulls, Wild Bulls), the Holy Nation's Holy Farms (Bonedogs, Domesticated Bulls) and the Crab Raiders (crabs, around 14,000 Cats for an adult, no alliance required).
Practical notes: animals cannot lose limbs — the interface showing "limb destroyed" is an oversight, and it heals on its own with time. Except for goats, anything past juvenile size cannot enter buildings and has to be carried in by a humanoid. The Garru Backpack and Bull Backpack come with −90% encumbrance and stack trade goods (6 stacks for the Garru Backpack, 5 for the Bull Backpack), but the lantern hanging off the Garru Backpack wrecks night-time stealth.
Common misconceptions
- Low stats do not mean easy: animals are never staggered and their damage is mostly piercing, so unarmoured low-level characters being killed by a goat is not unusual.
- Knocked down is not dealt with: spiders resist bleeding and regenerate fast, so they get back up quickly. Either finish them or take their death items.
- Clearing a nest is not permanent: nests respawn on a cycle and send raiding parties at any player base in range.
- Eggs do not hatch into pets: Beak Thing Eggs and crab eggs are only worth money. The developers once hinted that taming was planned and traces remain in the FCS, but it was never implemented.
Lore: where did they come from?
The game never says. What is certain is that this world lived through the collapse of the First Empire and the Second Empire, that ancient labs and runaway machines are scattered everywhere, and that almost every animal shares one feature — bony faceplates or bony ridges. That common design language strongly suggests a common origin, but nothing official spells it out.
A gene-engineering hypothesis circulates in the player community, attributing the Hivers, the Shek and some of the beasts to ancient human experiments in species modification. There is no in-game evidence for this; it is speculation, not setting.
The specific example most often cited for that hypothesis is the Skin Spider. The reading offered by the HeroInHisHead channel is that Skin Spiders are not a wild subspecies that slowly evolved on the Spider Plains, but genetic discards from the ancients' rushed work on the Hivers — leftovers from the same batch of ethics-free experiments[V1 0:07:36]. This is only the channel's speculation and the game text offers nothing to confirm it; but it points in the same direction as the "shared design language" observation above, which is why it circulates so widely in community discussion.
Video citations
- All Life Came From Humans (Sort of)HeroInHisHead