DeadhiveReport
English：Deadhive · Factions
What is left of a Hive that lost its queen — a feral mass driven by nothing but the urge to feed, known to everyone as the Fogmen. They are the terminus every collapsed Hive arrives at.
The Deadhive is the third branch of the Hive, and the only one that no longer qualifies as a civilisation. They are universally called the Fogmen, and they inhabit the Fog Islands — a valley permanently blanketed in ground fog and littered with the enormous metal wreckage of the ancient world. A Hiver in the player's squad delivers the coldest verdict in the game here:
"Cousins from the other hives. Lost their minds to parasite. Controls them from the inside. There is no helping them now."
Physiology: the same body, degraded across the board
The Deadhive are still filed as a Hive subrace in the game files, but statistically they read as a checklist of systematic decay:
| Attribute | Western Hive | Deadhive |
|---|---|---|
| Worker drone body HP | 75 (head 125) | 50 |
| Soldier drone head HP | 200 | 100 (same as a human) |
| Prince body HP | 80 | 75 |
| Acid immunity | Yes | No |
| Hunger rate | 0.5–0.6 | 1.0 |
| Can eat foul raw meat / human teeth | Yes | No |
The two decisive entries: the Deadhive are the only Hivers to have lost acid immunity, and they have also lost the ability to digest rotten meat. Their hunger rate is double that of their kin while they can barely eat anything at all — which explains why their fixation on living flesh borders on madness. Their skills collapse the same way: the Toughness bonus is gone, leaving only residual aptitude in Labouring, Farming and melee.
Behaviour: feeding as ritual
Fogman tactics are extremely consistent. They do not try to kill you — once a target is knocked out, nearby Fogmen shoulder the casualty and run back to camp to tie them to a prison pole. A Fog Prince then arrives and starts eating the limbs; if no Prince is nearby, a Fog Heavy presides over the ritual instead, while the surrounding workers shriek with delight.
Individually they are pitiful: barely competent fighters with very fragile bodies. Their weapon is numbers. Fogmen and Fog Heavies move in packs, a single fight usually pulls in other groups from the surrounding area, and even a strong warrior can be drowned.
Fogmen have no dialogue at all, only meaningless screaming. They cannot be pacified, negotiated with or brought back; as far as anyone knows, this is a one-way road with no return.
Deathyards
The Fog Islands are covered in so-called Deathyards — large Fogman camps, usually sited inside one of the island's many craters, with a prison pole at the centre. A Deathyard continuously spawns Fogmen and sends patrols out along the roads that criss-cross the islands. Because several Deathyards frequently sit next to one another, being boxed in on three sides is the region's signature way to die.
Deathyards can be destroyed like animal nests — kill most of the Fogmen that a given yard has spawned. And like animal nests, they grow back after a while.
A Fog Prince's head can be taken from the corpse and sold to any trader for a 6,000 Cats bounty. There are three tricks for picking the Prince out of a melee: yellow blood, a round head, and a Ninja Blade in hand.
Mongrel: the one city that was not swallowed
The free city of Mongrel, at the centre of the Fog Islands, is the sole exception on this land. It answers to no empire and shelters refugees fleeing the Holy Nation — people betting that their pursuers fear the Fogmen more than they do.
Mongrel's ninja guards are strong enough to hold off Fogman assaults, including the Fog Princes that occasionally charge the barracks gate. For a player this is a practical resource: stay in town and the bounties deliver themselves.
Origins: a parasite, or the loss of a queen?
The cause of the Deadhive is one of the few Kenshi puzzles where both explanations are endorsed by the game.
The parasite theory comes from in-game Hiver dialogue: a neurological parasite took their minds and controls them from within. But the wiki itself flags the reliability of this claim as questionable — player dialogue is not the same as objective fact.
The lost-queen theory has a great deal of mechanical evidence behind it. Kill or kidnap either Hive Queen and every settlement of that Hive converts directly into Deadhive Overrun ruins, with Fogman Deathyards beginning to spawn in Dreg, Okran's Gulf and Venge. If both queens fall, Fogmen spread to every former Hiver location. This strongly supports one inference: Hivers cannot hold on to their minds once deprived of their queen's pheromones, even if they left the Hive long ago. The worker drone's own racial description says that individuals separated from Hive control "usually die" — and "die", here, may not be literal.
The name itself is a clue: the "dead" in Deadhive need not mean having stopped breathing, and reads closer to a state of undeath.
Given that the Fog Islands sit right next to Venge and Dreg, the wiki leans towards the view that this was once a Hiver ecosystem comparable to — perhaps even continuous with — the Western Hive, which collapsed at some ancient point, leaving today's Fogmen as the remnant. One extended reading that circulates in the player community goes further: after that Hive's queen died, the Princes kept breeding using her hatching apparatus (or her corpse) to keep the population going, producing malformed offspring that got madder with every generation, until in the end even the Princes were eaten by what they had made.
How the world sees the Fogmen
The interesting part is that in Kenshi the existence of the Fogmen is common knowledge, not a horrifying anomaly.
- The player character mentions them on first entering the Fog Islands
- Drunks in Swamp bars conflate ordinary Hivers with Fogmen: "E's only a bloody bleedin' bloody Fogman innie, Margery?"
- The Fog Prince's head has a publicly posted bounty
- The Holy Nation borders the Fogmen directly and has spent years defending Okran's Gulf against their incursions, yet never mentions them in any doctrinal text — as though this were routine border administration
Holy Nation patrols do include cannibalism among the crimes they charge the "dark races" with, and they are capable of telling Southern Hivers from Western Hivers, which means they are not simply confusing Hivers with Fogmen: they know perfectly well that Hivers turn into Fogmen.
If Holy Lord Phoenix falls and the Holy Nation's armies pull back from the frontier, Fogmen move straight into the abandoned Holy military bases. Deadhive Overrun — the Fogman-occupied ruin on the edge of Okran's Gulf — may itself be a product of exactly that process: a border outpost of too little value, given up voluntarily.
