ElderReport
English：Elder · Characters
A P4 Unit Skeleton who brainwashed a crowd of humans into believing they are "Skeletons" and then sent them out to kill their own kind. He rewrote Stobe's history — and admits that he is lying.
The Elder is the leader of the Skeleton Bandits, a P4 Unit Skeleton who holds court at Iron HQ in The Crags. He is one of the most malicious characters in Kenshi — not because of how hard he hits, but because of what he has done.
A crowd of people who believe they are machines
The faction's name is a con. Apart from the Elder himself, they are all human — Greenlanders wearing Skeleton Masks with metal plates strapped over their bodies. The Elder brainwashed them into believing they are skeleton robots, and into hating the fleshly races[V1 0:02:04]. He himself is a genuine P4 Unit, and he founded the cult out of a deep hatred of humans; the whole procedure has two steps — first get the believers to give up their humanity, then send them out to kill their own kind[V2 0:21:54].
We are superior! We are free from flesh pleasures! We are free from bodily filth! We are free from the grasping mind! We. Are. Skeletons. — the Elder's propaganda
Taken literally, the propaganda is true — for the Elder. He genuinely does not need to eat, does not tire and is untouched by the weather. But he says all this to a crowd who still have to eat, who still bleed and who will still die of old age, and demands that they live by it.
His purpose is not obscure: the game files state plainly that he enjoys watching humans slaughter each other. The Skeleton Bandits are in permanent conflict with the Crab Raiders, the Reavers and the United Cities, and the Elder never has to raise a hand himself — he only has to maintain the faith.
The cult ranges over Stobe's Gamble, Stobe's Garden, The Crags and The Pits, and is internally graded into Upgraded Skeleton Guards, Upgraded Skeleton Bandits, ordinary Skeleton Bandits and Broken Skeleton Bandits[V1 0:02:04]. One detail neatly demonstrates how one-directional this faith is: they regard the Skeleton Legion as comrades (a faction standing of 100), and the Legion attacks them on sight[V1 0:02:04].
What he did to Stobe
The centre of the Elder's doctrine is Stobe.
The Stobe the mainstream evidence points to is the being who prevented the extinction of humanity in the Skeleton Wars. The Elder's version is the exact opposite: Stobe was the "exterminator of the human plague" and simultaneously a "martyr" — he will even thank Stobe for the sacrifice that returned the land to purity[V3 0:03:34][V4 0:09:34].
The interesting part is that the lie can be called out to his face. If the player talks to him with a Skeleton character, the only available response is to point out that this is a lie, and that the Elder knows it perfectly well — and he does not deny it[V3 0:03:34]. Told "that is a lie and you know it", his entire answer is "so what"[V4 0:09:34]. He then goes on to call it a kind of "ironic justice", saying that Stobe has "finally received the recognition he deserves", and also a "fitting comeuppance". The same exchange demonstrates something else: his resentment of humanity has not diminished by an inch in the present day[V3 0:03:34].
Those few lines leave one of the hardest blanks in Kenshi's lore:
- Where exactly is the "irony"?
- Who is the "comeuppance" aimed at — humanity? Stobe? The Skeletons themselves?
- Is the "recognition" he wants Stobe to have reverence, or infamy?
The game gives no answer. The two mainstream speculations offered by lore channels and the community are: that the Elder hates Stobe (for saving humanity and ruining the extinction project) and therefore rewrote him as a butcher in order to humiliate him; or that the Elder actually admires Stobe, believes humanity did not deserve that sacrifice, and so took the hero back out of human hands and repackaged him as a Skeleton hero[V1 0:03:15]. Both are hypotheses at the level of motive; the game text favours neither.
A case study in CPU bloat
Some commentators treat the Elder not as a straightforward villain but as a textbook case of a structural flaw in the Skeleton population: he has been furious for centuries over the price he paid at Obedience, and with nowhere to discharge that emotion it piled up over the centuries and finally set into blind Skeleton supremacism. The cult, and the lie that "Stobe's dying wish was the eradication of all organic life", are both products of that process[V5 0:09:01].
On this reading the Elder and Cat-Lon are two models of the same malfunction — the difference being that Cat-Lon's obsession was aimed at his own subjects, while the Elder's found a group of humans willing to do the work for him. This is an interpretive position, not stated setting.
The AI Core
The Elder carries an AI Core worth about 25,000 Cats. It is a "death item" — take it off him and he stops functioning immediately.
That core 
also makes him the only NPC in the game whose AI Core is flagged as stolen when removed. In other words, even if he has not yet been marked as an enemy, pulling that core out counts as theft.
His other legacy is a Meitou-grade Ringed Sabre forged by Cross, one of the finest examples of that weapon in the game.
Combat power, and a joke at the data layer
His Strength is 60 and his Toughness 75, with Sabres, Hackers, Heavy Weapons, Blunt, Polearms and his melee attack and defence all at 75, and Katanas at 60 — strong, but not top tier. The genuinely awkward part is the crowd of Skeleton Bandits standing around him.
Worth noting is that his Dexterity is only 10. The reason is not characterisation but data: his stealth-family skills were explicitly set to 10, and Dexterity follows the stealth family. Had the developer left that field alone, his Dexterity would have been 75. One uncleaned field, and the number drops from 75 to 10.
Even so, the game files still place him at the head of the Skeleton Bandits, and players running sandbox arena fights habitually send him out as the faction's representative, effectively treating him as its number one fighter[V6 0:00:43]. The most common matchup is against the Savant and the Skin Bandits — both sides being groups that "believe they are something": one believes it is made of skeletons, the other believes it needs a new skin[V7 0:00:11].
Joining him
A player of any race can join the Skeleton Bandits through dialogue, given the right options. A human character entering Iron HQ is treated as trespassing and attacked, yet the Elder is still willing to talk and still willing to sign you up on the spot — a contradiction that probably says more than anything else about his attitude to the concept of "human": if it is useful, killing it can wait.
Skeleton characters get their own dialogue, which is the branch that calls out his lie described above.
After he falls
If the Elder is killed or imprisoned, the balance of power in the southeast reorganises in a chain:
- Iron HQ is taken over by the Southern Hive
- Patrols that used to be one Upgraded Skeleton Bandit leading ten to fifteen decay into remnants of one to five "Broken Skeleton Bandits" — lose the prophet and the faith comes apart at once
- Southern Hive Prince patrols start appearing in Stobe's Garden and The Crags
- If the Savant is still alive and free, Skin Bandit patrols eight to twenty strong flood into The Pits and The Crags
That last line is the best footnote on the southeastern power vacuum: remove one madman and another one fills the space.
Trivia
Skeleton Bandits occasionally say "Resistance is futile" — an easter egg referencing the Borg from Star Trek.
They also do not scream in pain when put into a Peeler Machine. The technical reason is that they use Skeleton voice data, but the detail overlaps almost perfectly with the characterisation: they keep playing the machine right up to the last moment.
See also
Video citations
- History of Kenshi: Minor Powers | Cults - Crab Raiders, Skel Bandits, Skin Bandits, Preacher CultCivilizationEx
- History of Kenshi: Minor Powers | DocumentaryCivilizationEx
- The Age of Chaos: How Cat-Lon Became OkranHeroInHisHead
- The Whole Story of The First EmpireHeroInHisHead
- The Sadness of the SkeletonsHeroInHisHead
- Kenshi Colosseum: King Gorillo VS Pit Gang LeadersHeroInHisHead
- Kenshi Colosseum: Elder | 10 Skeleton Bandits VS Savant | 10 Skin BanditsHeroInHisHead