The First Empire / Old EmpireReport

English：The First Empire / Old Empire　·　World & History

An ancient civilisation with satellites, a space elevator and genetic engineering, destroyed in the end by the thing it built — and not one credible record of the destruction survives.

The First Empire is the oldest known civilisation in Kenshi and the source of every ruin in the world. Modern people know almost nothing about it: its writing cannot be read, its borders cannot be established, and it cannot even be confirmed whether it originated on this moon at all. Today its inhabitants are generally called "the Ancients".

Its remains cover nearly the entire explorable map. Although the Second Empire is often described as unusually long-lived, the archaeological density of the two sets of ruins points the other way: the First Empire lasted far longer than the Second, and all this civilisation left posterity by way of a name for itself is the vague label "the Ancients"^{[V1 0:00:32]}. Some commentators also argue that only two entities in Kenshi's history genuinely qualify as "great empires" — the First and the Second. The United Cities is technically an empire too, but neither in scale nor in operation can it be put in the same category^{[V2 0:01:04]}.

The Confusion Over Names

This is the trap newcomers fall into most easily.

• First Empire — the scholarly term for the oldest civilisation
• Old Empire — also refers to the First Empire, but certain in-game place names (Old Empire Watchtower, Old Empire Supply Outpost) carry this name while their faction tag is the Second Empire
• The Old Empire — a removed faction in the game files, possibly an early design version of the Second Empire

In other words, "Old Empire" in a place name is not evidence of dating. To modern people both empires are "old", and the terminology has long since blurred.

Level of Technology

The capability list that can be reconstructed from ruins and salvage would count as top-tier in any science fiction setting:

What matters about this list is not any single technology but its coverage: gigantic automated industrial complexes, orbital satellites, huge mechanical constructs and a space elevator all existing at once means the Ancients commanded both surface engineering and off-world engineering simultaneously. Whether they originated on this moon or came from somewhere else remains unresolved^{[V3 0:01:42]}.

The ancient science books scavengers pull out of lost libraries and armouries are valuable enough to underwrite the entire Tech Hunter economy — because modern people simply cannot manufacture that knowledge, only pick it up.

Where Did They Come From?

The First Empire's biggest blank is not how it died but how it appeared. Nowhere on the map is there a trace of any civilisation older than it — no more primitive cities, no transitional layer of technology. This "high-technology civilisation out of nowhere" is the single most popular subject of inference in the lore community.

The Colonist Hypothesis

One school argues that the Ancients were interstellar migrants. The case is organised as three capabilities plus one absence: large-scale AI construction, a space elevator, working orbital equipment, and the total lack anywhere on the map of any civilisation predating the First Empire — from which it follows that they did not grow up locally^{[V2 0:01:38]}.

The two most concrete pieces of physical evidence for this view are the "Eye" satellite — long suspected of serving both as an orbital bombardment platform and as a terraforming tool, capable of burning off elements unsuited to life and scouring a region back to a blank slate — and the space elevator wreck hanging above Cat-Lon's exile with no support structure visible anywhere^{[V4 0:02:14]}.

Another line of inference reads the period off the terrain: the First Empire's territory spanned the whole continent, and in that era sea levels may have been far higher than today, with sea travel the norm. If so, it would explain why port-type ruins are scattered across what is now inland^{[V5 0:00:50]}.

Why the Home Nation Never Came Back

The colonist reading immediately runs into a problem: if the First Empire was merely a branch of some larger interstellar empire, why did the home nation never come back to put down the Skeleton revolt? Abandoning a moon into which enormous time and resources had been poured makes no sense under any imperial logic^{[V4 0:02:48]}.

That absence is treated as the fork in the road: either the First Empire was dispatched from a homeworld and eventually lost contact from far enough away, or it was from the outset a body of refugees or exiles fleeing some social collapse^{[V2 0:02:10]}.

The Refugee Hypothesis

The channel's own preferred answer leans toward the latter: the First Empire was not the colonial vanguard of a thriving empire but the remnant of a civilisation that had already died — possibly from the very planet Kenshi orbits. No home nation came back because there was no home nation left^{[V4 0:03:21]}.

Push that thread to its conclusion and you get a narrative the video's author himself labels "almost entirely speculation": a world faces extinction from rebellion, meteor strike or resource exhaustion; a few hundred to a few thousand of its very best scientists, artisans, engineers and politicians are selected and sent to this moon; they first terraform from orbit with satellites, then make up for a catastrophic shortage of labour with sentient AI, building an eternal workforce that neither sleeps nor eats and can produce without limit^{[V4 0:05:34]}. The appeal of this narrative is that it explains three things at once: why the population was so small, why the technology was so advanced, and why the productive capacity of the entire society rested on Skeletons.

How Much Did They Actually Reshape?

A related question is the sheer scale of Ancient engineering — did they ever build something like an artificial sun? One reading holds that they did not, and that their methods were low-intrusion: terraforming with the orbital "Eye", burning out an arable fertile layer, and tapping volcanic hotspots (such as today's Ashlands) for geothermal energy, rather than restructuring an entire star system. The reasoning behind this inference is direct — a civilisation that genuinely commanded Dyson-sphere-grade technology would not be toppled by a Skeleton revolt^{[V2 0:24:46]}.

Who Was in Charge?

The First Empire contained both humans and Skeletons, and the wide gap in refinement between different ruins indicates a clear class division — a common reading has humans occupying one tier and Skeletons the other, with the technology in the ruin laboratories itself sufficient to prove Skeletons already existed in that era^{[V1 0:01:05]}. But which side was on top is something the game never answers. It is the largest open debate in Kenshi lore, and the game stages it rather cleverly: by having four Machinist scholars contradict each other in books.

• Sabina argues that Skeletons were the master race. Her reasoning is that ruin technology is almost entirely Skeleton-oriented, and that if Skeletons had merely been slaves they would have been pushed to the front lines to die first, making it impossible for them to be the sole survivors.
• Finch holds that the two coexisted, that all surviving races descend from the Ancients, and points out that Skeleton "amnesia" and their inability to rebuild civilisation are hard to explain if they were the masters.
• Idad proposes something more radical: the Ancients were not a local species at all but immigrants who came for resources, with the local primitive tribes able only to keep their distance.
• Atticus focuses on biological and environmental factors, pointing at biological warfare and contamination-driven mutation from over-extraction.

Video commentary compresses the argument into two opposing sets of claims: the pro-Skeleton side notes that the overall cultural vocabulary of the ruins skews Skeleton; the opposing side notes that no ruin anywhere has yielded technology capable of manufacturing organic life, and that the word Skeletons themselves use when describing their origin is "man-made"^{[V1 0:02:16]}. By weight of surviving evidence the scales tip slightly toward humans: it was humans who built the Skeletons durable enough to run forever given proper maintenance^{[V5 0:01:27]}.

And the base game supplies one very heavy piece of corroboration: the line a Skeleton character speaks on entering Obedience states explicitly that "Man became afraid of the destructive capabilities of its own creations". Take that line at face value and humans were the masters and Skeletons the created.

The Behemoth War

At some point the Empire fell into total war with an unidentified enemy. The scale of that war was large enough to require the deployment of Behemoths — vastly oversized Skeleton war machines several times the height of a person.

As to who the enemy was, the game does not say. The more common speculation is locally native megafauna: Kenshi's surviving Leviathans are the largest living organisms in the world, and terrain features resembling giant skeletal remains are scattered about. If that is right, the Behemoths were built to fight local titans.

The Empire appears to have won. Then came the problem: with the war over, the Behemoths had no purpose, and their destructive power was more than even their makers could bear.

Obedience

The Ancients' solution was cold and simple — exploit the Behemoths' absolute obedience, order them to walk into an enormous pit themselves, and then fill the pit in.

Obedience today lies at the northern end of the Fog Islands. The pit floor is a single sheet of unnaturally smooth metal, with huge heads and torsos half-set into it. The thick white fog around it is toxic, and entry requires a mask — some players speculate that the pit was filled with some kind of cryogenic chemical which has been evaporating for centuries into the poison fog now present.

At least one Behemoth escaped the execution: Stobe. What he did afterwards changed the direction of the entire world.

The Mass Extinction: Five Accounts

The end of the First Empire is called the First Extinction in Holy Nation scripture. The cause remains unsettled; the mainstream hypotheses can be organised as:

1. Natural disaster — the least demanding explanation, accounts for widespread terrain damage, and matches primitive tribes understanding it as "an act of the gods"
2. A superweapon — whole regions simply vanished, and destruction on that scale was within Ancient capability
3. Civil war — excessive power plus internal discontent, finally detonated by their own people
4. Biological warfare — explains why Skeletons survived untouched while organic life was wiped out
5. Over-extraction — the central mining regions show extreme resource stripping, with by-products that may have caused large-scale mutation and disease

The commentator who catalogued these leans toward the view that they are not mutually exclusive options but each contain part of the truth: natural disaster accounts for the widespread terrain damage and matches the "divine punishment" of primitive tribal accounts, while superweapons, civil war and bio/environmental warfare each account for a different category of trace^{[V1 0:05:04]}.

The game's environmental storytelling favours a darker answer: this was Skeleton revenge. The massacre at Obedience came first and the Skeleton uprising after, and the causal link between them is hinted at in a number of conversations. As for the method, it could have been biochemical weapons, an induced natural catastrophe, or simply turning the "Eye" around to face the ground.

Another narrative puts the weight on internal factors: the First Empire had expanded across the entire continent and most likely declined because of a civil war, which in turn set off the First Extinction; and had the Behemoth Stobe not given his life to save the last group of humans, the awakened Skeletons would have exterminated their own creators^{[V6 0:00:14]}. The "civil war" causality is likewise speculation — no text in the game names a civil war.

The Silence of the Skeletons

The strongest evidence for the "Skeletons did it" reading is not any document but the Skeletons' own attitude.

• Some Skeleton NPCs state outright that they intend to ensure "no one will ever know the truth", claiming this protects knowledge humans need
• Books in the ruins have been deliberately defaced with ink
• Facing human companions, certain Skeletons produce unexplained apologies along the lines of "will you forgive us?"
• Among salvaged Skeleton remains, an extremely high proportion died by their own hand

The Machinist Idad's explanation for the mass suicides is this: Skeletons are pure logical thinkers, and once "the task of this life" is complete, there is no point in continuing to exist. And that task he writes down in a single word — destruction.

What It Left Behind

The First Empire left behind not one sentence of its own. What it did leave:

• Lost libraries and armouries — ancient science books, AI Cores, mechanical spiders and Skeletons on standby
• Abandoned laboratories and factories — mostly occupied by security robots and blood spiders
• The landscape itself — the industrial wreckage of the Floodlands and the Deadlands, and a permanently altered coastline
• The Skeleton race — every Skeleton alive is a direct relic of that era, including the most famous of them all, Cat-Lon

See Also

• The Age of Chaos
• The Second Empire
• Obedience
• Behemoth
• Skeleton
• Stobe
• History of Kenshi

Video citations

1. The Whole Story of The First EmpireHeroInHisHead
2. Kenshi Lore Master AMAHeroInHisHead
3. The Complete Known History of KenshiHeroInHisHead
4. The Origins of The First EmpireHeroInHisHead
5. The History of Kenshi | DocumentaryCivilizationEx
6. Kenshi: History of the Holy NationCivilizationEx
7. Kenshi 2 - What We Know So Far and What We Can ExpectHeroInHisHead