FloodlandsReport
English：Floodlands · Locations
A flooded belt of industrial ruin under permanent drizzle. The First Empire mass-produced Skeletons here, and since the line stopped the whole region has held nothing but Iron Spiders and the occasional Skeleton — not a single town.
The Floodlands lie in the north-west of the continent, wedged between the Cannibal Plains and Okran's Gulf. The name says everything: a marsh sitting in water, under a sky that drizzles forever. Between the pools stand enormous structures that plainly do not belong to this era — this was once an industrial zone, and the industry is very likely the reason nothing grows here now.
This place is a relic of the old world. Technological marvels were mass-produced here; machines making more machines to make yet more machines. In the end, they could not feed its appetite. — Skeleton player character
The Skeleton character's line has a follow-up: "This is where I was born."
Geography and Hydrology
The rainfall in the Floodlands is not merely atmosphere. The water here is thought to be the source of the Wend: rainfall gathers, passes through Wend and Okran's Pride, flows on to the Border Zone and finally settles into the low-lying Swamp. The headwaters of the entire western river system are this industrial ruin.
Technically, the Floodlands' environmental modifiers in the FCS are distinctly anomalous: water, aridity, green and swamp are all flagged 0%, fertility is unknown, and the only definite resource is iron 100 — the game defines this place as a rust flat with no ecology.
The Zone with No Town
The Floodlands is one of the very few biomes on the continent with no town at all, and no camps or animal nests spawning either. There are only two kinds of point on the map: one tower with someone in it, and a pile of ruins with nobody.
Burn's Tower stands in the northern Floodlands and is the only place in the zone with a permanent resident. The unique recruit Burn stands outside it — an adventurer retired by age, who can be persuaded out for one last journey[V1 0:21:21]. His reason for settling here is entirely practical: nobody sane goes near spider robots, and those robots happen to keep out every more dangerous intruder for him — a security detail he does not have to pay.
The tower holds a considerable pile of loot, the most important item being Skeleton Repair Kits. If Burn is the first Skeleton the player recruits, that stash is close to essential.
The remaining points of interest:
| Name | Nature | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Ancient Labs | Ancient location | Garrisoned by security spiders; AI Cores and ancient science books to loot |
| Suspicious Lab | Ancient location | Already occupied by Cannibals |
| Leaning Tower | Ancient location | No enemies inside; pure loot |
| Empty Ruins ×2, Fallen Tower, Ruined Tower | Pure decoration | Visible on the map, not interactive |
Who Still Walks Here
No holdings means no garrisons, so every encounter in the Floodlands comes from homeless spawns, and the list is startlingly short: Iron Spiders, Skeleton Killers and Skeleton Seekers.
The Iron Spider belongs to the Old Machines faction and is a weakened version of the security spider, with 40 in every attribute. They do not eat people, but they are fitted with crippling weaponry — a lightly armoured character who goes down with nobody to help will usually die of the injuries outright. They attack anything living regardless of faction, which paradoxically makes the Floodlands a natural barrier.
The faction tag "Floodland Ruins" is used only to mark those unmanned towers and has no patrols at all. One small data anomaly: this faction somehow owns a ruin located in the Stenn Desert.
The Floodlands and the First Empire
The Floodlands is the most direct display case for the First Empire's legacy. The point of that Skeleton line is not nostalgia but production capacity: the factories here were the First Empire's line for manufacturing new Skeletons, and at some point it stopped.
The consequences of this determined the next thousand years of history. The factory that made Skeletons sat in the region later called the Floodlands; with the First Empire's fall and the wholesale loss of technology, the line stopped for good. Add the wave of mass self-termination after the extinction, and the robot population shrank drastically during the Age of Chaos[V3 0:02:46]. The Skeleton population could never replace an individual again, and entered an irreversible decline; the survivors dragged themselves through the long Age of Chaos carrying guilt, until eventually a group of them decided to make protecting humans their atonement, raised Cat-Lon up and founded the Second Empire. The Second Empire's motive originates here, buried under the water of the Floodlands.
- Sea levels were higher during the Second Empire era, and the Floodlands sank entirely underwater; the water only receded centuries later to leave today's half-drowned state. - Complex chemicals and heavy metals from the factory district dissolved into the surrounding land during that long immersion. And that contaminated land happened to be the only fertile ground nearby, and therefore the ground used to settle human farmers — the single most crucial step in the whole hypothesis[V4 0:12:17]. - Long-term consumption of contaminated crops raised aggression and degraded cognition; combined with the corruption of the local Stobe cult, this eventually evolved into today's Cannibals. Even the Cannibals' innate acid resistance is attributed to this. - The same reasoning is used to explain the soil colour of the Cannibal Plains: with the planet's water level higher during the Second Empire, iron from the Floodlands machine lines leached into the groundwater and contaminated downstream soil, producing gleying. Supporters often cite the Gut in the Great Desert, close to sea level, as corroboration — iron concentrations there are high enough that plants evolved to metabolise it, and players can harvest iron straight off the trees[V5 0:04:33].
These inferences are internally consistent, but they rest entirely on indirect evidence.
Practical Notes
The Floodlands are unfriendly to flesh-and-blood characters but a rare high-quality training ground for Skeletons: Burn's Tower provides a free repair bed, and the zone supplies an endless stream of Iron Spiders, letting you push Toughness and every attack skill at the same time. There are no slavers here, only machines.
Video citations
- Kenshi: All Unique CompanionsCivilizationEx
- The Whole Story of The Second EmpireHeroInHisHead
- Kenshi: History of the SkeletonsCivilizationEx
- The Origins of the CannibalsHeroInHisHead
- Why is Vain Red? - The Science of KenshiHeroInHisHead