FogmenReport
English：Fogmen · Races
What is left of a Hive that lost its Queen. They build nothing, farm nothing, say nothing — they do exactly one thing, which is drag living people back to camp, tie them to a pole and eat them.
The Fogmen, called the Deadhive in the game's own files, are a degenerate branch of the Hive that infests the Fog Islands in the northwest. They are one of the very few groups in Kenshi with whom no dealing of any kind is possible — no villages, no fields, no language, only endless screaming and endless feeding.
Cousins of the other Hives. Lost their minds to a parasite. It controls them from the inside. Beyond help now. — Hiver player character, Fog Islands
They used to be Hivers
On paper the Fogmen simply are Hivers: worker, soldier and prince castes are all present, each one strictly worse than its counterpart. Deadhive Workers have far lower body-part health than their Western Hive equivalents, the soldiers keep only half the head health, and the princes are frailer than a normal prince. They are also the only Hive branch without acid resistance[V1 0:07:24], and they cannot eat raw meat or human teeth — even the most basic Hiver diet has been lost.
Language went with it. They do not speak, only shriek incoherently, and their behaviour has collapsed into a single loop: send out Fogmen and Fog Heavies in packs, capture living bodies, and haul them back to feed the Fog Prince who leads the camp[V1 0:07:24].
The decisive evidence is in the world states: if the player kills both the Western and Southern Hive Queens, the Fogmen spread into every former Hive territory, overwriting the Western Hive, the Southern Hive and the outlying Hive villages alike. That is about as close as the game comes to saying it outright: the Fogmen are Hivers without a Queen.
"Parasite" or "pheromones"
The game offers two accounts of why the Fogmen are mad, and never arbitrates between them.
The parasite reading comes from Hiver characters' own dialogue: their minds have been taken by some neurological parasite that drives them from within. The wiki, however, flags it explicitly — the details are unknown and the reliability of these rumours is questionable.
The pheromone reading is inferred from mechanics: Hiver behaviour is held together by pheromones released by the Queen, Hivers separated from the swarm for too long become unwelcome "Hiveless", and when a Queen dies the whole hive's mental architecture goes with her. The Fogmen spread mechanic is direct support for this. Some versions of the argument hold that a specific secretion of the Queen is itself the precondition for a sound mind; both readings remain speculation, and the game does not settle the question[V1 0:07:24].
One reading holds that the two can be stacked: some disease or parasite killed the Fog Islands' original Queen, and what actually pushed the population over the edge was the chain collapse that followed her death. This hypothesis also supplies a reproductive step — a population cut off from its pheromone link panicked, and the princes fell back on using the Queen's hatching apparatus, even her corpse, to keep producing offspring. With no genetic template to work from and no Queen's will to restrain them, the new individuals were born mad, each generation worse than the last[V2 0:13:20]. In this version the earliest princes were probably eaten long ago by the offspring they bred, and every subsequent generation came out more broken than the one before, until nothing was left but breeding and feeding.
There is one piece of circumstantial support for the inference: there are so many Fogmen that even the Holy Nation, the strongest military power on the map, is losing territory to them — a group with no production and no agriculture sustaining numbers on that scale itself demands some still-functioning reproductive mechanism to explain it[V2 0:13:20].
Deathyards and the feeding ritual
The Fog Islands are a valley under permanent low fog, its surface strewn with enormous metal wreckage nobody can identify any more — a landscape all but identical to neighbouring Obedience.
Fogmen camps are called Deathyards, and usually sit inside one of the Fog Islands' many huge craters. They continuously spawn packs of Fogmen, and a prison pole stands at the centre of each.
Their tactics are extremely simple and extremely effective:
- Swarm in with overwhelming numbers; individuals are pathetic but casualties are irrelevant to them
- Once a target is knocked out, they stop fighting, pick the body up and run home
- The victim is tied to the prison pole to wait for a Fog Prince
- The prince arrives following the screaming and the smell, and starts with the limbs, while the workers and soldiers around it shriek along
Even wiping out every Fogman in the area does not make a carried-off companion safe — fresh Fogmen spawn in endlessly to replace the dead. Rescue is possible, but since the feeding order starts at the limbs, whoever you get back is often missing an arm or a leg.
A Deathyard can be destroyed like an animal nest, simply by killing everything it has spawned; it reappears after a while, though, and the Fog Islands often have several Deathyards packed side by side, so clearing one pulls in two more.
Fogmen will not carry off skeletons — there is no meat on a Skeleton.
Mongrel: an island inside the fog
Dead centre of the Fog Islands sits a lawless town that belongs to no empire — Mongrel. It began as a camp of ninjas who broke prisoners out of the Holy Nation's Rebirth and survived by accident when the pursuit was swallowed by Fogmen, then made a virtue of it and dug in where they stood.
Today Mongrel is the end of the line for fugitives: Holy Nation runaway slaves, ninja thieves, Tech Hunters and criminals of every stripe. The gate guards are tough enough to hold back wave after wave of Fogmen, but the price is that nobody really leaves — outside is nothing but Fogmen, and the town's food stores are running down.
People don't get used to coming here. If you're lucky enough to reach Mongrel, then you're stuck in Mongrel. — Ninja guard
That line describes something very concrete: people who escape the Fogmen's hunt can usually find shelter in Mongrel, and then never get back out of the region[V1 0:07:24].
Mongrel is not the only place under pressure. The Holy Nation borders the Fog Islands directly along Okran's Gulf and spends years holding off their infiltration; under certain world states, Holy Nation military bases are simply taken over by Fogmen. For a nation defined by its military strength, that is a fairly humiliating record.
The Fog Prince
The Fog Prince is the Fogmen's leader caste, always ringed by workers and three to five Fog Heavies. Its head sells for a 6,000-Cat bounty, and taking the head off a knocked-out prince kills it instantly.
There are a few tricks to picking a prince out of the crowd: yellow blood, a rounder head silhouette, and the ninja blade in its hands. Rather than hunting them in the fog, the cheaper approach is to sit in Mongrel and let them come to you — Fogmen assault waves regularly deliver a prince straight to the guards.
There is one Fogmen holding outside the Fog Islands: the Tower of Fog, off the west coast of Vain, occupied by a prince and a pack of Fogmen.
Holding them off in the Fog Islands
The Fogmen's threat has never been individual strength; it is numbers — depending on difficulty settings a single wave can be dozens or well over a hundred[V3 0:31:22]. That makes the defensive logic for a base in the Fog Islands completely different from anywhere else: rather than building perfect walls to keep them out, it is more workable in practice to let them in, set up a killing point in a courtyard held by melee fighters, and shoot down into it from harpoon turrets on the walls; when it really cannot be held, everyone pulls back into the keep, shuts the door and uses it as a shelter[V3 0:31:22].
The reason this works is exactly the Fogmen's single-track behaviour: they do not besiege, do not flank, and do not retreat over casualties — they simply pour in a straight line at the nearest living thing.
See also
Video citations
- Kenshi: History of the HiversCivilizationEx
- The Origins of the HiversHeroInHisHead
- Kenshi Base Building - Beep's Fog HavenHeroInHisHead
- Turning Beep into the Ultimate SITH LORDHeroInHisHead