GorilloReport

English：Gorillo　·　Creatures

The white-furred giant apes of the central wastes have terrifying stats, deal almost no damage and always travel alone, which makes them Kenshi's best free sparring partner; their black-furred cousins and two unique individuals are another matter.

The Gorillo is a white-furred ape-like creature that roams the wastelands of the central continent, most obvious for the fanged maw that takes up almost its entire head. They attack anything that passes by and their stat sheet looks intimidating — but in an actual fight they are among the friendliest monsters in the game.

Why it is a free sparring partner

The whole Gorillo family shares one design trait: high attack, high defence, negligible damage.

Their animal weapon provides a base of only 5.2 cut + 13 blunt, and it is the only animal weapon in the game with no pierce damage at all. Since the bulk of animal damage normally comes from pierce, which is unaffected by armour quality, losing that component makes Gorillo output collapse. Even with every stat maxed to 100, its strongest attack animation lands slightly under 53 damage against a target with 50 Toughness (20.5 cut + 32.5 blunt).

On the other side of the ledger, white individuals have all combat stats at 60 and black at 80, and the black variant's randomisation range is a full ±15 — you may well meet a black Gorillo with 95 defence.

High defence means your attack skills climb fast; low damage means you will not die. Both being true at once is exactly what a Kenshi player wants.

Behaviour

Their spawn group is always "×1" — Gorillos never travel in packs. Combined with clumsy animations and a movement speed of 9–19 mph, they can be kited with a crossbow or simply outrun.

In theory the game files contain a "Gorillo Nest" holding a nest squad of 2–6 black individuals and its own loot table (first aid kits, animal skins, raw meat and a batch of low-quality weapons). But the nest's spawn regions are empty — it does not appear in any region, making it cut content in all but name.

The variants

Great White Gorillo

The Great White Gorillo is an XL-size unique locked inside the derelict headquarters building at the centre of Mourn. Picking the lock counts as a crime by the rules, but you will almost never be caught. It can spawn on any floor of the building and generally only attacks once the player steps onto the floor it is on.

With all due respect, no, don't touch those gates. I don't care if you think you're the next Tinfist — we lost two men trapping that thing in there. Only takes one wannabe hero to let it back out again. — Mourn barman

Its biggest difference from the other variants is a speed of 20–25 mph — far faster than any other Gorillo, which makes kiting useless against it. With a blood pool of 655–715 and torso parts at 605–665, it is a straight endurance slugging match.

The reward is substantial: Great White Claw ×1 (around 3,000) plus Great White Skin ×3 (around 3,000 each). On top of that, carrying the Great White Claw and talking to the barman gets you congratulations and free Sake and Grog.

King Gorillo

The King Gorillo is a giant version of the Black Gorillo, spawning in a fixed position in the Crumbling Labs of Stobe's Gamble, and only ever once per game. All of its combat stats are 100, and so is its Martial Arts — which matters, because an ordinary character's Martial Arts defaults to one tenth of their combat level. Setting age multipliers aside, it has the highest total combat stats of any character in the game.

Even so it still carries the Gorillo family's low-damage weapon, so the real difficulty is that you cannot get through it and cannot get away from it, not that it will kill you outright. There is no special reward for killing it beyond Animal Skin ×8; the payoff is entirely in the loot inside the lab.

In the community it occupies roughly the position of "Kenshi's King Kong", and one lore video refers to it simply by its habitat, Stobe's Gamble^{[V1 0:00:43]}. There is no official yardstick for its strength, but one sandbox fight offers a rough reference point: set against the three gang leaders of the southeast at once (the Reavers' Valamon, the Crab Queen and the Elder), it traded blows evenly and took all three working together to bring down, with the Crab Queen coming away with a broken bone^{[V1 0:05:25]}. Sandbox experiments like this are obviously not official canon and only work as a rough measuring stick — but they illustrate very directly what "all stats 100 plus Martial Arts 100" means in a real fight.

War Gorillo

The War Gorillo is a breed "domesticated" by the Southern Hive, statistically identical to the Black Gorillo but belonging to the Hive's Southern Hive faction. They mostly stay around the southern Queen's main nest and are also assigned to raiding parties. The standard advice against them is stealth, ranged weapons, or simply overwhelming numbers — because unlike wild individuals, they do not come alone.

The trap in the counter-weapon

The Falling Sun heavy sword gets a +50% damage bonus against Gorillos, but the scope is extremely narrow: it applies only to the standard white Gorillo and the Great White Gorillo, and does nothing at all against the Black Gorillo or the King Gorillo.

Also mind the name collision: the game contains a human bandit leader called Gorrillo (head of the Gorrillo Bandits, carrying a Meitou-quality Exile Plank) who has nothing to do with the species, and to whom the Falling Sun bonus naturally does not apply.

That Exile Plank has, however, produced a piece of speculation. One channel reasons from in-game dialogue that a Shek warrior possibly drawn from the "Five Invincibles" (rendered in the video as Suchon) lost a fight to this bandit leader, had his weapon taken as a trophy, and was then shorn of his horn in disgrace and exiled from the Kingdom; afterwards he became the leader of a warlike faction that longs for the old tribal ways and opposes Esata's strategic line, wandering the world with an identity he can never buy back^{[V2 0:15:44]}. The whole thread rests on reverse-reasoning from "why is that weapon in a bandit's hands"; the game never says so outright, and it should be treated as a hypothesis.

Trivia

• The Gorillo has three attack animations, two with a power coefficient of 100 and one with only 70.
• The "Gorillos" faction does not appear on the factions list, and coexists with the Gutters, the Western Hive and the Herbivore faction. The Great White Gorillo and the War Gorillo do not belong to this faction.
• The United Weekly Series once reported that "Gorillos and golden pants" might be the next hot fashion trend. No golden pants exist in game for either humanoids or apes, so the question is unverifiable.

See also

• Creatures overview
• Beak Thing
• Leviathan
• Hive

Video citations

1. Kenshi Colosseum: King Gorillo VS Pit Gang LeadersHeroInHisHead
2. The Origins of the ShekHeroInHisHead