GreenlanderReport

English：Greenlander　·　Races

Greenlanders are Kenshi's most common human subrace and the only race with no stat penalties whatsoever - they are this world's baseline, for better and worse.

Mostly coming from a farming culture, they are still a warlike and easily-led people. The worst of them live in ignorance, knowing only greed and fear, answering everything unlike themselves with hatred and violence; but the best of them are the finest scientists, engineers and warriors this land has. — in-game race description

The Greenlander is the more populous of humanity's two subraces and the demographic bulk of the whole Kenshi world. From Holy Nation faithful to rebel farmers, from bounty hunters to swamp ninjas, almost every faction's roster contains Greenlanders.

Position: the world's baseline

Greenlanders play a peculiar role in the systems design — every other race's numbers are calibrated relative to the Greenlander. Hunger rate 1, heal rate 1, bleed rate 1, 100 HP per limb: these are not "mediocrity", they are the scale itself.

It also makes the Greenlander the only race with no experience penalties at all. A player never has to rearrange squad roles to suit racial traits: put a Greenlander on farming, smithing and the front line at the same time and none of it grows any slower. The price is that none of it grows any faster either.

Skill leanings: the business of keeping people alive

Greenlanders get a +20% growth bonus in three skills, and the direction is entirely consistent: Cooking, Farming, Science. All three correspond to settled life — growing food, cooking it, building a research bench. Conversely they have no bonus at all to combat, stealth or smithing, and no penalty either.

In practice this means:

• When building an outpost, Greenlanders are the labour to put on the fields and in the kitchen.
• When research is falling behind, a Greenlander scientist saves a meaningful amount of time.
• But for a squad of dedicated assassins or smiths, Scorchlanders are more efficient.

Distribution and culture

Greenlanders are found all over the map, but their share is most overwhelming inside Holy Nation territory — Holy Nation guards and soldiers are almost uniformly male Greenlanders. The Rebel Farmers who oppose them are likewise mostly Greenlanders, and that is no coincidence: the rebels are, by definition, farmers who fled Holy Nation rule.

Beyond that, Greenlanders show up in essentially every major faction: the United Cities, the Tech Hunters, the Anti-Slavers, the Flotsam Ninjas, bounty hunters, the Dust Bandits, assorted bandit gangs, and the slaves in Rebirth. It is fair to say that Kenshi's social structure rests on the sheer numerical weight of Greenlanders.

The race description's line about "the worst living in ignorance, the best being the finest scientists and warriors" is not just rhetoric. The same race supplies both the mobs burning heretics for the Holy Nation and the scholars studying ancient technology in the Great Library of Black Scratch — the game deliberately gives Greenlanders no essential moral leaning of any kind.

Trivia

• In Kenshi's early, pre-release builds, the Greenlander was the only race in the game; every other race was added later.
• In the game's editor (FCS), any faction or character with no race specified is treated as a Greenlander by default. That makes the Greenlander the "default value" in a technical sense.
• When starting a new game (unless the start forces a race), the initial character's Cooking, Farming and Science all carry a 1.2x bonus — because the character passes through the generation pipeline as a Greenlander first.
• The save system has a well-known exploit: save and reload while a character is bleeding and every NPC's bleed value rises by 20%, multiplied by their racial bleed rate. Since the Greenlander's bleed rate is exactly 1.0, the value can be stacked indefinitely, so in theory any Greenlander can be bled to death by repeated save-loading.

See also

• Human | Scorchlander
• Races overview
• The Holy Nation | Rebel Farmers