Hive Worker DroneReport
English：Hive Worker Drone · Races
The Hive's production caste, called "expendable" by its own race description — the deftest hands, the shortest sight, the highest body count, and the highest asking price of any organic race on the slave market.
An expendable worker bred for the benefit of the hive. They know only obedience, and put service to the hive above their own interests, safety and comfort. Once removed from the controlling influence of the hive they usually die; the very few that become free individuals are simply bewildered by their sudden freedom and the loss of their given purpose, wandering in search of meaning and mostly finding only death or exploitation. — in-game race description
The Hive Worker Drone is the most numerous of the three playable Hive castes and handles every productive activity in the Hive. Within the Hive hierarchy they sit at the bottom — the weakest of the three castes in both body and mind, used as expendable infantry, labourers and farmers — and the most famous of them all is the player companion Beep[V1 0:01:52]. For the biology and separation mechanics the whole race shares, see the Hive overview; this article covers the Worker's statistics, his place in the Hive Village, and his unusually miserable situation out in the world.
Build: good at working while alive, bad at staying that way
The Worker's body is a product of efficiency-first design. The head has 125 health, but chest, stomach and limbs all sit at just 75 — one of the frailest torsos of any playable race. Since Kenshi weights the chest for hits at 140 (head and limbs 80, stomach 60, right arm a mere 40), the overwhelming majority of knockdowns in practice come through that 75-point chest.
| Stat | Value | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Top / bottom speed | 31.318 / 17.896 mph | Bottom speed is the highest of the three Hive subraces |
| Combat move multiplier | 1.2 | Same tier as the Hive Prince |
| Hunger rate | 0.5 | Eats very little |
| Vision multiplier | 0.5 | One of the lowest in the game |
Vision 0.5 is the Worker's most notorious flaw — tied with the Southern Worker, crabs, swamp turtles and iron spiders for the shortest sight range in the game, with the direct consequence that Worker guards in a Hive Village routinely fail to notice a companion being attacked right beside them. On the other hand, a bottom speed of 17.896 mph is the highest of the three subraces: they lose less speed when encumbered or injured, a tangible benefit for a player hauling a cartload of building materials across the map.
Equipment restrictions are harsher than for most races: body armour and legwear are unrestricted, but the head slot excludes a long list of styles including crab helmets, masked helmets, spiked helmets and hachigane (the antennae will not fit), shirts are limited to four Hiver-only tops, and footwear cannot be worn at all.
Skill profile: nine bonuses for three penalties
The Worker's growth multipliers are the most logistics-oriented set in the game:
- +20%: Athletics, Dexterity, Engineer, Farming, Labouring, Stealth, Thievery, Toughness, Turrets
- −20%: Cooking, Science, Strength
Engineer + Labouring + Farming forms a complete Base Building chain, while Stealth + Thievery + Dexterity is an entire thief career. That makes the Worker Kenshi's best builder and burglar — two jobs that need no muscle.
What deserves notice is how much ground that list covers: Labouring, Farming, Athletics, Dexterity, Engineer, Stealth, Thievery, Toughness plus ranged and turret operation, which is very nearly everything outside melee. It also explains their dual identity — both the Hive's productive core and a hot commodity on the slave market[V2 0:05:30].
Strength −20% is a fatal chain reaction: low carry weight, low melee damage, fast stamina drain. Workers do not belong on the front line, and that is deliberate in the race design.
Workers in a Hive Village
In a Western Hive Village, Workers handle cooking, mining, labouring and sleeping — in other words, all actual production. They carry no weapons, and their first reaction to an enemy is to run; but once every nearby Soldier Drone is down, Workers will pick up weapons off the unconscious and fight back.
Mentally the Worker sits in the middle: smarter than the Hive Soldier Drone, nowhere near the Hive Prince. Behaviourally they are the most childlike of the race — Workers follow outsiders through their village giggling, because the visitor is "all squishy".
And "expendable" is not a figure of speech. A Worker being treated will blurt out: "I'm not broken, am I? Broken hivers go in the furnace."
After the Hive: the highest death rate, the highest price
The Worker is the caste with the lowest survival rate after separation. Working backwards from vagrant spawn ratios: Lost Drones in the Border Zone only slightly outnumber Lost Princes, yet the Worker population is twenty times the Prince population — which works out to a death rate above 98%, most of it from wild animals and the environment.
Survivors flow almost entirely into two places:
- The Empire Peasants of the United Cities — a Worker is four times as likely as a Human to end up an Empire farmer
- The Holy Nation's labour camp at Rebirth — a Lost Drone entering Holy Nation land alone is arrested by the gate guards and sent straight to Rebirth
Under slavery the situation is even more extreme: a Worker is forty times as likely as any other Hive subrace to end up a slave, and is simultaneously the highest-priced of all organic races. An individual who knows only obedience, eats almost nothing, and has the best labouring and farming aptitude in the game is precisely the ideal product in a slaver's eyes.
As a player character
The Worker is the easiest of the three Hive subraces to obtain: Wanderer, Hive Eviction, Slave, Empire Citizen, Nameless and other eleven Game Starts all allow a Worker — something neither the Prince nor the Soldier gets. There are two unique recruits: Green, the gunman in the Swamp (settle his bar tab of roughly 2,300 Cats), and the widely renowned Beep.
They are also the most widely distributed Hivers in the world, appearing among the Anti-Slavers, Empire Peasants, Scavengers, Shinobi Thieves, United Cities and the factionless Lost Drones.
Southern Workers
The Southern Hive has its own Worker variant with nearly identical statistics, differing in a bleed rate of 0.4 (Western: 0.3) and no Toughness bonus — both pure downgrades. They are not a start-selectable race, spawn extremely rarely, and can only be acquired by unlocking prisoner shackles or buying from slave traders; Espher is the only guaranteed Southern Worker character.
See also
- Hive ｜ Hive Soldier Drone ｜ Hive Prince ｜ Hive Queen
- Western Hive ｜ Southern Hive ｜ Deadhive
- Beep ｜ Empire Peasants ｜ Slavery ｜ Rebirth
- Races ｜ Statistics and Skills ｜ Base Building
Video citations
- The Origins of the HiversHeroInHisHead
- Kenshi: History of the HiversCivilizationEx