HumanReport

English：Human　·　Races

Humans are the most populous race category in Kenshi, split into the Greenlander and Scorchlander subraces; they are also the starting point of the central theory that all life descends from humanity.

Nothing really changes. Trends, cultures, languages, rulers… they come and go. But behaviour fed by greed and fear keeps human evolution at a standstill. Any progress is destroyed in the end, reset one way or another. Like waves, rising, then falling. — Burn, on the evolution of humanity

"Human" in Kenshi is two things at once: a specific people, and a race category. Both the Greenlander and the Scorchlander fall under it; the two are biologically very similar yet diverge in constitution, skills and cultural leaning.

The two subraces

The Greenlander is the subrace closest to Earth humans and serves as the game's baseline: hunger, healing and bleeding are all set to 1, there are no skill penalties at all, and the bonuses fall only on Farming, Cooking and Science. They make up the bulk of The Holy Nation's population and are the most common face in the wastes.

The Scorchlander is anatomically almost identical to the Greenlander, differing in markedly darker skin, glowing eyes, silver-white hair and a slightly shorter frame. Constitutionally they heal 10% faster, bleed 10% slower, see 25% further and eat about a tenth less, and they can eat raw meat directly; in skills they specialise in smithing, dodging, stealth and athletics, at the cost of slower growth in Farming, Cooking, Labouring and Strength.

The relationship between the subraces

The game never accounts for how Greenlanders and Scorchlanders diverged, and no text explains the geographical origin of either. What is certain is that the system treats them as the same thing. The tag the Holy Nation uses to decide "are you one of us" is the broad "Human" category — so in the Holy Nation's eyes, Scorchlanders and Greenlanders receive exactly identical treatment.

Scorchlanders are scarce in Holy Nation territory, and that is not the result of institutional exclusion but of cultural choice: a people who place personal freedom above doctrine will struggle to stay inside a theocratic agrarian order. By contrast the Shek and the Hive fall outside that tag, and walking into a Holy Nation town requires a human "master" in tow, or it is treated as invasion.

Cross-subrace mixing appears to be possible — Jewel in the game is inferred to be at least half Greenlander, yet is registered as a Scorchlander.

Humanity's place in history

On the evidence of texts and ruins scattered across the world, human history runs far earlier than the modern age: they already existed during the First Empire, whose technological level far exceeded today's. But whether humans predate the Skeletons is a question the game never answers, and it is the single most critical blank in the layered, tangled history between Skeletons and humans.

More striking still: humanity survived two civilisational collapses and countless disasters and wars, and has forgotten almost all of its own past. The overwhelming majority of people the player meets in the wastes know nothing of their own race's history — Holy Nation believers hold that the world is only a few hundred years old, and most Shek cannot even read. The ones who actually remember are the Skeletons who have lived for thousands of years and are hunted as demons for it.

"All life descends from humanity"

The most widely circulated inference in the Kenshi community is that the overwhelming majority of life on this moon traces back, in the end, to humans. The lore channel HeroInHisHead treats this thread as a theme running through the entire game, while specifically bounding the claim: the point is descent, not identity — the argument is not that a Bonedog or a Hiver "is a person", but that their starting point lies in humanity^{[V1 0:01:05]}. This remains inference, not stated canon. The chain runs roughly as follows:

1. Humans — human by definition.
2. Skeletons — artificially intelligent machine bodies manufactured by humans; origin unambiguous.
3. Shek — engineered from humans by the Second Empire, previously called Enforcers.
4. Hive — presumed to be a second round of genetic engineering on humans, late in Cat-Lon's reign, to counter famine and rebellion.
5. Bonedogs and Pack Bulls — presumed to be earlier trials run on animals before the Enforcers; over a thousand years they evolved exoskeletons along a path similar to the Shek's.
6. Skin Spiders — presumed to be genetic failures that got out of hand in the rush to produce the Hive.

Of this chain, items 1 and 2 have clear grounding, and item 3 has fairly strong circumstantial evidence: the Skeletons of the Black Desert City call the Shek "Enforcers" on sight and mock them for having "finally grown the spikes on the outside" — implying that Enforcers once looked no different from humans. Volume 4 of the Holy Nation's The Guiding Light records the same thing:

The horned demon was born human, a brother to the Okranites. But the horned demon harboured sin in his heart, rejected the light of Okran within it, and turned to the temptation of Narko.

Items 4 through 6 are entirely inference. The argument in their favour is that the timing is too neat: the Hive appears at the end of the Second Empire, and their physiology — extremely low hunger consumption, pheromone-controlled obedience, tolerance of harsh environments, a Queen capable of rapid reproduction — corresponds item by item to every crisis Cat-Lon was facing at that moment.

The counter-argument inside the game

Cultural Groupings And Evolution is a two-volume work found at the Science Headquarters in World's End and at the great library in Black Scratch, consisting of two scholars arguing past each other over the same question — and in The Holy Nation the set is contraband, earning an immediate bounty if found on you.

• Idad (Volume 1) holds that the evidence indicates the existence of "lesser tribes" whose genetic makeup differed from the ancients', which may be how they escaped the great extinction; as for the ancients themselves, given their technological level, they may well not have been a local species at all but extraterrestrial colonists who came for resources.
• Finch (Volume 2, current leader of the Machinists faction) rebuts him: no evidence of "another ancient race" has ever been found, which instead points to every extant race descending from a handful of survivors of one master species. He concedes, though, that the sheer difference in appearance between the races makes "natural evolution" a hard explanation to swallow.

Neither has an answer, and the core of their argument is precisely the question players are still asking a thousand years later: which came first, the Skeletons, or the people who built them?

See also

• Greenlander ｜ Scorchlander
• Shek ｜ Hive ｜ Skeleton
• Races ｜ The First Empire ｜ The Second Empire ｜ Cat-Lon

Video citations

1. All Life Came From Humans (Sort of)HeroInHisHead