Hungry Bandit LeaderReport
English：Hungry Bandit Leader · Characters
The man who stops you on the road with a gang of starving people behind him. His weapon is better than his squad's; his armour is worse than theirs — and the wiki states outright that he never spawns with a bounty.
Even if you have to die, I'm taking your food!
Hungry Bandit Leaders lead squads of Hungry Bandits and are the most skilled members of the Starving Bandits.
How the shakedown works
The routine is fixed. They approach anyone who passes through their line of sight, follow them, and demand that they share their food or die.
Then it forks:
- Against the player character, it is sometimes possible to convince the leader that they are in no condition to fight you, hand over a small sum of money, and avoid combat entirely.
- Against a non-player squad, or if you are not feeling generous, a character in the opposing squad automatically answers in the negative, and the whole bandit squad turns hostile and rushes in.
How weak they are
A Hungry Bandit Leader has combat stats of 8 (randomised by 4). That is close to the floor of the entire game.
Like their subordinates, they spawn with low hunger, taking a further 10–15% penalty to their stats — though as the wiki honestly adds, their base values are so low that the penalty is often not perceptible.
The only thing separating a leader from a plain Hungry Bandit is a better weapon (Horse Chopper, Unknown manufacturer, Shoddy grade). For protection, they lack even the meagre coverage of the Rag Shirt their followers wear — ragged halfpants and Wooden Sandals, nothing else.
The wiki's conclusion: they are only meaningfully stronger than their squad at very low levels.
One thing stated outright
Worth writing down, because Starving Bandits roam in gangs of 8, 13 or even 42, which makes it easy to assume there is money at the end of the fight. There is not. That is the point of them.
Who they are
The Starving Bandits are countless nobodies, destitutes, thugs and beggars. Rather than work or beg inside a settlement, they have ganged up and turned to banditry in the wilds to feed themselves. They have no named characters, no bases and no overall leader — only leaders for the individual squads.
They are especially numerous in frontier places like the Border Zone, Skinner's Roam and Okran's Gulf, where the reach of law is weak.
What they are for
Precisely because they are numerous, weak and unarmoured, a Hungry Bandit squad is the ideal training target for a starting party: enough bodies to practise group fights, low enough stats that nobody actually dies, and the leader's Horse Chopper is at least worth a few cats.