ImportReport
English：Import · Game Mechanics
Import is not a load. It lifts the player's progress out of an old save and drops it into a freshly generated world — Kenshi's only official way to repair broken saves, apply mods, and change world settings mid-playthrough.
On Kenshi's main menu, "Import" and "Load Game" are two different buttons. New players tend to read the first as a synonym for the second, but the two do almost opposite things — Load brings the world back exactly as you left it; Import demolishes the world and rebuilds it, keeping only you.
Import is not a load
When you import, the game takes an existing save, reads out everything that belongs to the player, regenerates the entire world from the current game data and mods, and then puts the player's data back in.
Broadly, what survives is your side of the ledger: characters, skills, equipment, injuries, cats, map discovery, and the day counter. NPC distribution, town contents, shop stock and every derived world state are generated fresh from current data.
Because it regenerates, Import can repair: corrupted towns, missing NPCs, buildings assigned to the wrong owner, research benches the game no longer recognises — all of it comes back correct in the rebuild.
The four advanced options
The Advanced section of the Import screen has four checkboxes, and they all follow the same logic: ticked = carry over the old save's state, unticked = revert to the world's default.
| Option | Ticked (kept) | Unticked (reset) |
|---|---|---|
| Import Buildings | Keeps every building the player owns: outposts, houses, farms | Buildings are not carried over |
| Import Research | Keeps every completed node of the tech tree | Research starts from zero |
| Import Dead NPCs | Dead unique characters stay dead; imprisoned ones do not spawn but are still counted as held | Everyone you killed or imprisoned comes back, in their original place |
| Import Relations | Keeps every faction standing; allies remain allies | Everything zeroes out; factions you angered return to neutral |
A few practical points:
- Zeroing Relations will not save you from natively hostile factions. The Fogmen and their kind attack anything on sight no matter how many times you reset.
- Buildings and Research can be moved between saves. The official wording is "import into another save" — meaning you can take an old character's tech tree and base and drop them into a brand-new game start, skipping the research grind entirely.
- Unticking Dead NPCs has known side effects. Besides reviving dead uniques (say Esata), it also brings back fallen unique recruits — you have to recruit them again — and sometimes respawns companions who are alive and already in your squad, leaving you able to recruit an identical duplicate. Beep is the case people mention most. Whether the bug fires at all is inconsistent.
- Revived bosses bring their bounties with them. When a unique enemy respawns, so does the price on their head — one streamer collected the bounty on the Dust King a second time this way[V1 0:07:31]. Whether that counts as an exploit is a matter of taste, but it illustrates exactly what Import touches: the game rebuilds the world's initial shape, not the shape you left it in.
When you should import
The wiki names two moments explicitly:
- After installing or removing mods
- After a game update
The reason is the same in both cases: mods and patches change world data, and an old save has the old data frozen inside it. Keep playing without importing and, at best, new content never appears; at worst the save corrupts.
Beyond that, the official changelog is full of entries that "require an import to take effect / to be fixed", which adds a third case — your save is showing any of these symptoms:
- Towns are empty, or cannot be entered at all
- Unique NPCs that should exist have vanished (leave town and come back, and the slaves and recruitables are gone)
- Your outpost's AI refuses to haul food or build (usually buildings assigned to the wrong town)
- Player settlements revert to "undiscovered" on the map
- Research benches are not recognised
- Map markers point at the wrong town
- Duplicate or long-dead hostile squads appear out of nowhere
And a fourth: you want to change world settings. The Advanced Options on the new-game screen (squad size multipliers and the like) cannot be edited from the options menu once a game has started. Import is the only way back into them, and the screen comes pre-filled with your last settings.
What Import costs
Import is not free:
- World objects regenerate. Shop stock, ruin loot, corpses and everything lying loose on the ground return to their post-regeneration state. Finish a big battle with a dozen sets of gear still on the ground and importing throws all of it away.
- Anything in progress is settled. The raid currently attacking you, the caravan on the road, the unfinished event — all of it disappears or starts over.
- Edge cases go wrong. The changelog has fixed a long string of import oddities: importing while inside a building stripping ownership from items, backpack contents inside containers not carrying over, furniture disappearing from purchased buildings, turrets and lamps assigned to the wrong town. Most of these individual cases are fixed, but they show what Import is: a high-risk operation that rewrites a great deal of data.
Common misconceptions
- "Importing wipes my characters" — it does not. Characters, stats, gear and injuries all stay. It is the world half that goes.
- "Importing resets my relations" — only if you untick Import Relations yourself.
- "Got a bug? Just import" — Import fixes world data problems. Odd character behaviour, UI glitches and performance issues are usually unrelated.
- "After removing a mod I can just load" — this is the fastest way to corrupt a save. Removing a mod pulls out data the save still references; the correct procedure is to remove the mod and import immediately.