ItemsReport

English：Items　·　Items & Equipment

Kenshi's items have no rarity colours and no level requirements — only nine equipment slots, two quality ladders that never touch each other, and an artifact system that caps the world's supply of expensive gear at a fixed number.

Kenshi's inventory looks like an early online RPG: a grid of squares, no colour tiers, no level locks. Underneath it, though, sit three independent sets of rules — slot restrictions, two separate quality ladders, and a globally capped artifact stock. Understanding those three is worth far more than memorising a few hundred item names.

The nine equipment slots

Everything a character can wear goes into a fixed slot, and each slot accepts exactly one type of item.

Cats: a currency named after a dead man

The currency is called Cats, and as an item it comes as a single coin (about 1 Cat) or a strung bundle (about 10 Cats). Picked-up cats merge into your total automatically and take up no inventory space.

The name has been retconned. Early versions had it as short for "Catan Credits", after the town later renamed Catun; once the southeast of the map opened up, the official origin became Cat-Lon, the last emperor of the Second Empire. The old lore was never fully scrubbed — Dust Bandits still demand your "Catan Credits" when they stop you on the road.

The six broad categories

Equipment

Weapons, armour, crossbows, backpacks, lanterns. This is the only category with a quality ladder, and the main form player wealth takes.

Consumables

Food (Bread 488 Cats, Dried Meat 78 Cats, Foodcube 874 Cats), medical items (Basic First Aid Kit 76 Cats, Advanced First Aid Kit 265 Cats, Skeleton Repair Kit 4,341 Cats), and the alcohol-and-drugs "Vices" category (Bloodrum 1,328 Cats, Narcotics 282 Cats).

Materials

Split into building materials (Building Materials, Iron Plates, Steel Bars, Fuel, Electrical Components), farm produce (Cotton, Wheatstraw, Cactus, Water), armour materials (Armour Plates, Chainmail Sheets, Leather, Fabrics) and robotics parts (Motors, Presses, Skeleton Muscle, Robotics Components). These are the lifeblood of a self-built outpost.

Trade goods

Things that exist purely to be bought low and sold high: Luxury Goods 240 Cats, Animal Skin 240 Cats, Beak Thing Egg 4,200 Cats, Megacrab Ganglion 3,000 Cats, Leviathan Pearl 12,000 Cats. Regional supply and demand set the spread, and that spread is where long-haul trading profits come from.

Books

Low value (90–150 Cats), but the main channel through which the game delivers its setting. Holy scripture (Book Of Grace, Book Of Sacrifice), Shek epics (Kral's Last Stand) and Tech Hunter field notes are scattered through libraries and ruins.

Research artifacts

AI Core 25,000 Cats, Ancient Science Book 5,000 Cats, Engineering Research 8,000 Cats. They are simultaneously research materials and hard currency.

The artifact system: the world's expensive gear is finite

This is the mechanic new players misread most often. The good things in ruins are not randomly generated and infinitely refreshed — the game runs an artifact system that allocates a fixed quota across the entire world.

• Research artifacts: the world is guaranteed to spawn 160 Ancient Science Books, 30 Engineering Research and 37 AI Cores. (That is a guaranteed floor; more turn up as random loot and in the inventories of some NPCs.)
• Gear artifacts: armour, crossbows and robot limbs only appear at Specialist or Masterwork quality; weapons only appear from three manufacturers — Catun Scrapmaster, Skeleton Smiths or Edge Type 1.
• The quotas are strict: 1 of each weapon type per quality level in the entire world, 1 of each robot limb (Economy models excepted) per quality, 2 of each crossbow (Junkbow excepted) per quality, and 1 of each armour set.

Put differently: that Skeleton Smiths Moon Cleaver in a weapon cabinet in the Lost Armoury in the Deadlands is the only one of its kind in the world. Take it and it is gone.

Two quality ladders that never meet

This is one of Kenshi's least intuitive designs: weapons and armour use completely different quality naming systems.

Crossbows are weapons but use the armour ladder. See Weapons and Armour.

Backpacks: capacity traded for combat ability

A backpack gives you squares and charges you combat stats for them.

The Thieves line is the only option that leaves stealth and dodge completely untouched, at the cost of a high price and no stacking of trade goods. Animal backpacks (Garru, Bull) have the largest capacity and the best weight reduction, but they are conspicuous.

A few things people get wrong

• Items sell for 0.25× their value. Want to strip the dye off a piece of armour? You sell it and buy it back, i.e. pay 0.75× value to repurchase your own gear.
• Items inside a backpack slip past smuggling checks, and putting the backpack itself into your inventory works too.
• Dropped backpacks have a bug: items retrieved from them may only sell for a quarter of their value. Dump them on the ground and pick them up again to fix it.
• Weight is not value. A sack of water (a full Garru Backpack can hit 966 kg) is worth almost nothing, but it is the best Strength trainer in the game.

Further reading

• Weapons — the six melee classes, damage to robotics, the manufacturer ladder
• Armour — light/medium/heavy, coverage and penalties
• Robot Limbs — the upgrade path after losing a limb
• Game Mechanics — combat, encumbrance and the skill system