Knockout and DeathReport

English：Knockout and Death　·　Game Mechanics

Losing a fight in Kenshi usually does not kill a character; it puts them face-down in the dirt. The real killers are blood loss, festering wounds, and who picks you up while you are out — slavers, cannibals, or animals.

One of Kenshi's most counter-intuitive designs is that losing a fight usually does not kill your character. They go down, get stripped, get dragged off, come back with one arm fewer — but as long as somebody patches them up, they will probably stand again. What kills is not the sword stroke; it is the ten minutes after it.

Why most fights are not lethal

A character has no single health bar. They have seven independent body parts (head, chest, stomach, both arms, both legs), each with its own HP, plus a blood pool (the Skeleton version is called "oil").

There are two routes to going down:

1. A vital hits zero — head, chest or stomach dropping below 0 causes a knockout.
2. Blood hits zero — blood below 0 also knocks the character out immediately.

Being knocked out is not death. If the injuries push past the character's KO point (-10 − Toughness × 0.75), they enter a "recovery coma" and stay under until their vitals climb back above 0. A character with 100 Toughness has a KO point of −85, meaning they stay conscious in a far worse state than a rookie ever could.

The length of a knockout depends on damage type as well:

• Cut damage lengthens knockouts (roughly 0.25 × base knockout time per point)
• Blunt damage shortens them
• Once a vital is already below 0, further damage to it is heavily amplified — 2.25× for cut to the head and 1.75× for blunt; 1.25× and 0.75× for chest and stomach

Which is why enemies dropped by pure blunt weapons are often back on their feet within seconds, while someone cut down by a heavy blade may lie there a long time.

Playing dead: an underrated lifesaver

When an entire squad goes down, any survivor still conscious automatically "plays dead" until the enemy leaves the area. This is the escape window the game deliberately leaves you.

• Giving a prone character any order makes them stand up — the cost is more beating, the reward is a great deal of Toughness XP. The game itself points this out as the way to train Toughness.
• Turning on SNEAK stops the character standing up and rejoining the fight. (A common community claim is that they then crawl off the battlefield, but the Kenshi Wiki does not record this and I could not find a source for it.)
• The Medic job order makes characters break cover to treat the wounded, which is suicide while enemies are still around. Turn it off when the whole squad is down.
• High-Toughness characters will get up and keep fighting on their own — if you want the enemy to "win and leave", switch to PASSIVE + SNEAK.

Three roads to death

One: blood loss

Blood has to fall to negative maximum blood before death: humans start dying around −75 (the ceiling rises with Strength), Hivers are finished at −50, and Skeletons die at −100 oil.

Bleed rate depends on the weapon; the formula is roughly bleed value = cut damage × weapon bleed multiplier ÷ 1000, and blood lost per second is the square of that value times the race's bleed rate. The square is the key: bleeding is glacial at first and then accelerates sharply once it accumulates.

The dangerous combination is therefore "low Toughness + high cut weapon + severed limb + pierce wounds". The Nodachi has the highest cut damage in the game paired with a 1.2× bleed multiplier; crossbow bolts, whatever the display says, are always 2× bleed in practice.

Two: festering wounds

Cut damage never heals on its own. Once the accumulated cut damage on a body part exceeds 20% of that part's maximum HP, a < arrow appears next to the bar and the wound starts to fester; past 100% it becomes <<. A part below −100% HP means death.

Festering is not a single threshold but a rate that climbs with the cut damage: 30% of maximum HP in cut damage is the baseline (1×), and every further 10% adds another 1× — so 80% festers six times as fast. << runs about four times the rate at 90%, which works out to something over twenty times the baseline.

The gap is easy to underestimate. When < first appears you still have time to work the problem; once << shows up you effectively have none.

Festering speed is set by Toughness (1.7 − Toughness × 0.0167). Which means that with enough cut damage stacked up, wounds can fester faster than you can bandage them. Festering stops completely while lying in any kind of bed, so "get them into a bed first" often saves more lives than bandaging on the spot.

Three: being carried off

This is Kenshi's signature way to die. An unconscious character does not vanish into thin air — somebody collects them:

One commentator argues that this single rule is the whole of Kenshi's tutorial. In his demonstration video he plays out a full cycle of going down: captured by slavers, escaping when Bonedogs attacked the camp, his companion then beaten unconscious by starving bandits and losing an arm to a Bonedog, both of them collapsed by the roadside, and finally the slavers coming back around to take them again. His conclusion: going down does not kill you; who picks you up afterwards is what actually decides your fate^{[V1 0:05:28]}. That reading also explains why the table above is worth remembering more than any formula on this page.

Dismemberment

A limb below −100% HP may be cut off. Whether it actually comes off depends on the game's Dismemberment setting:

• Frequent: comes off the moment it passes −100%
• Rare (default): after passing −100% it takes one more hit to come off
• Never: the mechanic is disabled

Losing a limb immediately costs 6–30 blood, plus a form of steady bleeding that will not stop unless the stump is bandaged. There are two emergency fixes: bandage the stump, or fit a robot limb straight away — the latter stops nearly all of the bleeding instantly, and you can remove the limb again immediately afterwards.

Skeletons can lose limbs too, but with 200 HP per limb it takes 400 accumulated damage, so in practice it almost never happens.

Treatment: getting people back

Bandaging order is largely fixed: blood/oil → head → chest and stomach → left arm → right arm → left leg → right leg — chest and stomach sometimes swap places. Kits with the fewest charges left are consumed first.

Common misconceptions

• "Empty health bar means dead" — no. An empty bar is a knockout; the death threshold is at the negative maximum, and there is a lot of room to save someone in between.
• "Getting knocked out means reloading" — most bandits only rob you. The time to reload is when slavers or cannibals drag you away.
• "A splint replaces bandaging" — a splint only props a leg up enough to walk. The cut damage keeps festering, and untreated it will still kill.
• "Leg damage only affects movement" — legs need about 55.6% HP to run at full speed, and the splint's 50-point cap is not enough for most races. Only Hive Worker Drones and Hive Princes have low enough maximum leg HP to sprint on a splint.
• "Injuries heal by themselves" — only blunt damage does.

See also

• Combat
• Statistics and Skills
• Game Mechanics
• Slavery
• Races

Video citations

1. WELCOME TO "KENSHI" - Expect No Favors Here!HeroInHisHead