LeviathanReport
English：Leviathan · Creatures
The largest living creature in Kenshi — absurdly slow and very nearly unkillable. The 12,000-Cat pearl inside it is the most tempting prize in the game, and the fastest way to go broke chasing one.
The Leviathan is the largest living creature in Kenshi. It has no venom, it does not ambush, and it does not swarm — it is simply very, very large, and extraordinarily hard to hurt. The most common way an unprepared squad dies to one is being stamped into the ground.
Range and temperament
Leviathans concentrate on the Leviathan Coast in the northwest, which is named after them. Bonefields, Sniper Valley and Stobe's Gamble spawn lone individuals, and they occasionally wander into Greyshelf, Shem, Cannibal Plains, Flats Lagoon and the High Bonefields.
There are only two spawn groups:
- Loner: 1 adult, age 0.9–1.0
- Family: 1–2 adults plus 0–3 pups
Leviathans do not actively hunt humanoids, so they pose no threat to a player base. The regions they roam are almost devoid of NPCs, and nothing challenges their dominance except the occasional suicidal Beak Thing.
Territorial reaction
Leviathans are not classed as aggressive, but lone individuals do react to groups. When a loner sees a character belonging to a squad of three or more, it has a chance to roar and attack every member of that squad — even if only one of them is physically present.
| Squad size | Chance to trigger |
|---|---|
| 3 | 10% |
| 4 or more | 30% |
| 6 or more | 50% |
Conversely, attacking a lone Leviathan will not alert other spawn groups; but attack one member of a family and the whole family retaliates.
Why it is so hard to kill
The Leviathan is one of the few units in the game with its own stat page (the other famous example being Tinfist). Martial Arts normally defaults to 10% of a character's combat ability, but the Leviathan has 75 Martial Arts and 40 Dexterity. Because animal cut damage is calculated from the sum of Martial Arts + Dexterity, those numbers make its attacks far more brutal than the "Melee Attack 50" on paper suggests:
Cut damage ≈ 23 + 0.88–0.91 × (Martial Arts 75 + Dexterity 40) ≈ 125
In practice, an age-1.0 Leviathan averages around 130 damage against a target with 50 Toughness. Any character without armour and without trained Toughness goes down in one hit. Its reach is enormous, and it has 3 extra attack slots — hitting three people at once is no problem for it.
The durability side is just as absurd:
- Blood pool 2,600–7,440, with a bleed rate of only 0.3
- Chest and stomach 2,000–8,050 each, other parts 1,000–4,025
- Its self-healing is real: as long as it is conscious it is immune to festering and continuously bandages itself at 40% of the normal healing rate
- "Healing rate" in game terms is a percentage of maximum blood restored every 22 game minutes. Because its maximum blood is so high, the Leviathan recovers blood faster than anything else in the game
On top of that, its sheer size means many weapons can only use the "heavy overhead v2" animation set against it, whose recovery time is much longer than other animations — so your real DPS is lower than you expect.
How to fight one
Ranged first. Grinding it down from a safe distance with crossbows or a harpoon turret is the option least likely to cost you money. Its average speed is about 8 mph, so any character who can run above 10 mph can disengage at will, and its aggro radius is small for a beast of its size.
If you insist on melee, a few reliable tricks:
- Spread out. Characters do not block attacks that are not aimed at them, so bunching up means everyone gets hit.
- Play with its turning circle using taunt toggles. The Leviathan turns extremely slowly; alternating taunts between units can keep it spinning in place without landing a single attack.
- Lure it onto rough terrain. Its size means it gets stuck constantly.
- Weapon choice: the Falling Sun does +50% damage to Leviathans and is also the highest raw-damage weapon in the game. Characters not strong enough to swing a heavy weapon can use the Nodachi instead — its overhead combo (double swing) is genuinely usable against animals, because a solo beast will not interrupt your attack animation.
The Leviathan Pearl
The Leviathan's death item is the Leviathan Pearl: 10 kg, 3×3 slots, average value about 12,000 Cats. "Death item" means exactly what it says — take the pearl out of its inventory and it dies on the spot, so knocking one out is as good as killing it.
Practical points:
- Pups drop pearls worth the same as adults'. If you can separate a pup from its family, pearl hunting becomes a very profitable business.
- Pearls can also be stolen from the bank in Trader's Edge.
- Pearls are a status symbol for the rich; the pearl cups, pearl weapon racks, pearl urns and pearl vases used as decoration in-game are presumably made from them.
For most players, though, the real reason to hunt Leviathans is not money but training stats — shooting a near-infinite punching bag with a crossbow from a safe distance is extremely efficient Crossbow practice.
The Leviathan in the setting
The Leviathan Coast has no towns or outposts at all. The whole region is scattered with Second Empire ruins, visited only by the occasional Tech Hunter picking through the wreckage. The local food chain is fairly simple: Garru wander in herds, Beak Things prey on them, and the Leviathan treads on everything.
Holy Nation Paladins will warn the player away from the northwest coast because of the "demons" there, "a hundred times the size of a man". Historical accounts also mention that, beyond the territory of the cannibal tribes, brave hunters once hunted the giant Leviathans along the coast — one of the few times the great beasts are mentioned positively in a human civilisation's own narrative.
Trivia
- Leviathans first appeared in alpha v0.70.0, were then removed, and did not return until beta v0.93.0.
- Unlike almost every other entity, Leviathans do not despawn at long range.
- The model was made by Linda "Methelina" McGill, who also created the Whistler's model.
- Before v0.93.13, players could "pick up" a Leviathan, which produced comical ragdoll bugs that flung defeated enemies across the map. The behaviour was later disabled.