Limbs and ProstheticsReport

English：Limbs and Prosthetics　·　Game Mechanics

A Kenshi body is seven independent parts, and any limb driven below −100% can come off permanently. Robot limbs are the only replacement — they hand you stat bonuses, a lifetime maintenance bill, and the hostility of the Holy Nation.

Kenshi has no single "health" value. Every character is broken into seven independent parts, each with its own maximum HP and its own chance of being hit, each festering and failing separately. The most immediate consequence of that design: you can survive a fight and still be permanently one leg short.

The body is seven separate containers

An incoming attack first rolls for where it lands, and the weights are tied to the part. Taking a Greenlander as the baseline:

The vitals (head, chest, stomach) take roughly 56% of hits; all four limbs together only add up to 43.75%. That is the fundamental reason limbs are rarely lost in combat: long before your arm is ground down to −100, your chest has already put you on the floor.

Racial differences are substantial. The Shek have 125 HP per part, Skeletons 200, while Hive Worker Drones have only 75 and Princes 80 — Hivers lose limbs more easily than any other race in the game, and they only have 50 blood.

When a limb comes off

There is exactly one condition: the part's HP is below −100% of its own maximum (−100 for a Greenlander arm, −125 for a Shek). After that, the setting decides:

• Never: limbs never come off.
• Rare (default): a part already below −100% must be hit once more to come off.
• Frequent: it comes off the moment it drops below −100%, no extra hit needed.

For a full-health Greenlander taking 50 damage per hit, the chance of any single limb coming off in normal combat works out to roughly 2.6%. Animals never lose limbs and cannot be fitted with prosthetics.

What happens at the moment of loss

Three things happen simultaneously, and the order matters:

1. An instant 6–30 blood loss, randomly rolled and unaffected by any stat.
2. Additional bleeding based on the unbandaged cut damage on that limb: every 1 point of damage adds 0.2 normal bleeding and 0.002 "steady bleeding".
3. A severed limb item drops — but only for humans, the Shek, the Hive and Cannibals. Skeletons lose limbs too, they just leave nothing behind.

Steady bleeding is the real killer: it will not stop on its own, and can only be halted by bandaging the part or plugging a robot limb straight into the gap. For a Hiver with 50 blood, losing two limbs in quick succession is enough to bleed into unconsciousness and then to death.

Severed limbs left on the ground get carried off and eaten by Bonedogs and Boneyard Wolves; young Bonedogs get excited enough to run away with the trophy.

Prosthetics: specs and side effects

The moment a character is missing any natural limb, the Limbs button in their inventory unlocks and prosthetics can be fitted like weapons or armour. Every race — Skeletons included — must actually lose the limb first; once fitted, a prosthetic does not count toward encumbrance.

The figures below are for Masterwork quality; left and right differ slightly in price (a Skeleton Arm is 16,586 on the left and 18,391 on the right):

Three practical conclusions:

• Almost every prosthetic heavily penalises Swimming, the sole exception being the Scout Leg (-1%). Do not kit out a character who needs to swim for their life.
• The Economy Arm's -52.5% to Lockpicking and Thievery is the harshest penalty in the game. Thief characters should never touch it.
• The KLR Series has the most HP but -52% Stealth, which suits a front-line tank rather than anyone who works at night.

The "unarmed damage bonus" printed on prosthetics was still doing nothing at all as of v1.0.68. Do not pay for it.

Upkeep: a prosthetic is not a one-off purchase

Prosthetics follow the whole Skeleton maintenance ruleset, and that is where they get genuinely expensive:

• Cut damage: needs Skeleton Repair Kits, applied with the Robotics skill; ordinary first aid kits do not work. The good news is that robotic parts repair at 250× the organic rate, so patching them is extremely fast.
• Wear: 4% of all damage taken becomes a permanent loss of maximum HP. Repair kits do nothing about this; only a Skeleton Repair Bed restores it.

Bed rental ranges from free (Burn's Tower, the Tower of Abuse, Skinhouse) up to 3,000 Cats (Mongrel Robotics Workshop); the Skeleton bar in the Black Desert City charges only 200 Cats, the best value in the game. See Medical System.

The social cost: before you walk into the Holy Nation

The Holy Nation treats anyone with a prosthetic exactly as they treat a Skeleton. Below 50 faction reputation they attack on sight; even above 50, a character wearing prosthetics still cannot talk to Holy Lord Phoenix, Paladins, priests or any shopkeeper — take the limb off and they can. Holy Nation caravans patrolling the roads are exempt from this.

Buying and crafting

Prosthetics are sold in robotics shops, robotics workshops, travel and repair shops, and Hive robotics shops; Hive shops carry only the cheap Economy models, while the rest are mostly Skeleton-run with better stock. The Black Desert City robotics shop has both the largest selection and the highest quality. Prosthetics also appear randomly in ruins through the artifact system.

Players can craft limbs at a Skeleton Limb Bench, with parts produced at a Robotics Bench. Prosthetics have no blueprints; they are unlocked by research instead — Economy at tech level 4, the Skeleton series at 5, the rest at 6. The Steady Arm and Thief's Arm cannot be crafted. Output quality is set by the Robotics skill, but unlike weapons and armour, Robotics has a skill threshold above which the highest quality is guaranteed. An injured character, or one working in poor light, produces worse results.

Prosthetics count as equipment rather than trade goods, so they sell for only half their value.

Deliberate amputation

Because the bonuses are tempting enough, players do cut their own squad members' limbs off. There are three reliable methods:

1. Set dismemberment frequency to Frequent, then let the wound fester on its own.
2. Throw them into the Skin Bandits' Peeler Machine — it destroys clothing first, then shaves off the limbs one by one, and only attacks the vitals last.
3. Hang them on a Fogman fogpole.

A more extreme approach removes the need to lose anything at all — character creation itself allows you to take all four limbs off. One let's play series opened with exactly that premise: seven armless, legless characters dumped in the Great Desert, crawling in the direction of Sho-Battai; a character with no legs moves so slowly they can only squirm across the sand^{[V1 0:00:32]}. It is also the clearest lesson available: losing a limb in Kenshi is not a death sentence, it just swaps movement, carrying capacity and combat for a worse set of numbers.

Worth noting: no NPC in the game is born with prosthetics by default, even though the system fully supports it. The reasonable explanation is that only Skeletons and Tech Hunters can afford the upkeep.

Known exploits and bugs

• Unequip, save, reload heals a prosthetic completely, wear included. The reason is that the game does not record the health of a limb that is off the body, only that of the character.
• Skeletons occasionally bug out after losing a limb and keep leaking oil slowly even at full health. The fix is to swap the prosthetic or spend a session in a Skeleton Repair Bed.
• With one robotic leg and one natural leg, the walk animation develops a limp.

Related pages: Medical System, Skeleton, Environmental Hazards, Game Mechanics.

Video citations

1. Kenshi | The Nugget Mafia (Ep. 1)HeroInHisHead