Game MechanicsReport

English：Game Mechanics　·　Game Mechanics

Kenshi has no main quest, no character levels and no classes — only a "you get good at what you do" skill system, plus five interlocking rule sets covering combat, survival, economy, crime and base building.

You are not the chosen one. You are not great, nor powerful. You do not have more health than anyone else. You are not the centre of the universe, and you are not special in any way — unless you earn it.

That opening line is Kenshi's entire design document. There is no main quest, no XP bar, no classes or talent trees, and NPCs level up under exactly the same rules the player does. Every system shares one premise: the world will not adjust its difficulty for you.

Who made it, and why it turned out like this

Kenshi is the work of one man, Chris Hunt. Early in development he worked as a cleaner by day and a night-shift security guard in the evenings; for years Lo-Fi Games had no other employees. The game released on 6 December 2018, briefly cracked Steam's top hundred by player count in 2019, and carries overwhelmingly positive reviews across more than thirty thousand of them^{[V1 0:00:33]}.

That background goes some way toward explaining the shape of the systems. One commentator sums up Kenshi's design philosophy in a sentence: the game exists to tell you that you do not matter — no main story, no quests, no plot, you are simply a random passer-by dumped on this desert moon, and your death will mean nothing^{[V1 0:02:11]}. The same stance was later used to argue against putting a quest system in the sequel: if the core is "you are not the chosen one", then whether you become a beggar, a drug baron, the toppler of nations, or the inheritor of Cat-Lon's imperial wreckage should be for the player to define; the climbing-the-ranks errand-running in the first game was always an optional path, never a required one^{[V2 0:04:24]}.

No levels, only skills

Kenshi has no such thing as a character level. A character carries just over 30 independent skills in seven groups: attributes, weapon skills, combat skills, thievery skills, athletic skills, science skills and trade skills. Each grows only by actually doing that thing — swing a sword to train the sword, get hit to train Toughness, build houses to train engineering, get chased to train Athletics.

Growth is governed by a multiplicative chain, of which the two most important terms are the level multiplier and Stronger Opponent Logic. The first makes XP decay with the square of your level; the second grants up to six times XP for beating an opponent stronger than you. Details in Statistics and Skills.

Five interlocking systems

Combat: decided by arithmetic, not health bars

Kenshi's melee is close to turn-based underneath. The gap between the two sides' Melee Attack decides who gets to swing; the gap between attack and defence decides whether the swing is blocked. Base block chance is 70%, and defence 21 levels above the opponent's attack reaches the 95% block cap.

Armour is not a flat damage reduction but five independent parameters — cut resistance, blunt resistance, cut-to-stun efficiency, harpoon resistance and coverage — resolved in layers by equipment slot. Heavy armour blocks more but costs combat speed and stealth; light armour blocks less but often carries stat bonuses. That trade-off runs through the whole equipment system, and there is no mindless optimum. See Combat.

Survival: the problem is not going down, it is what comes after

A character whose vitals (head, chest, stomach) drop below 0 is knocked out, and below the "KO point" enters a recovery coma. The knockout itself is usually not fatal — Kenshi's real killers are blood loss, festering wounds, and who picks you up while you are unconscious. Cut damage never heals on its own and always needs a first aid kit; blunt damage recovers by itself. See Knockout and Death.

Hunger is the other slow pressure. Below 250 hunger a character eats automatically; below 200 they become malnourished and all their stats drop; further down they periodically collapse until they starve to death. Slavers deliberately keep slaves fed to around 100 precisely to suppress their combat and movement ability through malnutrition. Racial hunger rates vary enormously: Hivers are at 0.5×, the Shek at 1.25×, and Skeletons do not eat at all.

Economy and crime

The universal currency is Cats. Income comes broadly from mining and refining, farming, manufacture and sale, looting corpses, bounties and theft. The buy/sell spread on equipment is brutal (you sell at roughly half price), which makes "buying gear" permanently the worst economic option available.

The crime system runs on its own logic. Witnessed trespass, corpse looting, brawling, lockpicking and theft all attach a bounty that expires in anywhere from a few hours to a few dozen hours — unless the character has already become notorious. With a bounty on your head, stay away from policed towns: being knocked out there puts you in a cage, and in slaving territory a cage is usually just a waypoint on the road to the mines.

Faction relations

Relations are a single number line: below −30 a faction turns hostile, above +50 an alliance becomes possible. Some bandit factions and manhunter squads attack on sight even at neutral. Relations can be repaired by paying off bounties, helping in battles and choosing the right dialogue, or laundered outright by paying a large sum to a "pacifier" in a bar.

Watch out for characters with Diplomatic Status: they are nearly immune to ranged weapon targeting, and attacking or abducting one brings full retaliation from their entire faction.

Building and research

Technology is divided into eight branches — Core, Crafting, Defense, Electrics, Farming, Industry, Smithing and Training — each with six levels. Research needs a research bench, books and the Science skill, and some technologies can only be obtained from blueprints. Players can buy houses in towns or build an outpost in the wilderness; the latter means thinking first about land rights (the United Cities will come to collect tax), resources (copper and iron, water, fertility), power (wind or biofuel), and whether the plot will be raided.

The world changes

Kenshi runs a system of World States. Towns change hands, are destroyed and rebuilt through player or NPC action; leaders die, factions collapse. It is one of the few parts of the game that feels like a plot advancing — except the button that advances it is in the player's hands.

These states pull on each other and form causal chains: break a regime and you also change patrol density in that area, whether merchants show up at all, even whether certain equipment can still be bought^{[V3 0:03:53]}.

But it is deliberately not a "dynamic economy". Chris Hunt has explained why there is no dynamic economy and no global politics: a dynamic economy is extremely hard to balance, and this world is already unstable enough — a pack of spiders is sufficient to wipe out a town. He cited Mount & Blade as an example, a game that needs artificial caps to stop any one power from actually conquering everything^{[V4 0:14:18]}.

Beyond world states, Kenshi's more common form of "plot" is what happens when rules collide. One commentator recorded a textbook case: Skeletons from the Black Desert City chased the player all the way into a waystation, and the player simply stood back and let them grind the guards down by sheer numbers before walking in to collect gear and crack the safe, incidentally leaving a shopkeeper with broken legs and no ability to resist as an audience — and that is how the waystation changed hands^{[V5 0:19:36]}. No script describes any of this. It is just a few rules meeting in the same place.

Engine and mods: how multiplayer became conceivable

Kenshi runs on the Ogre engine, which was already about five years behind the times when the game launched in 2018 — which is why multiplayer was regarded as impossible for years^{[V6 0:00:43]}. The deadlock was broken by reKenshi, which rewrote Kenshi's code wholesale in a more modern language and raised the ceiling for the modding ecosystem in one step^{[V6 0:00:43]}.

The multiplayer mods built on top of it are most worth recording for how they handle time control: either side can pause at any moment (much like Total War), while speed-up takes the slowest setting among all players — to run at triple speed, both people have to set themselves to triple speed^{[V6 0:02:20]}. Synchronisation in early versions was only around 35%: containers were not synced, action animations were not synced (one side carries a body to a bed while the other sees a teleport), damage numbers were rendered by each client separately, and pulling too far apart crashed the game — one test crashed on a run from Stack to Blister Hill, and the author shipped two hotfixes within thirty hours^{[V6 0:03:26]}.

The difficulty of making it multiplayer also throws the single-player skeleton into relief. One commentator argues that the real knot is pausing, not speed: speed-up can be made to require both parties' consent, but pause is bound to the spacebar and is a micro-management tool players use several times a minute in combat, so in a multiplayer environment it has to be removed entirely — and removing time control ruins the game's pacing^{[V3 0:02:13]}. The same commentator also thinks world states would go from a feature to a nuisance: another player might break the United Cities without your knowing, and you would only find out on arrival, with the city ruined, the merchants gone and certain equipment permanently unavailable^{[V3 0:03:53]}.

The sequel and that redacted feature

Lo-Fi Games have repeatedly mentioned, across several AMAs and update posts, that Kenshi 2 has one hidden redacted feature — and have consistently refused to explain it. Counting from Chris Hunt's original Reddit AMA, the community has been left hanging on this for two and a half years^{[V7 0:00:00]}. In that AMA the studio said outright that they would not drip-feed information, because they do not want the best content leaking early — the feature is under the highest level of secrecy and will probably only be revealed just before release, or even after it^{[V7 0:09:18]}.

What is definitely not going in is clearer. Chris Hunt has answered on Reddit that the sequel will not add more survival needs like sleep, thirst or disease, on the grounds that these only add micro-management, make an already hard game harder, and degrade long journeys into backpack-space arithmetic^{[V2 0:00:34]}. As for confirmed directions, he has said the sequel's faction wars will be more dynamic than the first game's^{[V4 0:14:18]}.

As for what the redacted feature is, every account in circulation is speculation; the studio has never answered:

• One reading holds that boats are all but certain to be in the sequel — concept art is full of water and rafts, and the water level was higher in the Second Empire era anyway — but precisely because the community already agrees on this and the studio has never denied it, boats are unlikely to be the thing that needs keeping secret^{[V7 0:01:05]}
• The community has also guessed at wall-climbing, an AI trading system that would send squads on caravan routes automatically, and a quest system. The argument against these is that none is "big" enough to require secrecy — the studio has actually been quite open about systems like city zoning and dynamic resource allocation^{[V7 0:03:19]}
• HeroInHisHead's own hypothesis is that the "entirely new landmass" the studio talks about may not lie across the sea but underfoot — a cave system leading to a subterranean continent. That could house new enemies, factions, even races, and would turn Kenshi from a purely outdoor sandbox into a game that can support dungeon and level mods^{[V7 0:06:02]}

The five things beginners most often get wrong

1. "I level faster than they do" — you do not. NPCs grow on the same XP rules, and they are still fighting while off-screen.
2. "An easier start is better for training" — start difficulty only affects your initial situation, not how fast you improve.
3. "Buy good gear before heading out" — good weapons make you level slower. Early on you should be using low-quality equipment (see Statistics and Skills).
4. "Getting knocked out means reloading" — most of the time you are only being robbed. What to fear is being carried off.
5. "Heavy armour is safest" — heavy armour costs combat speed, athletics and stealth, turning a character into a target that cannot leave.

See also

• Combat
• Statistics and Skills
• Knockout and Death
• Races
• Factions
• Slavery

Video citations

1. WELCOME TO "KENSHI" - Expect No Favors Here!HeroInHisHead
2. 5 Things I DON'T Want To See In Kenshi 2HeroInHisHead
3. Kenshi 2 - Should It Have Multiplayer?HeroInHisHead
4. Kenshi 2 - What We Know So Far and What We Can ExpectHeroInHisHead
5. Kenshi | The Nugget Mafia (Ep. 1)HeroInHisHead
6. Kenshi Co-op is finally here and its AMAZING!HeroInHisHead
7. Kenshi 2 - What is the [Redacted] Feature?HeroInHisHead