Medical SystemReport

English：Medical System　·　Game Mechanics

Cut damage in Kenshi does not heal — it festers. Bandages, splints, beds and repair kits each cover one segment of the problem, while Toughness alone decides when you drop, how fast your wounds rot, and whether you can get back up.

Kenshi's medical system rests on one brutal premise: cut damage on an organic body never heals by itself, it only rots faster. Lie down for thirty days and an unbandaged wound will not have recovered a single point. Medicine here is not restoration; it is damage control.

Two damage types, two fates

• Cut: comes from blades. It does not recover naturally and must be bandaged; left alone it keeps festering.
• Stun: comes from blunt weapons, or from armour "converting" cut damage (via cut resistance and cut efficiency). It recovers automatically and needs no medical items at all.

The real value of wearing armour is not damage reduction but trading lethal cut damage for stun damage that heals itself. Animals never need bandaging; Skeletons and characters fitted with prosthetics need a different set of consumables.

Festering: what those arrows mean

When accumulated cut damage on a part reaches 20% of that part's maximum HP, a < appears beside it, meaning the wound is festering. Past 100% of maximum HP it becomes <<, festering roughly four times as fast as at 90%.

Festering speed is set by Toughness:

Festering speed = 1.7 − (Toughness × 0.0167)

At 0 Toughness that is 1.7× speed; maxed out it is only 0.03×. A handful of NPCs (Esata, Eyegore and others) are born with Toughness above 102, making their festering speed negative — their wounds heal on their own — but the last 20% of cut damage still has to be bandaged away.

Any part that drops below −100% means death. That is why festering wounds must be dealt with first, rather than topping up the parts that look worst.

Blood loss and knockouts

The blood bar is the top line of the health panel; the Skeleton version is called "oil". The more < marks beside the bar, the heavier the bleeding. Key points:

• Weapons have their own bleed multipliers — the Nodachi is 1.2×, i.e. 20% more bleeding than an ordinary weapon.
• Wounds clot naturally, so the peak bleed rate only lasts a few seconds.
• Racial bleed rates differ enormously: Greenlanders 1.0, Scorchlanders and the Shek 0.9, the Hive just 0.3, Skeletons only 0.1.
• Blood below 0 causes a knockout; death comes only at negative maximum blood (roughly −75 to −150 for humans, −50 for Hivers, −100 for Skeletons).
• Blood only starts regenerating once the bleeding has stopped completely, and it regenerates twice as fast in any bed.

One piece of lifesaving trivia: after a blood-loss knockout, a second knockout requires dropping to −25 blood. So a character between 0 and −25 who gets carried off by an animal stands straight back up, and most animals flee at the sight of their "food" still being alive. What to do then is sneak away and bandage yourself.

Any vital (head, chest, stomach) below 0 causes a knockout; below the KO point the character enters a recovery coma and will not wake until their vitals are back above 0.

KO point = -10 − (Toughness × 0.75), ranging from -10 (0 Toughness) to -85 (maxed)

Toughness also determines damage reduction (−65% at level 0, +65% at level 100). A character below level 50 is actually taking amplified damage, which is the hidden reason rookie squads collapse so quickly.

First aid kits and Field Medic

Organic parts are always treated with first aid kits:

Field Medic governs both bandaging speed and consumable use: the higher the skill, the more injury a single kit can treat. The quality requirement is a threshold — without the skill you cannot extract an advanced kit's efficiency.

The order of use is fixed, and understanding it is how you pack a backpack:

• Kits in the character's own inventory are used first, then those in the backpack.
• With several available, the one with the fewest charges left is consumed first (the same logic by which characters eat the worst food first).
• Bandaging order by part: blood/oil → head → chest/stomach (occasionally swapped) → left arm → right arm → left leg → right leg.

Head injuries directly degrade medical ability: for every 1% of maximum HP of damage on the head, both Field Medic and Robotics drop by 0.45%. A Greenlander who has taken 80 damage to the head is effectively 36% worse at the skill. Poor light affects only Robotics.

Medics are assigned with shift + a click on the interface's Medic button. The job carries risk: with a wounded ally nearby, a character will stand up out of the "playing dead" pose to treat them, walking straight into the enemy's line of sight.

Splints: a field brace

A Splint is a device that temporarily props up a badly injured limb, and it is nearly instant:

• It can only be used on a limb below 47.5 HP, and that part must have bandageable damage (a part at 0 HP purely from stun damage cannot be splinted).
• A normal splint props up 26 points at most, an advanced one 51; the effective HP cap is fixed at 50, and it stops there.
• To get the full 26 points out of a normal splint requires Field Medic 25 or above.

Splints have two combat uses: the propped-up HP can pull a limb back from the brink of coming off, and it restores mobility to a character with leg injuries. Full-speed running requires 55.6% leg health, so only Hive Worker Drones and Hive Princes can splint their way back to full speed — their maximum leg HP is low enough (75 / 80) that 50 splinted points clears the threshold. Putting Splinting into the job list is well worth it.

Robotic parts: a separate production line

Cut damage on Skeletons and all robot limbs cannot be treated with first aid kits. It requires Skeleton Repair Kits, applied with the Robotics skill:

Robotic parts repair at 250× the organic rate, so with consumables on hand a Skeleton is back up almost instantly. The real cost is wear: 4% of all damage taken permanently subtracts from that part's maximum HP, and repair kits do nothing about it.

Beds: the only accelerator

Lying in a bed has two more effects: hunger rate falls to 1/3 (see Hunger and Food), and wounds stop festering — which works for Skeletons too.

A few practical details

• Carrying an unconscious character (NPCs included) to a bed stops the festering, and laying down a downed NPC may even improve relations with their faction.
• Skeletons have a long-standing bug: they usually will not self-repair while playing dead. The workaround is to issue the repair order at the moment of the knockout.
• First aid kits and splints are crafted at a Medical Bench, repair kits at a Robotics Bench.
• The trade good "Medical Supplies" has no practical use whatsoever. Do not confuse it with first aid kits.

Related pages: Limbs and Prosthetics, Hunger and Food, Environmental Hazards, Skeleton, Game Mechanics.