Navigation GuideReport

English：Navigation Guide　·　Game Mechanics

Kenshi has no roads, no quest markers and no red dots on a minimap. This explains how to read the grid coordinates used on this site, how to plan a cross-region route on the interactive map, and how the 72 regions are actually wired together.

Kenshi will not tell you how to get anywhere. No roads, no quest markers, no red dot on a minimap — just a hand-drawn map and a squad that walks slower than you would like. That is deliberate: in this game, knowledge is geographic knowledge. Knowing which region you can cut through and which one will flatten your whole squad is the thing a player actually accumulates.

This page explains how the site turns that knowledge into something you can look up, share, and hand to a program.

Reading the grid

The interactive map lays a 128 × 128 grid over the world map. The cell 26,24 you see in the drawer means column 26, row 24. This is the site's own grid, not the same thing as the game's zone.17.19.zone files.

• The origin is the top-left corner; column numbers increase eastward, row numbers increase southward.
• This is a reference grid this site laid down, not the game's internal world coordinates. It is meant for relative bearing and rough distance — is A north-west of B, roughly how many cells apart — and it answers those well. Do not try to match it against numbers in a save file.
• A few regions have no reliable grid data and are positioned from adjacency instead; the drawer says so when that happens.

The reason this layer exists at all is that spatial reasoning is the weakest thing a language model does. A plain-text encyclopedia telling a model "Bad Teeth is in Holy Nation territory" leaves it nothing to do but memorise. Give it coordinates and an adjacency table and it can work out for itself that three cells south of here puts you in slaver country.

Finding your way around the map

Planning a cross-region route

Press 🧭 Plan a route in the toolbar. A route panel opens on the left of the map and prompts you to "Click the map to set your start". Then:

1. Click once on the map — that spot becomes the origin.
2. Click again — that spot becomes the destination, and the route is drawn immediately.
3. Once the route is drawn the map unlocks again, so you can zoom and click settlements freely without moving your destination by accident.
4. To start over, press ✕ Clear route, which appears in the toolbar at that point, and click twice again.

The route lists the danger rating of every region along the way, the settlements you can resupply at, and how many regions in a row have nothing at all. Phones and tablets work exactly the same way — two taps, no keys involved.

The resulting URL is shareable:

`` https://kenshi.zone/?route=border-zone__deadlands ``

How the cost is calculated

Kenshi has no roads; players just drag a straight line across the map. So the "shortest path" is not a distance in kilometres — it is how many regions you cross and how dangerous those regions are:

`` cost = 1 + (danger − 1) × 0.8 danger runs 1–5 regions with a settlement are multiplied by 0.75 ``

The 0.8 weight is deliberately conservative. Most early deaths in Kenshi come from wandering into a high-danger region and being crippled in seconds; the cost of walking around is far lower than the cost of a wipe. Regions with a settlement get a discount because you can resupply, sleep, and — if you do go down — stand a better chance of being carried off rather than eaten.

The skeleton of the continent

72 regions, 173 border edges, fully connected — in principle you can walk from any point to any other. But the wiring is very uneven.

Danger distribution

Danger 4 and above accounts for 26 regions, over a third of the map. That is not scaremongering; it is the actual shape of the world. The safe part is small.

Hubs and dead ends

The regions with the most borders are the crossroads; the ones with the fewest are where a wrong turn costs you the entire leg.

Chokepoints

Some dangerous regions are not a matter of whether you want to go there — you simply cannot route around them. These are the danger zones that appear mid-route on the largest number of least-lethal paths:

Stobe's Gamble turns up on 381 routes because it borders eight regions at once and sits astride the corridor south. If you are heading that way, sooner or later you deal with it.

Resupply gaps

24 of the 72 regions contain no settlement whatsoever. That is the number that decides how much food and how many bandages you carry.

The longest unsupplied stretch is The Iron Trail to and from the Fog Islands: three hops with nothing along the way. Most city-to-city routes, by contrast, let you stop somewhere in the middle.

Every region article ends with a "Getting there" section giving its resupply situation and how many regions away the nearest city is.

Crossing water

Nothing drowns, but going by water is almost always slower. A Greenlander with Swimming maxed manages 9.84 mph against 15.66–26.84 mph running on land; at Swimming 0 it is 1.34 mph.

Skeleton do not swim at all — they walk along the bottom at a fixed 6.711 mph and are immune to acid water. Send them for anything involving water. Everything that walks underwater moves at that same fixed speed, which is why a Shek (0.5 swim multiplier, 5.59 mph maxed) cannot outrun a Blood Spider wading after them; humans and the Hive need Swimming 64 to beat one.

The water in ten regions, Deadlands and Vain among them, is acidic. While you are in acid water, weather protection on armour is not counted at all — only Hive and Skeletons are immune. See Environmental Hazards.

Ways across without swimming: three identical bridges (Black Desert City–Scraphouse, north of Blister Hill over the Wend, north of Fishman Island) plus a land bridge due south of Flats Lagoon in The Hook that reaches Mourn.

March speed and load

Every 1% of encumbrance costs 1% of running speed. An untrained Greenlander runs about 15.7 mph unloaded and 26.8 with Athletics maxed; Shek and Skeletons have the lowest ceiling (24.6 mph), Hive Worker Drones and Princes the highest (31.3 mph).

The answer on long marches is to put everything on a pack animal: Garru and Wild Bull backpacks cut 90% of the weight and do not slow the animal down when full. What you can actually buy is usually a juvenile, though — a Garru does 12.3 mph and a Bull only 8.9, slower than a person carrying nothing. The lantern on a Garru backpack only goes out if you remove the whole backpack, so take Bulls when you travel at night.

Below 55.6% leg health a character cannot reach full speed, and splints add at most 50 points — only Hive Worker Drones and Princes clear the threshold that way.

For programs and AI agents

The route data is also published as static JSON. No API key, no rate limit.

The graph is 22 KB. Running Dijkstra over 72 nodes takes milliseconds, so computing it yourself beats downloading the 5.5 MB precomputed set — which is why the graph is what gets served by default, with /api/routes/ there if you want the answer ready-made.

See also

The Map of Kenshi, Border Zone, Bounty and Crime