Prison and EscapeReport

English：Prison and Escape　·　Game Mechanics

Being beaten in Kenshi does not kill you, it just changes your situation. Prison has a sentence, enslavement does not — and enslavement happens to be the safest Toughness training ground in the game.

Characters in Kenshi do not die easily; "defeat" is a process rather than an ending. Where you wake up after being knocked out depends on who picked you up.

Three forks after you go down

The key point: being put in a slaver faction's cage can lead directly to enslavement and shipment to the mines — all it takes is a slaver patrol nearby, and the two do not have to belong to the same faction.

Doing time

The sentence is half the bounty decay time (see Bounty and Crime for the conversion): 2 hours for trespassing, 50 hours for theft, 100 hours for kidnapping.

• The ground floor of a police station is the chief's desk, the second floor is the cells; confiscated weapons go in a nearby chest.
• Leaving the cage before the sentence is served counts as escape, adding a 2,500-Cat bounty.
• To get out immediately, issue the escape order to start picking the lock; you can also unlock without leaving and wait for a better moment.
• Bail must be negotiated by another character, and costs twice the bounty. If the chief happens to walk within conversation range, the imprisoned character can pay it themselves.
• Player-built prisoner cages are always lock level 15, requiring Imprisonment research level 3, 5 iron plates and about an hour of work.

Being enslaved

The difference between enslavement and prison is not one of degree but of kind: prison has an end point, slavery does not. When enslaved:

• Weapons are confiscated immediately and some armour is swapped for Prisoner Shackles. Races that cannot wear footwear (Hive, Skeletons, anyone with two prosthetic legs) get the Hive version of the shackles instead.
• Shackles occupy the boot slot, weigh 20 kg, are lock level 20 with a Strength threshold of 20, and heavily reduce stealth and movement speed. They can be removed by lockpicking, tools or brute force.
• The rest of your equipment is also confiscated, though depending on the faction this may not happen until you reach a town or camp.
• The job list is wiped, leaving only Obedient Slave. Removing it is equivalent to declaring yourself an escaped slave.

Conversely, being enslaved is one of the safest training environments in the game:

• Slavers will always bandage you after you collapse, so training Toughness carries almost no risk of death.
• Hunger is held fixed at 100 — malnourished, with clear stat penalties, but you will neither starve nor pass out, which is precisely the sweet spot for training Strength and Martial Arts.
• Being enslaved by a faction clears your bounty with that faction. For a character who has already become notorious, this is the cheapest solution available.

Escaping

Escape is a procedure, not a button:

1. Unlock the shackles first, but keep wearing them. Guards will not re-lock them unless they catch you without them on. Take them off only when you need to run, fight or sneak.
2. Steal a set of guard equipment as a disguise. With full guard armour on, they will not put you back in slave clothes unless they catch you without shackles. Sneaking does not affect the disguise, but heavy armour is very slow.
3. Assassinate isolated guards while they sleep. After knocking one out, take his weapon and throw it away, then strip his armour — they will not pick it back up or put it on when they wake. As long as the assassination succeeds and nobody sees it, no fight starts.
4. Wait for chaos. Small slave sites (such as the Holy Mine) have plenty of gaps in the watch, and guards will run off to fight when bandits attack. Rebirth has a spread-out interior and is the easiest place to work.
5. Use a side gate. The main gate usually has 2–4 in the front rank and 1 at the back; take out the one at the back and slip out the side. If you get stuck, release the other slaves and let the guards chase them.

There is also a timing issue in practice that often gets overlooked: guards detect "started picking a lock" almost instantly, and the moment a character is flagged as a runaway they are dragged out of the cage and beaten^{[V1 0:09:21]}. And since you will not starve as long as you honestly maintain the Obedient Slave job state, time is actually on your side — so the more reliable approach is to do nothing during the day and start at night, when no labour is required^{[V1 0:09:21]}.

As for "releasing people" in point 5 above, the payoff is larger than simply creating chaos: freed prisoners become allies outright, so you can leave them in place to draw the guards' fire and walk out the other side in the confusion^{[V1 0:11:34]}.

If you are allied with the slaver faction in question, things are far simpler: just pick your own shackles, and they will not react at all.

After you get out

Escaping successfully is not the same as being free. You are flagged as an Ex-Slave, and factions that support slavery will turn hostile once they recognise you.

• The "Looks like a Slave" percentage in your inventory is the chance of being spotted. Bringing it down means changing clothes, changing hairstyle and keeping a low profile for several game days until it reaches 1%.
• Manhunters and Slave Hunters specialise in hunting runaways inside United Cities territory. They will let you go if you are allied with the United Cities or the Traders Guild, if police are nearby, if you are inside an NPC town, or if your squad outnumbers them. But if you genuinely are an escaped slave, they will take you anyway.
• A shortcut: as long as you are not on bad terms with the Anti-Slavers, one conversation with Grey clears the slave status immediately. The problem is that with insufficient Toughness and athletics, getting to him is an expedition in itself.

Two prisons worth knowing

Rebirth is a religious labour camp the Holy Nation runs in a mountain pit, holding criminals and non-human races, whose work is building statues to Okran; the official line is "atonement and re-education". Unlike slavers, Rebirth does not trade, so the player cannot buy prisoners out, but characters can be sent in for 500 Cats or +1 relations. Skeletons are never imprisoned here — the Holy Nation considers them soulless; the guards also carry no repair kits, so a Skeleton taken by mistake is in real danger.

Tengu's Vault is the United Cities maximum-security prison, holding a roster of characters with bounties, and rescued prisoners may join the player. The jailer's welcome says it all:

Nobody cares about you. Making you suffer is my job. Enjoy your stay.

Imprisoning people yourself

The player can also build cages and lock others up, but there are two traps:

• Prisoners vanish from cages after the zone has gone unloaded for a long time. This is a known defect; the mitigation is to leave one character on site as a watchman (a Skeleton is recommended, since they do not need to eat).
• Raiders attacking your base will always go and release prisoners, regardless of relations. To prevent it, put the cages inside a locked building or a separately walled-off area.

Most NPCs will flee immediately when you unlock their cage; a few unique recruitment targets will join you on the spot. Releasing slaves inside a city counts as terrorism (a 5,000-Cat bounty), and slaves released there are usually subdued by the guards on the spot — to use them as a recruitment source, you have to get them some distance outside the walls first.

See also

• Bounty and Crime
• Slavery
• Anti-Slavers
• United Cities
• The Holy Nation
• Making Money
• Game Mechanics

Related items

Ancient Samurai Boots, Faulty Prisoner Shackles, Wooden Sandals, Samurai Boots, Drifter's Boots, Crab Shoes, Plated Longboots, Footwear

Video citations

1. Kenshi Co-op is finally here and its AMAZING!HeroInHisHead