RacesReport
English：Races · Races
Kenshi has seven playable races across four race groups — Human, Shek, Hive and Skeleton. The difference is not just appearance but an entire package of survival conditions: hunger, bleeding, healing, equipment and social treatment.
Kenshi's race system has no classes and no talent trees, only a set of cold multipliers. Choosing a race means choosing an entire package of survival conditions: how much food you need, how fast you bleed, how slowly wounds close, whether you can wear a hat, and whether walking into a given city gets you arrested on the spot.
If the feel of the four groups had to be summed up in one line: Humans are ordinary at everything, Hivers are weak individually but come in numbers, the Shek specialise in beating other people into pulp, and Skeletons are decent at everything but cannot be treated by ordinary medicine. Racial differences do not stop at appearance — they also move attribute modifiers and the learning capacity for each category of skill[V1 0:03:49].
The four race groups
The game sorts all intelligent life into four broad groups, of which seven specific races can be chosen directly at the start.
| Race group | Playable races | Biological nature |
|---|---|---|
| Human | Greenlander, Scorchlander | Organic life, the most numerous population in the world |
| Shek | Shek | Organic life, the only race with no subraces |
| Hive | Hive Prince, Hive Worker Drone, Hive Soldier Drone | Collective consciousness, bred from eggs laid by a queen |
| Skeleton | Skeleton | Ancient machine life, requires no food |
The three corresponding races of the Southern Hive and some Skeleton models (P4 units, soldier frames) cannot be selected at the start, but can become player characters through recruitment. Cannibals, Fishmen, Fogmen (Deadhive) and Hive Queens are entirely unplayable and exist only for hostile or narrative purposes.
Physiology: where the gaps actually open up
The most practical differences between races lie in their health values. Taking the Greenlander as a baseline of 1, the rest are multipliers.
| Race | Hunger rate | Heal rate | Bleed rate | Per-limb HP | Blood | Max speed | Combat speed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Greenlander | 1 | 1 | 1 | 100 | 75–150 | 120 | 1 |
| Scorchlander | 0.9 | 1.1 | 0.9 | 100 | 75–150 | 120 | 1 |
| Shek | 1.25 | 0.8 | 0.9 | 125 | 75–150 | 110 | 1 |
| Hive Prince | 0.5 | 1 | 0.3 | 80 | 50 | 140 | 1.2 |
| Hive Worker Drone | 0.5 | 1 | 0.3 | 75 | 50 | 140 | 1.2 |
| Hive Soldier Drone | 0.6 | 1 | 0.3 | 100 | 50 | 130 | 1.1 |
| Skeleton | 0 (does not eat) | 2 | 0.1 | 200 | 100 (machine oil) | 110 | 0.9 |
A few conclusions that bear directly on play:
- The Shek are the most expensive. Their hunger rate is 1.25 times a Greenlander's, and one Shek squadmate early on can eat an entire party's food supply into the ground.
- Hivers are the cheapest. A hunger rate of only 0.5 and a bleed rate of just 0.3; the drawback is 50 blood and low limb HP, so one heavy blow can take a limb off.
- Skeletons are a different kind of creature. They need no food, are unaffected by weather, their blood is machine oil, and their wounds cannot be treated with first aid kits — only with repair kits and the Robotics skill. A heal rate of 2 means they recover from unconsciousness four times as fast as a Greenlander.
- Heal rate cannot be read on its own. The Shek's 0.8 looks worst, but because each part has 125 HP, 0.8 × 1.25 = 1, so natural limbs actually recover at the same rate as a Greenlander's. What genuinely costs them is robotic prosthetics and blood regeneration, both of which run 20% slower.
Attributes and skill tendencies
Each race has a ±20% experience multiplier on certain skills (a few are ±10%). This is not a cap but a difference in growth rate — in theory any race can max any skill, it just takes a different amount of time.
| Race | Clear advantages | Clear disadvantages |
|---|---|---|
| Greenlander | Cooking, Farming, Science (+20%) | None |
| Scorchlander | Weapon Smith, Armour Smith, Athletics, Dodge, Stealth (+20%), Dexterity (+10%) | Cooking, Farming, Labouring (−20%), Strength (−10%) |
| Shek | Attack, Toughness (+20%), Strength (+10%) | Athletics, Dexterity, Dodge, Farming, Labouring, Robotics, Science, Stealth, Thievery (−20%) |
| Hive Prince | Dexterity, Toughness, Perception, Stealth, Athletics, Lockpicking, Thievery, Field Medic, Science (+20%) | Strength, Labouring (−20%) |
| Hive Worker Drone | Dexterity, Toughness, Stealth, Athletics, Thievery, Labouring, Farming, Turrets, Engineering (+20%) | Strength, Science, Cooking (−20%) |
| Hive Soldier Drone | Attack, Toughness (+20%) | Perception, Engineering, Robotics, Science, Smithing, Farming, Cooking (−20%) |
| Skeleton | Heavy Weapons, Turrets, Robotics (+20%) | Dodge, Stealth, Thievery (−20%) |
Equipment restrictions
Body shape directly determines what can be worn, and this is a point beginners frequently overlook.
| Race | Head | Shirt | Footwear | Body / leg armour |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Human (both subraces) | All | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Shek | Most (a few hat types clash with the horns) | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Hive Prince / Worker | Most | Limited | No | Yes |
| Hive Soldier Drone | No | Limited | No | Yes |
| Skeleton | No | No | No | Yes |
Skeletons cannot wear helmets or shirts at all, which means their head defence is permanently bare — but in exchange they are immune to every weather effect, and acid rain and irradiated desert mean nothing to them.
Social treatment: what a race actually costs in the wastes
Racism in Kenshi is not textual decoration; it directly triggers mechanics for being arrested, attacked or sold.
| Race | The Holy Nation | United Cities | Shek Kingdom |
|---|---|---|---|
| Greenlander | Core population, males hold all power | Majority population | Derided as "Flatskins" |
| Scorchlander | Doctrinally the same Human category, in practice very rare | Widely employed as guards and caravan hands | Also "Flatskins" |
| Shek | Treated as beasts; without a human escort, treated as an invasion | A minority, mostly seen among mercenaries and criminals | The ruling people |
| Hivers | Seen as hollow and base, require a human escort | Second-class residents, large numbers end up enslaved | Regarded as weaklings, frequently provoked |
| Skeleton | Dark apostles; the deepest fear and hostility | Extremely rare, but not excluded by law | Uncommon; the Shek value martial strength over lineage |
The Shek are in the most extreme position: they make up only a single-digit percentage of the total population, yet are heavily over-represented in combat-related professions, and they are also the bulk of the United Cities slave camp at Rebirth — more than 70% of the slaves there are Shek.
The non-playable races
- Cannibals — a degenerate branch of humanity with severely degraded language and tool use, active only in the northern plains.
- Fishmen — amphibious creatures of the swamps and coasts, among the few plausible candidates for genuinely being native to this moon.
- Fogmen / Deadhive — Hivers who went out of control after being cut off from the hive, losing their reason and feeding on the living.
- Hive Queen — the only reproductive individual in an entire hive, laying eggs through parthenogenesis.
A common origin?
One account circulates in the game: every race can be traced back to humans. Skeletons were built by humans; the Shek came from humans genetically engineered by the Second Empire (their predecessors called Enforcers); and Hivers are thought to have been brought into being by Cat-Lon late in his reign to solve famine and rebellion. Not a single line of dialogue in the game confirms this inference directly, but two authors in the Cultural Groupings And Evolution book series do argue over the same question — and that book is contraband in the Holy Nation.
One channel compresses the genealogy into a single sentence: humans are humans, Skeletons were made by humans, the Shek are humans modified by Skeletons, Hivers are humans modified by Skeletons, and bonedogs and pack bulls are animals modified by Skeletons — while the Skeletons themselves were made by humans[V2 0:09:12]. This is inference rather than setting, but it states the observation that "this planet has almost no native life" very cleanly.
Following the same thread, some have compiled a Second Empire "list of creations": Enforcers for military use; Greenlanders enhanced for farming, research and cooking; Scorchlanders tuned for exploration and craft — faster, more agile, better at sneaking, healing quicker, and able to eat raw meat directly. Some even argue that the Hive was deliberately created as a worker class, on the grounds that they excel at labour and are absolutely obedient to the Hive Queen within the hive[V3 0:01:30]. The appeal of this list is that it lines up with the skill multipliers in the game, but conversely, reasoning backwards from stats to design intent is itself a form of speculation.
Detailed argument and the counter-accounts are collected in the Human article.
See also
Video citations
- WELCOME TO "KENSHI" - Expect No Favors Here!HeroInHisHead
- All Life Came From Humans (Sort of)HeroInHisHead
- Kenshi: History of the HiversCivilizationEx
- Kenshi Lore Master AMAHeroInHisHead