Recruitment & SquadsReport

English：Recruitment & Squads　·　Game Mechanics

A faction caps at 30 people and a single squad at 20, and animals count too. Kenshi has no morale or loyalty stat — recruits never defect, but slaves wander off, mercenary contracts expire, and bar recruits never respawn once used up.

Kenshi has no protagonist. What you control is a faction, and faction size has hard limits: 30 characters in total (the default global setting, animals included) and 20 in a single squad (past that you need to start another one).

Once you hit 30, the dialogue option on every recruitable character simply disappears, with no explanation offered. More characters also means a heavier computation load, and part of the late-game performance problem comes from exactly this.

The architecture of "one faction split into several squads, each squad capped" is bound tightly to single-player assumptions. Discussing multiplayer for a sequel, one commentator identified this as the hardest piece to deal with: in a multiplayer environment, is the group one faction or several? Whose reputation is it? Is a player limited to a single squad? His conclusion was that touching this architecture means rewriting the whole of it^{[V1 0:06:06]} — that is commentary on system design rather than an official statement, but it marks out rather precisely how much weight "faction" carries in Kenshi.

Who can be recruited: the eligibility check

Most characters have to pass an internal "is recruitable" check (DC_IS_RECRUITABLE): their job must not be diplomat, enforcer, soldier or trader; and the combat threshold takes the higher of each of Strength/Dexterity, Melee Attack/Martial Arts and Melee Defence/Dodge and adds them together, with the total not allowed to reach 75. The rule exists precisely to keep genuine heavyweights out of your hands — famous champions, Paladins and Hundred Guardians are all locked out.

Routes to recruitment

1. Hiring in bars

Recruits stand around in bars or patrol the streets of towns, usually asking 3,000 – 7,500 Cats, and most of them have terrible stats, wear rags, carry junk weapons and are hungry. They divide into combat types (Novice → Adventurer around 5 → Warrior around 10) and specialists (cook, engineer, farmer, gunner, medic).

2. Unique Recruits

Globally unique, with their own dialogue, and usually better stats than generic recruits. Some are tied to world states and are not guaranteed to spawn; a few have no fixed name and can only be identified by their gear or by talking to them.

The asking price is not the closing price. This is what new players miss most often: those absurd-looking figures can usually be negotiated, and by a lot. Besides Infinite Wingwang going from a hundred thousand down to five, Cornelius the goat in the nomad village of Dreg is listed at 15,000, but buying him from the "Goat Man" instead costs half that, 7,500^{[V2 0:05:27]}.

There is also almost no relationship between price and ability. Chad, a veteran brawler, asks 9,000; Jewel, who can only cook, and crab-loving Lumi ask 6,000 each in United Cities towns and in Crab Town respectively; while Green Finger, doubly specialised in engineering and farming, costs just 2,000^{[V3 0:05:19]}. The reason is that "recruit by payment" and "recruit by condition" are two completely separate systems inside the game — a price tag reflects which system the character was written into, not what they are worth^{[V3 0:05:19]}.

The Shek unique recruits share a narrative motif as well: most of them carry a history of disgrace^{[V4 0:00:15]}. Ells, the drunk in Sho-Battai, has a 1,000-cat bounty for stealing booze and nothing going for him beyond middling Stealth and Thievery — 300 Cats takes him away; Kang, by contrast, a veteran who appears in Admag, Squin or Last Stand, asks 6,000^{[V4 0:00:15]}. In a people who write "death in battle is honour" into their culture, a Shek who has drifted into a bar to be picked up by the player usually has a reason.

3. Slaves and prisoners

The cheapest, and the least reliable. Buying happens mainly at United Cities slave shops; the purchase first becomes an "ally" and only decides to join after travelling with you for a while — and may abandon you immediately or partway through. Rescuing means picking a cage and shackles, after which behaviour depends on personality: Honourable and Clever follow you; Brave and Treacherous just run; Stupid and Fearful stay in the cage. Prisoners released from police stations usually become allies too.

4. Saving a life

There is a "you saved my life!" dialogue, with harsh conditions: the character must carry the "saviour" or "liberator" flag, you must have never kidnapped them (once is enough to lock it out permanently, even undetected), and you have to run into them again 24 hours later.

5. Animals

Animals bought from nomad traders, farm shops or Holy Nation farms become player characters directly, also using up the 30-person budget, and lose 75% of their Toughness, attack/defence/dodge, Martial Arts, Athletics and Stealth — a purchased beast is not the same thing as a wild one. Movement speed depends on age, not on the Athletics skill.

How mods rewrite this pipeline

Genesis turns prisons and cages into the least troublesome mid-game expansion pipeline: put a knocked-out bandit or beast in a cage, heal it up, and once it wakes you can recruit it — one streamer used this to turn a half-dead beast into a guard dog for the base^{[V5 0:00:32]}. The same process gets used for post-battle handling: take prisoners alive, cage them, starve them a while and then convert them into your own members; in the video a captured ninja had rather good stats and went straight into the defence force^{[V6 0:04:23]}.

It is worth recording because it fixes a structural gap in vanilla: out in the wilds, with no town to visit, the player has almost no way to grow. Vanilla leaves you rescuing prisoners and hoping, while the mod wires "winning a fight" directly into "getting bigger"^{[V6 0:04:23]}.

Mercenaries are not squad members

Mercenaries are a fixed-term contract: they do not count against your cap, you cannot control them directly, and they leave when the time is up, counting down in the "events" panel of the faction window.

The terms of the contract are spelled out at the setting level too: anyone can hire them, a single payment buys a fixed span of time, they supply their own weapons and armour, and they keep the right to loot the enemies they defeat^{[V7 0:06:48]}. In other words, a mercenary is not your person but a service with an expiry date.

Patrols from allied factions may also escort you for free: bring Bo along to summon Anti-Slavers, show a Holy Seal to have Paladins escort you for 36 hours, and Shek Hundred Guardians can guard you for three days.

Precisely because mercenaries neither eat into the cap nor need training, they are the fastest way to get defender numbers up in a hurry. The standard practice in play is to send several characters to bars in different cities (say Vain, Stack and Squin) and hire mercenary companies en masse to march back to base — above all when you know a raid is coming and your own strength is visibly short^{[V6 0:01:05]}.

Morale and loyalty: they do not exist

This is the point most in need of clearing up. Kenshi has no morale value and no loyalty rating — no wages, no satisfaction, no squad member defecting because they are unhappy. Recruits are permanent unless you dismiss them yourself (at which point they join the Tech Hunter faction).

Only three situations actually cost you people: slaves/allies who have not formally joined can walk off at any time, mercenary contracts expiring, and death or capture.

As for characters "in bad condition", the effect comes from hunger rather than mood: a hunger value below 200 badly slows movement and combat performance — slavers deliberately keeping slaves on the edge of collapse are exploiting exactly this mechanic.

Squad controls

Seven buttons run down the right side of the interface, set per character:

JOBS and RANGED are on by default.

Races and role assignment

Start with the racial multipliers (mostly ±20%, with Strength/Dexterity at ±10%):

Skeletons have three further overwhelming advantages: they never eat, they heal four times as fast as a Greenlander, and they have 200 HP in every limb. The price is that entering the Holy Nation is fatal.

Common misconceptions

• "30 is a cap you can upgrade" — no, it is a global setting, and only mods can change it.
• "Bar characters respawn if they are killed" — they do not, short of re-importing the save.
• "Animals don't count towards the limit" — they do.
• "Mercenaries can be your main force" — contract-based, eight days maximum, and you cannot command them.

See also

• Base building
• Production and crafting
• Races overview
• Slavery
• Game mechanics overview

Video citations

1. Kenshi 2 - Should It Have Multiplayer?HeroInHisHead
2. Kenshi: Unique Companions | GreenlandersCivilizationEx
3. Kenshi: Unique Companions | ScorchlandersCivilizationEx
4. Kenshi: Unique Companions | Shek, Hivers, SkeletonsCivilizationEx
5. Kenshi | MOVING DAY....AGAIN!! | Let's Play Kenshi Genesis (Ep. 4)HeroInHisHead
6. Kenshi | TAKING THE FIGHT BACK TO THEM!! | Let's Play Kenshi Genesis (Ep. 5)HeroInHisHead
7. History of Kenshi: Minor Powers | Factions (Deadcat, Mega City, Mongrel, Shinobi Thieves...)CivilizationEx