Shrieking BanditsReport
English：Shrieking Bandits · Factions
The bandits of the Shrieking Forest, who cannot speak and come at you 9 to 26 at a time. They are also one of the few enemies you can negotiate with — in grunts.
AIYAAAAAAAAH! AIEEEEEE! FLOOOOOOOOOOP! — in-game dialogue
The Shrieking Bandits live in The Shrieking Forest, Purple Sands and the north-western corner of the Cannibal Plains.
They cannot speak
The first thing the wiki says about this faction is that they are unintelligible, and it offers a cause: possible chronic malnutrition and reduced mental capacity.
That is not a figure of speech. Every line they have is a scream. You can identify them by ear before you see them, because they shriek constantly as they roam.
They are equally easy to identify by sight: no armour at all, a Flesh Cleaver in hand, weapons manufactured by Unknown and Ancient. All stats land between 15 and 35, and they are uniformly Greenlanders, evenly split by gender.
Negotiating in grunts
The most interesting thing about them: the player can vocalise with some of their leaders.
Not by reasoning — by exchanging a series of grunts and gestures. Get it right and you avoid the fight. Get it wrong and you start one.
Why they are dangerous
Individually, an unarmoured enemy with stats of 15–35 is nothing. The problem is volume: they appear in groups of 9 to 26.
For an early squad, twenty-odd flesh cleavers coming out of the trees are deadlier than any single strong enemy. Sightlines in the Shrieking Forest are short, so the first warning is usually the screaming — by which point you are surrounded.
"Simply misunderstood nomads"
One line in the faction relations table stands out: the Shrieking Bandits have a relation of +100 with the Nomads.
There is a text to back it up. The Tech Hunter's Note series entry "Tech Hunter's Notes: The Shrieking Forest" describes the Shrieking Bandits as "simply misunderstood nomads".
In other words, the only people in the game who treat them as people are other people wandering the wastes. The thread is never developed further, but it quietly reframes a screaming monster-mob as a group of humans who are starving.
For the player
- They hold no settlements, and no world state grants them one or removes them.
- There is no leader to kill. The faction has no unique characters.
- The loot is worthless — no armour, and the weapon is a cleaver. Killing them pays almost nothing.
- Walk around them if you can. Their real value is that a fight is optional: if you are willing to stand in front of a screaming mob and work through the dialogue, you can leave intact.