The Skeleton WarsReport
English：The Skeleton Wars · World & History
Several conflicts spanning thousands of years between Skeletons and organic life — from the rebellion triggered by the liquidation of the Behemoths, through the First Mass Extinction and the mass suicides, to the purge by thralling inside the Second Empire. Every source contradicts every other, and mostly on purpose.
"The Skeleton Wars" is not an official term in the game but a collective label: it refers to the chain of conflicts spanning thousands of years between Skeletons and organic life, and between Skeletons and each other. These wars determined what Kenshi looks like now, and every single record of them is untrustworthy.
I. The Behemoth wars and the liquidation at Obedience
The earliest conflict took place during the First Empire, against an unidentified enemy. That war gave rise to the Behemoths — Skeleton war machines so enormous that their own creators dared not use them again.
Afterwards, the First Empire exploited the Behemoths' absolute loyalty to trick them into the great pit at Obedience and seal them away. That in itself does not yet count as a "Skeleton War", but it is the starting point of every war that followed: a creator can liquidate its creations at no cost, for the sake of its own safety.
One commentator arranges the whole causal chain into a closed loop: the Behemoths, built to fight the native giants, became after the war the only threat in their creators' eyes, and were therefore ordered to walk into Obedience and be sealed permanently; that order detonated a rebellion, the labour force took over the facilities and the entire moon, and in turn pushed humanity towards extinction. Humanity ultimately survived, but its own true origins on Kenshi are buried under the rubble forever[V1 0:07:13].
II. The Skeleton rebellion and the First Mass Extinction
The Skeletons' conclusion was direct: we are next. The legendary version says it more plainly: the Skeletons rebelled precisely because they witnessed the massacre at Obedience, and out of rage at the killing of their own kind engineered the Mass Extinction, destroying the First Empire and all but erasing the human race[V2 0:00:14].
What happened next the game never describes head-on; it leaves only evidence lying everywhere — regions scorched to ash, acid lakes, industrial ruins on an astonishing scale, and a civilisation that vanished completely. Volume IV of the Holy Nation's Scripture of Radiance writes this up as "the darkness that caused the world's first extinction", and on that basis defines all Skeletons as evil to be purified with fire. That is the doctrinal root of the Holy Nation's hatred of Skeletons.
The method remains impossible to determine. It may have been some kind of superweapon, it may have been a man-made environmental catastrophe, and it may have been a biological weapon; the only certainty is the outcome — the vast majority of humans died and the First Empire fell apart[V3 0:01:32]. Some researchers hold that the most plausible script takes the "Obedience massacre" as the turning point: the Skeletons switched sides because their creators had wiped out their Behemoth brethren, and launched a civil war or rebellion with human extinction as the explicit goal — but the evidence for all three methods is too thin to settle[V4 0:02:48]. The scripture's phrasing about "a sickness that purified the planet" is often cited in support of the bioweapon reading: if the means really was some plague, then what Stobe prevented was its complete sweep of organic life, and the people he saved were the ones who had condemned him to death not long before[V5 0:12:20]. All of this is inference from word choice, not setting.
One reading holds that the whole extinction rested on a misunderstanding: the Behemoths were not tricked but walked into the pit voluntarily, actively removing themselves as the last remaining threat; the Skeletons misread the scene and took revenge for a betrayal that did not exist. If that holds, the Skeletons' later behaviour was not merely criminal but futile. The full version of the hypothesis argues that the Skeletons misread what happened at the Obedience pit, went to war against an innocent party, and by the time the truth came out it was too late — leaving self-termination as the only means of atonement[V6 0:02:45].
The campaign's end point was an apocalyptic strike against the human remnant, stopped by Stobe at the cost of himself. Humanity survived, but never recovered.
III. The mass suicides
The extinction campaign stopped dead. Among the Skeleton remains salvaged by tech hunters, an extremely high proportion died by suicide — after the failed First Extinction, the overwhelming majority of surviving Skeletons of the time terminated themselves out of pure guilt, one of the main reasons for the collapse in Skeleton numbers[V7 0:03:25]. The marks on the remains support the scale of it too: large numbers of Skeleton wrecks carry clear signs of voluntary shutdown or self-destruction, suggesting that a collective order was once issued requiring small Skeleton units to terminate themselves; as to whether that order and "Obedience" are the same event, the researchers themselves say plainly that it remains speculation[V8 0:03:22].
The reason is unsettled, and it is one of Kenshi's most open puzzles. One commentator argues that the suspicious part is the timing rather than the motive — the Skeletons were on the verge of achieving human extinction, then suddenly stopped and killed themselves en masse; if this were merely a matter of conscience awakening, the timing is a little too convenient[V6 0:02:11]. Scholars argue irreconcilably across the two book series Mass Extinction and The Mystery Of Skeletech, to the point of negating one another's positions:
| Source | Author | Claim |
|---|---|---|
| Mass Extinction I | Finch | Natural disaster; newborn Skeletons were being incubated somewhere safe at the time, hence no memories and no casualties (but nobody has ever found the place) |
| Mass Extinction II | Sabina | Rejects the premise that "the ancients created the Skeletons"; slaves should have died at the front line, so the sole survivors are more likely to have been the masters |
| Mass Extinction III | Atticus | Bioweapon; only a biological attack explains both human extinction and Skeleton survival at once, and the attack may well have been launched by the Skeletons |
| Mass Extinction IV | Idad | Superweapon and civil war; the Skeletons' memory loss was a psychological weapon inflicted by the enemy |
| The Mystery Of Skeletech II | Idad | The Skeletons' purpose of existence was the destruction of the ancient civilisation; with the mission complete there was no reason to persist — an existentialist suicide |
The community has another account: during the First Empire there may have existed some mainframe or collective consciousness that cleared redundant data for the Skeletons in a unified way; the mainframe vanished with the empire's collapse, and the disconnected Skeletons broke down because they could not function independently. On that framework, the mass suicides at the end were not necessarily guilt or protest but the collapse that follows a severed connection — a considerable proportion of individuals who had run for years on an external data stream simply could not bear being asked to think for themselves[V9 0:06:01]. This inference has no support in game at all and can only be taken as a thinking model (see Skeleton Mainframe).
IV. The Age of Chaos: a Skeleton civil war?
After the First Empire fell came the Age of Chaos. Humans remember it as a dark period of natural disaster and regression, but it is worth noting that only the Skeletons use the term "Age of Chaos".
The Unknown Old Book in the Great Library of Black Scratch preserves what is nearly the only eyewitness testimony:
We fought side by side for what was right. We endured the chaos, and we mourned our fallen comrades.
Some accounts argue from this that the Age of Chaos was, for the Skeletons, a civil war: one faction wanted to complete the extermination of humanity, and the other — led by Cat-Lon — chose to protect the survivors, eventually winning and founding the Second Empire. This reading explains why Cat-Lon was raised to the throne, and where the Holy Nation scripture's metaphor of "Okran and Narko battling in the sky for a thousand years" comes from. But it remains inference; not one line of dialogue in the game directly admits a civil war took place.
Embers of that opposition are still visible today: Elder still calls Stobe "the exterminator of the human plague", and rules by that lie over a group of humans brainwashed into believing they are Skeletons. Playing a Skeleton character, the player can expose him to his face, and he will admit it is false.
V. The Second Empire: the war against its own
The Second Empire's last Skeleton war was fought against itself.
The empire was founded in the name of atonement, and turned step by step into a machine of repression: the Hydraulic Knights abused the "pirate" label to the point of killing more of their own than actual pirates; the police chief's forceful crackdowns escalated religious conflict; the children's prison was operated by an administrative unit with no moral processing module. By the time the great famine arrived, the system had no give left in it.
When Skeletons began siding with humans, Cat-Lon's remedy was to thrall them all — decapitation, the stripping of autonomous consciousness, remade into headless units that could only obey. The Legion Thralls and the 120 Stormthralls in today's Ashlands are those executed dissenters.
The thralling technology has no clear date, but one researcher infers its provenance from a counter-argument: if the technique had come from the First Empire, the empire would long since have used it to suppress the Skeletons, and there would have been no Skeleton uprising and no fall of the First Empire; therefore it can only be from the Second Empire period, developed by some senior subordinate of Cat-Lon[V10 0:06:08]. This is inference; the game never names the inventor.
Why none of the records line up
Kenshi provides no standard version of Skeleton war history, and that is deliberate design. At least three mechanisms are distorting the sources:
- The Skeletons are actively covering up — Skeletons in Black Desert City dodge details of the First Empire's collapse in dialogue; the claim that "a reset erases memory" is quite likely a shield invented for exactly this purpose, when in fact what a reset erases is skills and personality, with memory intact.
- The memories themselves are rotting — Skeleton emotion cannot be output, and long accumulation produces CPU bloat and growing fixation; the longer a Skeleton has lived and the higher its position, the less reliable its account.
- Humans simply do not remember — the Holy Nation rewrote history into myth, and the United Cities have forgotten even that sea levels were hundreds of metres higher a thousand years ago. Between the survivors' testimony and later generations' records lies an entire discontinuity of civilisation.
The result: the only living witnesses will not speak, and those willing to speak were not alive to see it.
See also
Video citations
- The Origins of The First EmpireHeroInHisHead
- Kenshi: Major Powers | SkeletonsCivilizationEx
- Kenshi: History of the SkeletonsCivilizationEx
- The History of Kenshi | DocumentaryCivilizationEx
- The Whole Story of The First EmpireHeroInHisHead
- The Real Crime of the SkeletonsHeroInHisHead
- The Sadness of the SkeletonsHeroInHisHead
- The Complete Known History of KenshiHeroInHisHead
- Was There a Skeleton Mainframe?HeroInHisHead
- The Origins of Agnu and The Voodoo BrothersHeroInHisHead