Skin BanditsReport
English：Skin Bandits · Factions
A "human" settlement at the gates of the Ashlands, in truth a band of damaged Skeletons wearing human skin — ruled by a living human who lets them take him for a god.
In the volcanic belt of the Sonorous Dark, on the road to the Ashlands, a group of people will come out to greet you warmly, call you a flesh brother, and invite you to share human food.
They are not human.
The Sonorous Dark is a volcanic strip wedged along the outer edge of the Ashlands, which makes the Skin Bandits the first obstacle any Tech Hunter must get past on the way to scavenge ancient technology from the ruins of the Second Empire[V1 0:01:07]. Their approach to travellers is consistent and uncanny: they announce loudly that they are human, greet you with the affection of kin, and then beat you unconscious[V1 0:02:13].
The truth: Skeletons in human skin
The Skin Bandits are a cult made up of Skeletons (Screamer MkI / P4 units in the game files) whose members believe they are human, or believe that enough human skin will make them human. They hunt organic life, drag their catch back to the nests scattered through the ruins of Old Empire facilities, and use a Peeler Machine to strip the skin off layer by layer before stitching the pieces into patchwork suits worn over their frames. One commentator argues this is crueller than what the Cannibals do in the north, for a very simple reason: the victims are skinned alive[V1 0:02:47].
Kill a Skin Bandit and you can take an Old CPU Unit off the body — its death item, and the proof of what it really is.
Human Skin as "armour" offers zero protection. It was never equipment; it is a declaration. The item description explains why the hunting never stops:
The Skin Bandits need a constant supply of fresh human skin to make new suits, as they tend to rot away quite quickly.
The world knows almost nothing about them
How long the Skin Bandits have existed is unknown; the general assumption is some time after the collapse of the Second Empire.
What is genuinely strange is how ignorant the outside world is. Outside the fringes of the Forbidden Zone, hardly anyone knows the faction exists — their handiwork is widely attributed to mythical creatures. The United Cities do know the name Savant, and do know that bodies have been found stripped to the flesh, but the wanted poster says only that "details of the mutilator are still largely unknown", with nothing about his appearance and nothing about the organisation he leads.
The first time a player squad enters the Stormgap Coast, one of the characters brings up rumours of skinless corpses found in The Pits — and that is the sum of what the outside world has.
In the Tech Hunter's Notes Series, Stone-Head, the last surviving member of the Ashland Drifters, ran into the Skin Bandits during his group's expedition into the Ashlands. In the interview he alludes vaguely to what they did to his friend Cobby, then trails off, stares into space for ten minutes, and stops responding to anything around him.
Stay well away from that big pit with all the torches around it. You can see it from miles off. Just go around it, all right? —Tinfist
Savant: the only human present
The darkest layer of this faction is its leader.
Savant sits on his throne in the Skinhouse HQ, surrounded by Skeletons who take him for a god — and he is a genuine human being, a Scorchlander, flagged with a Maniacal personality. The United Cities price him at 80,000 Cats (the poster prints 50,000) for "the disappearance of hundreds of humans in the Forbidden Zone, south of the Great Desert".
He holds a special blueprint called the Skeleton-Human Transformation Bible, which the game describes as "Savant's secret alchemical formula for turning skeletons into humans". The same blueprint unlocks both the Human Skin Suit and the Peeler Machine.
Savant's dialogue gives away two things. First, he knows Skeletons:
Of course. Is it about your... the skeletons?... Yes, I thought it might be. What else is there to ask, you've only just met me! I studied skeleton psychology for three years when I was just ten years old, you know...
Second, he knows the Ashlands. He talks about the Skeleton Legion rampaging through them like killing machines, and about contamination by the cinders — first-hand knowledge at that level cannot come from someone who has never been there.
Origins: a faith turned back on its believers
The game offers no official version, but the clues are enough to assemble two mainstream readings.
The first reading (the version favoured by lore videos): Savant was an ambitious Tech Hunter and expert in skeleton psychology whose entire expedition into the Ashlands was slaughtered by the Skeleton Legion. He alone escaped alive and drifted into the old mines of the Sonorous Dark. Living there was a group of Second Empire Skeletons who had evaded Cat-Lon's enslavement process — but whose CPUs had gone unreset for centuries, letting their emotional modules swell until they went mad. Their duty to protect humans mutated into worship, and the Savant who stumbled in became half-god, half-prisoner. He took the position on offer and used his knowledge to give them what they wanted: a machine for taking human skin off. In exchange, all the loot was his.
Following that thread, one reading holds that Savant built the Peeler Machine himself out of Tech Hunter engineering knowledge: he traded on the skeleton psychology he had studied, buying absolute loyalty with the promise of "humanity" — since by the logic of a malfunctioning Skeleton, a Skeleton wrapped in flesh is a human — and the real output of the entire religion was an unbroken stream of loot delivered into his hands[V1 0:12:27].
The second reading puts the weight not on Savant's past but on the aetiology he preached to his followers. He tells them the Skeletons of the south go mad because of the ash that keeps falling from the sky and works its way into the machinery; if that is the cause, then "becoming human" will keep the madness out, and the method is to catch living people, put them through the Peeler Machine, and stitch their skin into clothing[V2 0:04:30]. Because skin degrades over time, the doctrine has an endless demand built into it from the start, which is why any human who tries to settle nearby draws a Skin Harvest raid[V3 0:23:43]. This version also explains something else in passing: the Skin Bandit holdings happen to plug the entrance to the Ashlands, shielding what remains of Cat-Lon's forces from a great many humans coming to dig up ancient technology.
Who is safe and who is not
The Skin Bandits' friend-or-foe test is the most literal in the game: do you have skin?
- Humans: attacked without exception, straight into a Peeler Machine
- Skeletons, Hivers, Shek: neutral inside the Skinhouse HQ, and able to talk to Savant
- Only Skeleton characters can join — that is the sole condition of membership
In faction terms they unilaterally treat the Skeleton Legion as a +100 ally; the Legion attacks them anyway. With the Fishmen and the Old Machines they maintain coexistence, and they sit at -100 with the Reavers, the Crab Raiders and the United Cities. Notably, the game's default faction relations set the Skin Bandits friendly towards the Second Empire Skeletons — from which one commentator infers that Savant is fundamentally a survivor, and that faced with the overwhelming Skeleton Legion he would submit on the spot rather than resist[V4 0:17:51].
With the Skeleton Bandits they are nominally neutral and fight regardless — the two are exact inversions of each other: a group of humans who believe they are robots, and a group of robots who believe they are human. One lore channel calls the Skin Bandits a perfect mirror of the Skeleton Bandits: Skeletons conditioned into "believing they are human"[V3 0:23:43]. The pairing has even been staged as a sandbox battle, Savant's Skin Bandits against Elder's Skeleton Bandits; that is a player-made simulation and carries no official standing[V5 0:00:11].
Allying with the Skin Bandits drops relations with the Crab Raiders, the Reavers and the Skeleton Bandits by 75 each.
Skin Harvest
If a player base falls within 7,000 metres of a Skin Bandit holding, it can trigger the Skin Harvest and The Big Skin Harvest raid events, of 1–3 and 2–5 squads respectively, each squad 8–20 strong.
On arrival they deliver a short address:
Come out, flesh brothers! Come talk with your fellow humans! We mean no harm... we only want your skin. Your fresh... clean... skin... skin!
Downed characters are carried back to a Skinhouse and put into a Peeler Machine very shortly after arrival, where they die — a rescue has to be extremely fast.
Besides the Skinhouse HQ, there are two smaller Skinhouses within the Sonorous Dark, equally terminal for captives[V2 0:04:30].
Killing or imprisoning Savant stops both events from triggering and reduces the Skinhouse HQ itself to ruins, taking any valuables left inside with it.
Behind the scenes
The Skin Bandit storyline is not a coincidence players read into the details. Narrative design at Lo-Fi Games was handled by Nat, sister of producer Chris Hunt, who wrote a great deal of the first game's text; the Skin Bandits are one of the factions she authored — the whole dark package is deliberate design[V6 0:07:13].
See also
Video citations
- The Origins of the Skin BanditsHeroInHisHead
- History of Kenshi: Minor Powers | Cults - Crab Raiders, Skel Bandits, Skin Bandits, Preacher CultCivilizationEx
- History of Kenshi: Minor Powers | DocumentaryCivilizationEx
- What If Cat-Lon Tried To Take Back Kenshi?HeroInHisHead
- Kenshi Colosseum: Elder | 10 Skeleton Bandits VS Savant | 10 Skin BanditsHeroInHisHead
- Kenshi 2 Just Got a New Update!HeroInHisHead