Sources and LicensingReport

English：Sources and Licensing　·　Other

The articles here are original rewrites, factually based on the Kenshi Fandom Wiki (CC BY-SA 3.0), with narrative context drawn from two lore video channels. The game itself is copyright Lo-Fi Games Ltd.

This site is a rewritten Kenshi reference, not a translation project. The text of every article was reorganised, condensed and explained by an editor after reading the source material, rather than translated sentence by sentence from the wiki or from video subtitles. This page sets out where the facts come from, how they were checked, and what a reader should go back to when they find an error.

Factual sources

Kenshi Fandom Wiki

The factual baseline for this site is the English Kenshi Fandom Wiki. The whole site was captured on 2026-07-30 through its api.php interface, yielding the plain text and category tags of 2328 articles plus 330 redirect records, which are used to cross-reference the different English spellings of one concept, such as Anti Slavers pointing at Anti-Slavers.

It needs saying up front that those 2328 articles are not all lore. In the actual distribution there are roughly 520 character pages, 276 locations, 168 buildings, several hundred on items and equipment, plus 94 modding tutorials, 48 gameplay guides and 68 "removed content" pages. Only thirty-odd core pages actually sit under the Lore category. The articles here are built mainly on the lore, faction, race, character and in-game book pages, and the modding and guide pages are essentially unused.

Files from the game's own installation

Since 2026-08-02 the numbers on this site come from the game's own data files rather than the wiki's restatement of them. The source is a Steam installation of Kenshi, from the site owner's own legal copy:

These are custom binary formats with no official documentation, and the parser was reverse-engineered. The format notes are in the header of work/parse_gamedata.py.

What it changed on this site:

• The GLOBAL CONSTANTS record gives the game's real constants, and three of them overturned figures this site had taken from the wiki. The hunger multiplier for sleeping in a bed is 0.4, not 0.33. The Hive's food savings of 0.45/0.5/0.6 apply only to the Southern Hive, since ordinary Hivers are 1.0, the same as humans. The Shek hunger rate is 1.0, and the wiki's 1.25 does not match the game files.
• The same record confirmed this site's derivation of wound degeneration speed. degeneration mult is 1.7 at level 1 and 0 at level 99, a slope of 1.7÷98 = 0.01735, which matches the "1.7 − Toughness × 0.0167" written in the articles.
• The navigation graph gives the world's real size: 294,912 game units square, which works out to 29.5 km × 29.5 km = 870 km², matching the official marketing figure. Distances on the map can therefore be given in kilometres rather than in cells.

What it cannot give: the world coordinates of towns are empty in gamedata.base, and the actual placement is scattered through per-building instances in leveldata/*.zone. Meitou grade is not in any of these files. Both still follow the wiki.

kenshimap.com (location coordinates)

Map coordinates originally came entirely from OCR of the official map image, which gave 153 of them. Places the official map does not label (Narko's Trap, Swamped Lab, Cat-Lon's Exile and others) therefore had no coordinates, and this site's rule is to draw nothing without a real coordinate rather than invent a plausible one. Forty-odd of the 285 loot locations were consequently invisible.

Half of that has since been overturned: after unpacking the game's own leveldata.level, those places all turn out to have exact world coordinates (Narko's Trap at cell 39,89; Swamped Lab at 59,48; Cat-Lon's Exile at 109,118). The rule has not changed — the set of places with no coordinates is simply much smaller than it looked.

The game files could not close that gap, since the .zone files contain no town records at all and the town entries in gamedata.base carry no instances. So the community-built kenshimap.com was consulted, supplying coordinates for 260 locations.

Facts only: place name, type, latitude and longitude. None of that site's written descriptions were taken.

The georeferencing method is recorded here so it can be checked. kenshimap uses Leaflet, whose default projection is Web Mercator, so latitude is not linear. A least-squares fit was run over the 116 places present on both sides with unique names (repeated names such as the fourteen Ancient Labs would pin different places to one reference point, and including them pushes the median error from 19 px to 605 px):

x = 17.022 × lng + 3057.2 y = −978.517 × ln(tan(45° + lat/2)) + 3094.7

Median error after transformation is 18.7 px on a 6102 px map where one grid square is 95.3 px, so roughly 0.2 of a square. The linear-latitude version has a median error of 224 px, and that gap is itself the evidence that the projection was identified correctly.

Coordinates rose from 153 to 260, and map coverage of loot locations from 96% to 99%.

YouTube lore channels

The video material comes to 138 videos and about 35.2 hours in total, taken from three public channels:

• CivilizationEx: 20 videos, about 4.0 hours. All Kenshi history documentaries, covering the major powers, the minor powers, the history of each race and the unique companions.
• HeroInHisHead: 84 videos, about 25.5 hours. Of these, only about 33 (10.1 hours) are lore analysis, and the rest is base building, arena fights, let's plays, Kenshi 2 previews, and videos about other games entirely.
• Paul Rogers Gaming: 34 videos, about 5.7 hours. Mostly the "Kenshi Location Guide" series, 27 of them, which works through the regions one at a time and asks whether you should build a base there, covering water, fertility, stone, power, and whether the neighbours will come for you. This material feeds the "is this a good place to build" section of each region article and Base building. It is play advice, not lore.

The videos are here to supply narrative context and interpretive positions, not facts. They string the fragments scattered around the game into a coherent story, and the act of stringing itself contains the author's inferences. See Disclaimer and Lore Reliability.

Common recognition errors:

Images

The images likewise come from the Kenshi Fandom Wiki, all scaled to 800 px wide on capture, with 3306 usable filenames in the index (the local directory holds a small number more that were not indexed). The overwhelming majority are in-game screenshots and item or faction insignia files.

Licensing and rights

• Wiki text: user-contributed content on Fandom is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, which requires attribution and share-alike. The articles here are derivative rewrites that use that content as their factual basis, so the original text on this site is likewise released under CC BY-SA 3.0, and every article ends with links to the corresponding wiki pages as attribution.
• The game itself: all of Kenshi's setting, text, art and trademarks are copyright Lo-Fi Games Ltd., with which this site has no affiliation.
• Images: mostly screenshots of the game, whose copyright remains with Lo-Fi Games Ltd., and CC BY-SA 3.0 does not cover them. They are used here strictly for non-commercial reference on a local network, not distributed and not used commercially.
• Video content: copyright of the respective channel authors. Only their public captions are used here as material for understanding, no video is rehosted, and interpretations are attributed to their source video.

On the rights holder itself, one piece of background from the video material is worth recording here. Lo-Fi Games is a very small studio, and Kenshi was originally developed by Chris Hunt alone over more than a decade. Some commentators argue that a work of this size could only ever be finished because there was no publisher's schedule behind it^{[V1 0:03:54]}. That also indirectly explains why the material this site handles is so fragmentary, since Kenshi's setting is scattered across item descriptions, in-game books and character dialogue, and there has never been an organised official lore compendium, which is why this site has to lean on both the wiki and the videos.

How the data is verified

1. Wiki first: every factual statement must have a corresponding basis in a wiki article.
2. Wiki wins conflicts: where a video disagrees with the wiki, the wiki is used, and the text is marked "one account holds that…" rather than hiding the disagreement.
3. Speculation is not written as settled fact: where the wiki uses wording such as it is unclear, possible or speculated, the article must preserve that layer of uncertainty.
4. Proper nouns are checked back: any personal or place name heard in a video is compared against the wiki spelling before it is written down.
5. Nothing is lifted: no whole passage is translated directly. Quote blocks are used only for in-game text such as book passages and character lines, and limited to a sentence or two.

Capture statistics

Where to look when you find an error

Every article ends with a grey sources box listing the wiki pages and videos behind it. When something looks wrong, work backwards in this order:

1. Follow the wiki links in the sources box, going straight to the corresponding page on kenshi.fandom.com to see how the original puts it.
2. Read that wiki page's citations. Lore pages usually note which in-game book, dialogue line or item description they rest on.
3. Check in-game, since books and item descriptions can be read directly in play. The more thorough approach is to open the dialogue and text data in the official FCS (Forgotten Construction Set), which is the closest thing to a source-code layer.
4. Watch for the snapshot gap. This site is frozen at 2026-07-30, and later wiki revisions do not propagate automatically. Where the live version and this site disagree, the live version wins.

Known limitations

• This site is a single snapshot, with no automatic sync.
• The wiki itself contains 130 stub articles and 92 incomplete ones, all low in information density and reliability.
• The 68 pages under "removed content" describe older versions of the game and do not match the current one.
• The video material contains a great deal of non-lore content, and let's play, arena and modded gameplay footage is never cited here as a basis for setting.

See also

• How to Use This Site
• Disclaimer and Lore Reliability
• World Overview

Video citations

1. The Perfect Star Wars Game Doesn't Exist! (But It Could!)HeroInHisHead