Swamp TurtleReport

English：Swamp Turtle　·　Creatures

A stilt-legged giant that crawls through the swamp belt at a near standstill. Completely harmless, and worth fourteen units of Raw Meat per corpse — the safest bulk food source in the early and mid game.

The Swamp Turtle is the big herbivore of the swamp belt: four spindly legs holding up a wrinkled, moss-green body, a long snout hanging low, and a broad, flat "shell" on its back that reads less like a carapace than like the cap of a mushroom. They cross the wetlands at a speed close to standing still, and they are one of the very few creatures in Kenshi that will never cause the player any trouble.

Ecology and distribution

Swamp Turtles appear in the swamp belt and the regions bordering it: The Swamp, the South Wetlands, the Burning Forest and The Unwanted Zone.

Group size depends on the region:

• In The Swamp they usually travel alone or in pairs (squads of 1–3)
• In the South Wetlands they form herds of 5–12 adults plus 0–3 juveniles

One detail that is regularly got wrong: the Swamp Turtle does not belong to the Swamp Creatures faction. That faction covers Swamp Raptors and some Blood Spiders, while the Swamp Turtle sits in the generic Wildlife faction.

Its vision range multiplier is only 0.5, the shortest of any animal in its size class. Combined with a movement speed of 4–8 mph, it is nearly incapable of noticing you, let alone catching you.

Fourteen cuts of meat per corpse

For the player, almost the entire value of the Swamp Turtle sits in one line of data: its death item is Raw Meat ×14 (about 60 Cats a unit, so roughly 840 Cats a corpse).

That combination — a large amount of meat at almost zero risk — is rare in Kenshi. Game of comparable size either kills you back or drops something like Rotting Meat, which barely counts as food. For a squad that has just settled in The Swamp or the South Wetlands and has no farms yet, a single Swamp Turtle is several days of rations.

Its combat data says the same thing:

Two settings that were left broken

The Swamp Turtle is where two of the best-known oversights in Kenshi's data files live, and both of them work in the player's favour.

First, it was never assigned an animal weapon. Every animal in the game has a dedicated "weapon" entry that determines how its damage is composed — every animal except the Swamp Turtle. Faced with that gap, the game falls back on handing it a random ordinary weapon of Ancient quality. The practical consequence is that attack and defence bonuses drift from one individual to the next depending on which weapon it rolled, so you can run into a Swamp Turtle with slightly higher or slightly lower attack.

Second, its attack animation is wrong. The Swamp Turtle was assigned an animation that does not match it, so when a player actually gets hit by one, no attack is visible on screen. In Kenshi the attack animation also determines the type of attack, and what the Swamp Turtle was supposed to have is a stomp AoE. Because the animation is misassigned, that area attack has never once gone off.

The community mod Swamp Turtle FIX corrects the animation assignment. Worth noting: with that mod installed, Swamp Turtles become considerably more dangerous — they finally get to perform the area stomp they were designed around.

Where it sits in the world

The Swamp Turtle has no story of its own; its role is to be part of the setting. The Swamp itself is a margin outside the United Cities system, where the locals live off the hemp economy and the black market. On a stretch of land soaked in acid rain and mud, a scattering of quiet, slow giants that are hostile to no one is itself part of what the region feels like.

They are also a reminder of something easy to forget: not every wild animal in Kenshi is a threat. In a world where everything wants to eat you, the Swamp Turtle is one of the few things that only wants to be left alone.

See also

• Creatures
• River Raptor
• Leviathan
• Game Mechanics