TinfistReport

English：Tinfist　·　Characters

The Skeleton leader of the Anti-Slavers and the hardest-hitting unit in the game. He once stood beside Cat-Lon; today he is at war with the entire slave economy in a fight he cannot win.

Tinfist carries no weapon. Statistically his hands are the highest-damage thing in Kenshi — Martial Arts 110, a number no player will ever reach. And he has been putting those hands to the same purpose for a very long time: dismantling slavery.

A Skeleton with no past

The wiki gives his background one honest line: almost entirely unknown.

The only anchor that holds up comes from a Skeleton drinker in the Black Desert City, complaining:

Tinfist and Cat-Lon used to be a great pair… and now Tinfist fights a losing battle for humans while Cat-Lon has vanished into thin air… what happened?

That single line establishes three things: he existed during the Second Empire; he and Cat-Lon were once friends; and the two ended up on opposite roads. From the level of that friendship one can infer he held some military, administrative or political post inside the empire — but what exactly it was, and whether he ever faced Cat-Lon directly when the empire came apart, has no answer.

When he learned Martial Arts is equally uncertain — before, during or after the Second Empire all remain possible.

For the thousand years after that, the record breaks off again. Only the result is confirmed: he now leads an organisation whose sole purpose is to attack the slave industry.

Gatwood's legacy

Talk to him and he will mention his teacher, Gatwood the Soft — the founder of modern Martial Arts.

Two facts about Gatwood survive in the world: he was never defeated, and he never killed a single person in his life.

That combination is an argument in itself: the highest form of violence need not be lethal. Tinfist clearly did not inherit that part in full — his bounty and the warrants out on him across every nation say as much — but he did inherit the core of the art. His defence of unarmed combat runs like this:

When you can fight with empty hands, no one can disarm you, not even if you are naked and in chains. It is the perfect weapon for a slave.

That line explains why a substantial share of the Anti-Slavers carry no weapon at all. Empty hands are not an ascetic quirk, they are a technical solution designed for slaves — because slaves are not permitted to hold weapons.

Spring

The Anti-Slaver base Spring is built on a hilltop south-west of Stobe's Gamble, cobbled together out of storm houses, metal-walled buildings and swamp houses. Tinfist sits inside the faction headquarters.

This is a place that vets its visitors strictly: entering in the armour of a hostile faction triggers an attack, and so does being on too-good terms with the slaver camp. Players who want to join the Anti-Slavers cannot go straight to Tinfist — he refers them to Grey, who handles vetting new members.

Terrorist, or liberator

Kenshi does not take sides, so the assessment of Tinfist depends entirely on who is talking.

Longen of the Traders Guild is the fiercest accuser:

Tinfist and his ninjas. He harasses our guild, undermines our order, frees our slaves… and do you know what becomes of those runaways, brother? Look at the bodies they leave along the roads.

The United Cities' official line is "terrorists" and "madmen preaching freedom", accusing them of manufacturing famine, releasing criminals, and spreading chaos and death across the empire. In bars in slaver-held towns you will regularly hear rumours of raids he led in person.

On the other side, the drifters who wander the map speak of him rather well. Bard, a recruitable minstrel (hiring price 3,000 Cats), has only two songs in his repertoire, and one of them is "Tinfist the Righteous", the other "The Ballad of Harmothoe"^{[V1 0:00:15]} — meaning his abolitionist deeds have already made it into the folk repertoire. The content of that song is a noble who amused himself shooting slaves being punched beyond recognition; and when the song ends, nobody in the bar applauds.

The wiki's conclusion on this propaganda war is restrained: whether those raids are fabrications by slave traders or genuine acts of terror by the Anti-Slavers is not clear.

The world differs depending on whether he lives

Tinfist is one of the most far-reaching characters in Kenshi's world-state system.

If he is killed or imprisoned:

• Slave trader caravans begin appearing on the Northern Coast, in Shem, Sinkuun, the Skimsands, Skinner's Roam and the Outlands, and their frequency increases sharply in Heng, the Stormgap Coast, the Great Desert and the Grey Desert.
• If Longen still lives, the Settled Nomads are emptied out; and if slavers such as Emperor Tengu and Grande also survive, the Fishing Village and the Cult Village get taken over by slave traders and converted into slave farms.
• The Anti-Slavers retaliate: a Jonin Assault of 20 elite Jonin comes after the player, potentially led by Jaegar, Bo or Grey.
• Afterwards you can claim the reward from Longen at the guild: +70 with both the guild and the slave traders, two Leviathan Pearls, and the recruitable character Yamdu.

If he lives:

• When Emperor Tengu and Longen both fall, Trader's Edge passes into Anti-Slaver hands and the Free Settlement becomes The Free City.
• Once slavers elsewhere are cleared out, Anti-Slaver Jonin patrols move into the Great Desert, Heng and the Stormgap Coast.
• United Cities tax collectors shaking the player down add half again to the price because "Tinfist is still at large".

In other words, he is the stone holding down the expansion of the whole slave economy. Hand him over and the number of slave traders on the map genuinely goes up.

An open question: is he breaking down too?

Tinfist is usually written up as the lucid one, but commentators have pointed out that he is also starting to show the madness characteristic of Skeletons: his fixation on freeing slaves and fighting nobles keeps intensifying, to the point of ignoring any cost — and that cost includes countless lives, many of them United Cities civilians dragged into it. This reading further speculates that the root of the fixation is guilt, over the things he tolerated and possibly took part in during Cat-Lon's reign^{[V2 0:09:34]}. It is an inference that applies the CPU-bloat premise to him; the game never says Tinfist has gone mad.

Another hypothetical that comes up often is "what if Cat-Lon walked out of the Ashlands". One channel has played out that scenario and concluded that Tinfist would end up at war with everyone: Cat-Lon striking at the United Cities would indeed cripple the slave trade, which points the same direction as the Anti-Slavers' goal, but Tinfist is Cat-Lon's old comrade and has seen with his own eyes what he did to his own kind when he turned them into thralls — nobody on the continent understands better how far Cat-Lon will go^{[V3 0:16:10]}. This is pure extrapolation; no such storyline exists in the game.

Stats and fighting him

Martial Arts 110 makes him the highest single-hit damage unit in the game, and he has enough training partners to push himself all the way into the 500 range. He is also one of only two NPCs in the game with an explicitly set Robotics value (the other is Bo).

A few things worth noting in a fight:

• He normally uses no weapon, but will pick one up and use it if he is caged or enslaved — and his skill with everything except katanas and sabres is extremely high. If drawn out to the perimeter of Spring, he has a habit of manning a harpoon turret: get staggered by the harpoon first, then take a Martial Arts hit, and that is enough to kill outright.
• His resistance to assassination can be calculated: at Assassination 100 you have a 50% knockout chance, and switching to Assassin's Rags (a 1.3× bonus) makes it reliable.
• Once knocked out he must be carried away immediately. Put him in his own cage and open it, or let him wake up on his own, and he can summon a mass of Anti-Slaver reinforcements — one of the most dangerous escorts in the game.

See also

• Anti-Slavers
• Slavery
• Cat-Lon
• The Second Empire
• Traders Guild
• Eyegore

Uses

Dustcoat, Advanced First Aid Kit

Video citations

1. Kenshi: Unique Companions | GreenlandersCivilizationEx
2. The Sadness of the SkeletonsHeroInHisHead
3. What If Cat-Lon Tried To Take Back Kenshi?HeroInHisHead