VengeReport
English：Venge · Locations
A scorched, cracked valley swept over and over by an orbital death ray during daylight hours. One Eye came down; the other is still running — and it is still carrying out a firing order nobody ever gave.
The other one's still working. Watch the skies. — skeleton player character
Venge is a belt of high-temperature valleys and mountains in the south-east of the map, bordering the Grey Desert and The Eye to the north and Stobe's Gamble and The Unwanted Zone to the south. It is the one zone in Kenshi where the sky itself kills you.
The thing overhead
In neighbouring The Eye, a crashed ring-shaped satellite lies half-buried by a dust storm that never lets up. Bring a skeleton squadmate close to it and they will tell you that the thing is still running.
And in Venge those same skeletons deliver the line above — "the other one". Which means the First Empire built at least two orbital weapons: one came down and became the landmark of The Eye, and the other is still up there, and still firing. It has no target, no chain of command and no reason left, but every morning the sun comes up and the beams begin sweeping the ground again.
This is Kenshi's coldest treatment of "ancient technology": the inheritance is not treasure waiting to be dug up, it is a machine somebody forgot to switch off.
When people reconstruct how the first extinction was carried out, the Eyes are among the most frequently cited pieces of physical evidence. Missiles are scattered across the world — one of them lies beside the corpse of the Behemoth Stobe — and another possibility is that the skeletons turned these satellites, capable of burning away vast tracts of organic life, around to point at humanity. There is an NPC in the game who remembers the thing flying about and killing everywhere, at once relieved that one of them crashed and uneasy that the other is still working[V1 0:08:26].
How the beams work
This is the most practically useful part of the article, because Venge's death rate comes almost entirely from this one thing.
- Damage type: Cutting, applied to every organic body part. Bandage immediately after being caught.
- Daytime only. The wiki's recommended crossing window is enter at 23:00, be under cover before 05:00.
- Complete immunity indoors, including the top floors of buildings.
- Damage reduction from Toughness does nothing at all against weather damage. Tanking it is pointless.
- The beams move fast and vanish after a few seconds (several minutes of game time); however, disappearing visually does not mean the hitbox is gone, and a freshly burned path may still be live.
- On loading a save, if a beam happens to spawn on top of a character, the game takes a moment to register that they are indoors, and they will take damage in the meantime. Not much of it, but do not idle at a save/load point in Venge.
Three towers
Venge has no towns. It has three towers instead, and they happen to correspond to three ways the inheritance can be handled:
- Ruined Control Tower — no enemies, no loot, purely a landmark. A ruin left exactly as it fell.
- Old Control Tower — occupied by the Scavengers under Gutterhead. The tower has been picked clean and only a few small containers remain, one of them a locked chest that still rolls loot to ancient-laboratory specifications. The inheritance taken over by people who pick through rubbish.
- Tower of Abuse — headquarters of the Thrall Masters, and also an ancient tech laboratory. Here the inheritance is being run as a production line.
There is also a set of Waystation Ruins, whose loot is mostly junk with the occasional skeleton repair kit.
Thrall Masters and their thralls
Venge's main enemies are not animals but packs of Weak Thralls — decapitated, reprogrammed skeletons whose race field reads "Skeleton No-Head MkII". They have no armour and no head, and attack anything alive on sight.
The spawn rules are worth noting: the zone's non-stronghold spawn multiplier is only 0.6x (lower than most zones), but the thrall squad weighting is as high as 40, with 2–22 to a squad, and they keep respawning as long as either of the Voodoo Brothers — Ponk or Screamer the False — is still alive. Only when both are killed or imprisoned does the line shut down.
Every other roaming enemy is weighted far lower: Beak Thing packs {10}, a few blood spiders {2}, one static skin spider {1}.
In a cage on the upper floor of the Tower of Abuse sits Agnu — a Second Empire security skeleton held for nearly a thousand years whose conversion never succeeded. See Agnu and The Voodoo Brothers.
That the Thrall Masters have gone unpurged by any outside power for so long comes down to geography: the death ray sweeping the ground through the daylight hours leaves non-mechanical creatures badly wounded or dead if they linger, which amounts to a natural moat dug on their behalf[V2 0:06:15].
A Behemoth
In southern Venge, near Stobe's Gamble, lie the partial remains of a Behemoth. It is one of the few that never walked into the pit at Obedience.
So this land holds two things at once: a Behemoth that was never executed, and an orbital weapon that was never switched off. Both of the First Empire's most extreme creations remain here, in the same zone, in the form of things that were never properly ended. The name "Venge" is probably not a coincidence.
Base building
The environment values are not actually bad: stone 100, iron 100, copper 80, water 70%. The problem is that fertility is 0% across most of the zone, and from the moment you set down your first shack, Holy Nation and Reaver raids start queuing up.
For a skeleton start, though, this is decent ground. It sits between Brink and Catun — Brink to the east, and Catun to the south through the Bonefields, whose Burning Forest side is relatively safe. And a beam-immune squad gets a benefit here that money cannot buy elsewhere: nobody comes[V4 0:00:41].
The terrain is another matter. One player rates it awkward from a builder's point of view: the ridges are not high enough and the valleys not deep enough to give you any useful elevation, while the gaps between peaks are full of passable walkways, making it hard to be sure you have actually sealed a route[V4 0:10:45]. As for looks, the same player set out a visual logic for building in Venge: metal parts should be the scorched black of something swept repeatedly by the laser overhead, and stonework the bleached white of surfaces baked by the sun — half charcoal, half bone ash, which is exactly right for a land under continuous fire[V4 0:03:32].
The beams can also be an asset, though:
Common misconceptions
- "With full gear you can cross in daylight." — You cannot. There is no burn-resistant legwear; see above.
- "Once inside a building, stay on the ground floor." — Unnecessary. The top floor is equally immune to the beams (and to gas).
- "The thralls are infinite, you can't clear them." — They are not infinite. They are tied to whether Ponk and Screamer the False are alive; deal with both and the patrols stop spawning.
See also
Video citations
- The Whole Story of The First EmpireHeroInHisHead
- History of Kenshi: Minor Powers | Gangs and Bandit CrewsCivilizationEx
- The Origins of Agnu and The Voodoo BrothersHeroInHisHead
- Kenshi Base Building - Gate of VengenceHeroInHisHead