Western HiveReport

English：Western Hive　·　Factions

The source of 99% of the Hivers in the wasteland — a caravan civilisation living off farming, smuggling and hard bargaining, and the only Hive willing to do business with the outside world.

The Western Hive is the largest of the three branches of the Hive and the only one that maintains normal relations with the outside world. More than 99% of the Hivers you meet in the wasteland come from here. They are settled in Vain and Dreg, with a small group that migrated north to Sinkuun.

One research video sums them up as the lot "from the red forests of Vain and an island off its coast, who want to sell you something the moment they see you" — a single sentence, but a precise capture of their image out on the map: an omnipresent caravan civilisation^{[V1 0:01:21]}.

Geography and population

The core of the Western Hive is Vain, a stretch of west coast with a crimson acid river. That river is lethal to humans and Shek and merely scenery to the acid-immune Hive, which makes it a natural moat. Vain's ecology is unexpectedly rich, which also means the threat from Beak Things and Gorillos never lets up; Hive Villages are frequently attacked by these animals in game.

The Queen herself does not live in any of the villages but presides from a small island off the coast of Vain, surrounded by acid water. There is nothing on the island but a few Hive structures and a "Hill Hut" — no shops, and nowhere for outsiders to have wounds treated.

Settlements come in three kinds:

The population estimates are startlingly small. Working from spawn weightings, the wiki puts the Western Hive population in Vain at somewhere over ten times that of Beak Things, while its economic scale is a fifth of the Traders Guild's; the whole Hive civilisation numbers roughly three times the Starving Bandits, and is a hundred to a hundred and twenty times smaller than the Holy Nation. This is a civilisation that occupies two large blocks of the map with an extraordinarily thin actual population.

Daily life in a Hive Village

The workings of a Hive Village are the most direct display of the caste system there is:

• Worker drones cook, mine, labour and sleep. They carry no weapons, and their first reaction to an enemy is to run — but if every soldier drone nearby goes down, workers will pick weapons off the unconscious and fight back
• Soldier drones come in two kinds, town guards and shop guards. The former patrol and sleep; the latter never leave their shop. All are equipped with ancient-grade polearms, rag loincloths and basic first aid kits
• Hive traders are invariably Hive Princes. They do not sleep, and they can fight

Trade: the cheapest prosthetics in the wasteland

For early-game players the Western Hive is one of the most valuable trading partners in the Border Zone — they are the nearest supplier of cheap prosthetic limbs. A character who has just lost an arm or a leg out in the wild is better off at a Hive Village than at any Tech Hunter outpost.

Western Hive caravans come in three types — survival goods, materials and crops — ranging as far afield as Flats Lagoon, Heng, the Stenn Desert and the Great Desert. Their cargo lets you infer a good deal of industry that is never actually shown:

• Agriculture: hemp, riceweed, wheatstraw, cactus, cotton — although there is not a single field to be seen in a Hive Village
• Mining and smelting: iron plates, spring steel, steel bars, armour plating, building materials, electrical components — again with no visible mines
• Suspected smuggling: the hemp and hashish on the shelves, plus pearl pots and ceramic bowls of unexplained origin

Putting those numbers together, one commentator has run the accounts for the Western Hive: their buildings are almost all secreted from their own bodies, so construction costs are near zero, and yet their caravans blanket the entire continent at steep asking prices. Even with merely ordinary goods, the sheer density of caravan coverage makes them the second-largest trading body on the map after the Traders Guild^{[V2 0:22:26]}.

Their commercial reputation, on the other hand, is a joke across the wasteland. The Western Hive's "trustworthiness" value is −50, on a par with most bandit factions. There is a well-known Hive caravan event in which a "special discount" is used to push a Lantern of Radiance onto the player at an outrageous markup. A character line from the Vain zone captures the impression vividly:

"…oh good, Vain. I wouldn't buy a loaf of bread off a bug merchant if I were starving to death. Cheating bastards. …Cute cheating bastards."

Extended reading: why this branch in particular does business

The three Hives share an origin yet differ wildly in temperament, and that fact needs explaining on its own. One account traces the cause to raw materials: after the Second Empire collapsed the three Queens were scattered across the continent, and the Western Queen landed on this island off the west coast, where no ready organic material was available, so her offspring had to farm to obtain the biomass they needed to breed^{[V3 0:11:07]}. On this reasoning, using crops as raw material both gave them their cream-to-light-brown colouring and shaped them into the only one of the three branches willing to trade and coexist with outsiders — because an agricultural civilisation has to exchange goods with other people in the first place^{[V3 0:11:07]}.

The appeal of the hypothesis is that it also accounts for a mechanical oddity: Hive caravans sell large volumes of crops, and yet there is not a field to be seen in a Hive Village. But it remains inference — the game neither describes how the Queens were scattered nor explains the difference in skin colour.

Diplomatic position

Western Hive diplomacy is a delicate balance of being disliked without being fought.

The Holy Nation imposes a trade embargo on them and arrests any Hiver who strays across the border, shipping them off to Rebirth — but at faction level the two are not at war. The result is a tacit line of mutual non-aggression: Hive caravans rarely push deep into Holy Nation territory, and the Holy Nation does not march into Vain.

The Traders Guild is a purely commercial rival. In the Stenn Desert, the Great Desert and Heng, where the two sides' caravans overlap, the Guild appears five times as often as the Hive.

The Southern Hive unilaterally sets relations to −100. That hostility is hard-coded in advance; it simply has no chance to express itself — until the moment the Western Queen falls.

As for the Shek Kingdom, the Tech Hunters, Mongrel and the skeleton communities, the flow of goods (authentic skeleton repair kits, the distribution range of economy prosthetics) implies that the Western Hive has substantive dealings with all of them.

Behind this "offend nobody" posture, one commentator offers a distinctly cold reading: every decision the Western Queen makes obeys a single criterion — whether the Hive survives. His precedent is the Southern Hive, which has already voluntarily submitted to a skeleton machine (the "King") to improve its survival odds; if Hivers are capable of that, then should skeleton power genuinely reach their borders, the Queen might equally bow — and would switch sides the instant the balance tipped^{[V4 0:15:35]}. This is an inference about the Queen's behavioural pattern; the game contains no story that verifies it.

After the Queen dies: a civilisation evaporating on the spot

The Western Hive is Kenshi's most extreme case of a single point of failure. Kill or kidnap the Queen and the entire civilisation vanishes from the map within days:

• Every Hive Village and Distant Hive Village becomes a Deadhive Overrun ruin
• Fog Deathyard groups begin spawning in Dreg, Okran's Gulf and Vain
• Hive Bandits and Lost Princes begin appearing in the Border Zone, Flats Lagoon, the Stenn Desert, the Great Desert, the Swamp and a dozen other zones
• Lost Hivers wander the major cities, complaining to anyone at all about how much they miss the Queen
• Farm trader and materials trader events stop permanently
• If the Queen was kidnapped rather than killed, the Western Hive launches a retaliatory siege: nine squads of nine soldier drones each throw themselves at the player's base, and 24–48 hours after each defeat they come again, indefinitely

"The Queen! Forgive us, Queen!" — soldier drone, during a siege

If the Southern Hive Queen is still alive at that point, southern patrols move into the vacuum, pushing all the way into the Bonefields, the Border Zone, Flats Lagoon, Okran's Gulf, The Hook, the Swamp and even Vain itself. The wiki reads this as a formal annexation launched by the Southern Hive once the west weakens — to feed their "King".

See also

• Hive
• Hive Queen
• Southern Hive
• Deadhive
• Traders Guild
• Factions

Video citations

1. Kenshi Colosseum: Southern Hive VS Western HiveHeroInHisHead
2. Which Faction Can Succeed on Kenshi?HeroInHisHead
3. The Origins of the HiversHeroInHisHead
4. What If Cat-Lon Tried To Take Back Kenshi?HeroInHisHead