The World of KenshiReport

English：The World of Kenshi　·　World & History

Kenshi is set on a nameless, tidally locked moon — civilisation has collapsed twice, and what is left is ruins, dust, and survivors who eat each other.

The world of Kenshi has no name. By the time the player lands on it, two empires have already risen and fallen across it, and what they left on the surface is slag melted into scars, colossal machine skeletons half-buried in sand, and a population whose only goal is to live through today.

What kind of world this is

The game is set on a tidally locked moon: it keeps one face permanently towards the planet it orbits, so an enormous planet hangs constantly in the sky^{[V1 0:00:14]}. The extreme differentiation of surface climates follows from that — from perpetually baked scorchland to fog-bound swamp under weak light all year round.

This astronomical setup is not background decoration but the root cause of how geography and civilisation are distributed. The acid rain belts, the irradiated deserts and the miasmic swamps are not randomly scattered disasters but the necessary consequences of this world's physical conditions. Every step north or south on the map brings you not merely different enemies but different rules of survival.

That said, the phrase "tidally locked" is often stretched too far. One commentator points out that what is locked is the moon relative to the planet; the moon itself still gets different faces lit by the star in turn, so there is no permanently dark hemisphere — Earth's Moon has no dark side either, only a far side^{[V2 0:23:10]}. The same commentary argues that what genuinely fails to add up in Kenshi is the length of day and night: roughly nineteen to twenty hours of daylight against five or six hours of night is unreasonably short for a tidally locked moon^{[V2 0:23:10]}.

The terrain itself also records one enormous upheaval. There is an NPC in the game who mentions that a certain place "used to be a great port, back when the water was hundreds of metres higher"^{[V3 0:01:07]}. If that line can be trusted, sea levels dropped by hundreds of metres after the first extinction, the continent expanded enormously, and the islands of the old world became the abrupt hills and peaks that now stud the coastal lowlands.

Some speculations about this world

The world itself is left largely blank. Everything below is a hypothesis put forward by lore channels, and the game has never confirmed a word of it.

• That planet overhead may be humanity's original home. One reading holds that the humans of the First Empire originally lived on the planet being orbited, and that the moon Kenshi is set on was a later foothold; its proponent cites Titan as an example of how "a moon more habitable than its planet" is not unusual in real astronomy^{[V2 0:03:18]}.
• The Eye satellites may have been terraforming tools. The same commentator speculates that the "Eyes" the First Empire put into orbit were not merely surveillance or weapons platforms but devices for breaking down hazardous surface material and releasing the compounds needed for life from deep underground — thereby manufacturing an atmosphere and arable soil, a process he compares to comet impacts delivering the ingredients of life to Earth^{[V2 0:04:22]}.

Both inferences are elegant, and their shared problem is equally obvious: the game never describes what the Eye satellites were for, nor where humanity came from. Read them as possible explanations and they work; read them as setting and they do not.

Two collapses of civilisation

The backbone of Kenshi's history is the successive destruction of two empires, and it is the key to understanding every faction now in existence.

The First Empire: the summit of technology, and self-destruction

The First Empire was an ancient civilisation far beyond present-day technology, with automated factories, artificial satellites, genetic engineering, space elevators, and the enormous skeleton war machines called Behemoths. Its extent, its origins, even whether it was born on this world, are all beyond recovery. What can be established is scale and sequence: thousands of years before the fall of Bast, this ancient human civilisation ruled across the entire continent^{[V1 0:00:14]}.

Of the Empire's internal social structure only indirect clues survive. A common reading is that the First Empire maintained some form of caste hierarchy that placed humans explicitly above their creations, the skeletons^{[V1 0:00:14]} — which fits neatly, narratively, with the skeletons' later rebellion and with the "atonement" motive of the Second Empire, though the game never spells the system out.

The First Empire fell to a war and a chain of catastrophes. The Behemoths' power was so great that it frightened even their makers — after the war, the ancients used the skeletons' absolute obedience to order the Behemoths to walk into a vast pit filled with molten metal, sealing them away permanently. That place is today's Obedience, where the huge shapes half-set into the metal can still be seen.

The Second Empire: atonement, corruption, disintegration

The Second Empire was founded by the skeleton Cat-Lon and his followers. Their motive carried a note of atonement — to make up for what the skeletons had done in the past, even though humanity had long since forgotten that history.

The Second Empire did rebuild a civilised order for a time, and then slid step by step into autocracy: child prisons, the suppression of religion and dissent, the mass killing of its own innocent citizens. It finally came apart under the combined pressure of famine, human rebellion and betrayal from within the skeleton ranks. The ruling class withdrew into the shadows, while Cat-Lon himself went slowly mad over the long years.

After the collapse: today's wasteland

The vacuum the empires left was filled by three major powers and countless smaller groups.

Beyond them are a great many small and medium powers: scavenging Tech Hunters, wandering skeletons, swamp ninja gangs, man-eating Cannibals, and bandit outfits scattered everywhere.

Why Kenshi's storytelling is unusual

Kenshi has no main quest, no designated protagonist and no victory screen. The world's history is not told through cutscenes but scattered across objects:

• The ruins themselves — the scale of the architecture and the type of surviving machinery tell you directly which empire they belong to
• Books and notes — texts scattered through ruins and shops, mostly fragmentary and mutually contradictory
• NPC dialogue — each faction's account of the same history is wildly different, and all of it is laced with propaganda
• Terrain — the regions burned to ash and the acid lakes are physical evidence of some atrocity

Which also means every piece of "historical record" the player reads might be a lie. The game deliberately makes the verification itself part of the play.

The basic rules of survival

This world gives the player no favours. A few rules are worth knowing in advance:

1. No levels, only skills — every ability grows through actual use, and taking a beating counts too
2. Losing limbs is normal — losing an arm or a leg will not kill you, but you need a prosthetic to keep fighting
3. Knocked out is not dead — most fights end in unconsciousness, and only then do the real problems start: enslavement, being eaten, or being dragged off by animals
4. Every NPC can be killed — including every faction leader, and the world changes accordingly
5. Enemies do not wait for you to get stronger — the world does not scale to the player

The sequel: Kenshi 2

Lo-Fi Games has announced a sequel, set before the first game, moving from their in-house engine to Unreal Engine 4. One commentator therefore hopes for a large improvement in fire and explosion particle effects — the first game's texts constantly refer to burning a place down, while the game itself shows almost no fire^{[V4 0:04:26]}.

As for the "new mechanic that will change how the game plays" that the studio keeps under wraps, some speculate it is watercraft and sailing, on the grounds that boats appear in nearly every piece of official concept art; the person suggesting it stresses that it is pure guesswork^{[V5 0:06:38]}.

See also

• History of Kenshi
• The First Empire / Old Empire
• The Second Empire
• Factions
• Races

Video citations

1. Kenshi: History of the SkeletonsCivilizationEx
2. Kenshi Lore Master AMAHeroInHisHead
3. The Whole Story of The Second EmpireHeroInHisHead
4. 5 More Things I Want To See In Kenshi 2HeroInHisHead
5. Kenshi 2 - What We Know So Far and What We Can ExpectHeroInHisHead