Happy Monday everyone! As we’d set out in our last post, this last week has mainly been tweaking and fixing things so it’s gonna be a short blog entry today. Other than balancing, we still have some populating to do in order to perfect the first section for release, right now it’s still looking just a little bare bones and lonely. We’ve recently added some border town ruins, a boss hideout and more, but it still needs a few more gems before it’s ready. 

World Map

The full map itself has now been finished. You’ll find consumable map items around the world that will contain town locations to add as a marker on your interface. Maykol’s just finished creating a unique item distribution system that will add these kinds of items throughout the world, which should give consistent allocations for all players and play-throughs (although some mods could change where each item would be). The trader’s inventory fill algorithm has also been improved to give a better distribution of the items in the different containers.

Player Controlled Animals

Some of you may have noticed that taming is marked as a luxury feature on our Trello page, this will only be added if we have the time and funding at a later date. However we have still been working on player controlled animals which you’ll be able to buy from traders, this has mainly just involved adapting and fixing up the current squad menus such as the character editor, inventories, trading & looting, actions and portraits. Animal player characters should be finished in time for our 0.90 release.

Animation

All of our new character animations are now complete, we have positions for kneeling in worship or submission, using objects like machines and research benches, sleeping on the floor and other more realistic movements. See our fog man cannibal ritual in action below with the new animations!

In other news, this week will be Otto’s last week with Lo-Fi Games as he goes back home to Sweden. Hopefully it won’t be the last we hear from him, you’ll be missed, Otto, good luck

*** The above content has not been released yet. This will be added in the next update, Beta 0.90, ETA end of March. In case some of you have noticed, this has changed from 0.80 to 0.90 since the addition of extra features

Click here for details on the current playable version of Kenshi, available on Steam experimental opt-in ***

Okay, this is another super short post this week, as we’ve mostly been working on not-so-newsworthy stuff like fixes and minor tweaks for the GUI, water shaders, terrain seams and… you get the idea.

Dust Storms

We’ve made good progress on particle and weather effects – here are our new dust storms:

Eventually weather effects will affect gameplay, particularly industry function and wind generators etc. Dust storms and other weather effects won’t be released in game for quite a while yet though, ETA way after Beta.

Player Controlled Animals

Some of you might remember that we had a poll a few months back about AI and player controlled animals. Although AI control came out as the most popular vote from players, in the end, we’ve decided to make them player controlled. AI control would have been considerably more complicated and time consuming to implement in the long run, at least not an amount of time we have to spend on a non-core feature. Either way, animal squad mates are now complete and all ready to go for the Beta update!

Stealth Icon

In our last blog we mentioned finishing a number of animations. Well, sneaking is also one of those new animations too, plus last week we’ve added a new player name tag with stealth and light amount icons. Here you can see an example of the new ‘stealth meter’ in action…

*** The above content has not been released yet. This will be added in the next update, Beta 0.90, ETA end of March. 

Click here for details on the current playable version of Kenshi, available on Steam experimental opt-in ***

NEW WORLD (0.90.0)

Due to the sheer size of the new map, the first release will be restricted to a certain area only. This area will gradually expand with more updates, but the main focus now is going to be on stability and polish.

This first build will be full of bugs and instability, please send us crashdumps and bug reports (either via Steam or our official forum) so we can fix it up ASAP.

The update is only available on the “Experimental” branch at the moment, because I’m unsure of it’s stability. (you have to right-click on Kenshi in your Steam games list -> properties -> betas tab -> then choose “experimental”)

Content:

• Entirely new world map. More detailed and polished, new factions, new content, things to explore. Its’ like Kenshi 2. Crazy. I should have called it Kenshi 2 and charged for it again, but I didn’t. Damn.
• Entirely revamped research tech-tree, new technologies and balance. Research is faster, but has a cost in items or artifacts.
• Totally new buildings. Multiple floors, and you can mount turrets on the rooftops.
• New power system. Generators require fuel, wind power fluctuates with the wind strength, batteries compensate for fluctuations. Fuel can be made from crops.
• Revamped farming system and different crops.
• New animals, and new races with own strengths and weaknesses.
• There’s water now. Rivers to cross and oceans to drown in.
• Camping- You can build easy camp beds and fires for survival when travelling
• Things and places to find. Bandit bases, old labs, ruins.

Gameplay:

• Hunger is now a thing. You can die of starvation although it takes a long time. Your characters appearance reflects their state of physical strength or malnutrition.
• Buildings are now made with multiple materials. Machinery requires iron and sometimes copper.
• Thievery is improved, buildings have things to steal, guards are more alert.
• Leather crafting now requires you to hunt for animal skins
• Nice new zoomable world map window. It’s so nice.
• Your stats are now affected by injuries and malnutrition.
• Certain animals might now eat your crops, your dead bodies, and sometimes even your unconscious bodies.
• NPCs use the stuff in their homes, guards train, people sit etc
• Guards in buildings and shops now descreetly sort of follow you about, keeping an eye on you
• Fixed getting busted for stealing from accidental clicks. You can look inside unlocked containers, and lock picking has to be chosen through the right-click menu.
• Reduced labour/engineering speed penalty at level 1 from 0.25x to 0.5x. This will speed things up slightly at the lower levels when starting out
• Stealth skill is easier to train in non-hostile environments.
• Increased trade profitability by 50%, this combined with thievery should provide decent alternatives to looting as a profession in the early game stage.
• Characters with a turret job will automatically use whichever turret has enemies in its line of fire.
• New long-distance move command, so you can click on distant terrain and your characters will run there
• Tons of bugfixes.

Engine:

• -New fancy shadow system, looks nicer and more importantly runs faster.
• New terrain engine. Runs faster, looks nicer and shows more detail for distant mountains
• Long-range pathfinding system. You can click on any visible distant mountain and your characters will find their way there, following roads.
• A lot of fundamental engine optimisations have been done, this may temporarily cause new bugs, but hopefully speed things up
• Bit of an overhaul to the animation system, runs faster and combat animation should be a little smoother and have more functionality
• Overhauled with a new PBR & HDR global lighting system, should make a great improvement to the visual quality
  -(Credit for this goes to Linda MacGill and Igor Frolov of Bug Zen!)

CURRENT STATUS:

• Currently only runs in DirectX11 mode, DirectX9 mode will be fixed later
• No more 32-bit support, the game’s memory requirements are too high
• Not sure how it runs/looks on ATI and non-nVidia graphics cards.

*Make sure to check out our update FAQs for any problems and fixes. We’ll keep it updated as we get more feedback from you all*

There will be a whole bunch of patches over the next week while we stabilise the game, we’ll add them all here in one place. Check back frequently for updates detail below…

Current Game Status & FAQs

Currently, 0.90.0 is very heavy on performance and RAM, these will be optimised further over time.

• For performance issues: Reduce the terrain detail and view distance and turn off shadows.
• For low memory: Reduce the texture quality and view distance.

You can’t load old savegames but you CAN import your squad without buildings and research.

The old version will still be available through Steam in the other branches.

Patchnotes

31st March

0.90.1

• Imposed limitations and a fix for importing old-world savegames
• Enabled the missing playable races

1st April

0.90.2

• Stopped new games starting in deadly towns.
• Fixed getting stuck when trying to add building materials
• Fixed some of the crashes at startup that some people were getting
• Pets no longer need to eat. This is a temporary measure, later I will figure out a feeding method or something.

0.90.3

• Added missing Dialog.mod file. Tons of content was missing there, and caused some crashes
• Fixed crash when purchasing buildings
• There are some big long slowdowns and freezes in the game at random times when zones are unloaded. Optimised these in a gung-ho kinda way to get it out quick. Will go over it more carefully later.
• Robot repair kits now available at construction traders. Not in the holy empire though.
• Hive faction shop was missing tons of item types
• More fixes for starting in bad towns

0.90.4

• Fixed dialogue crash after stealing stuff.
• Fixed getting cooked food item from campfire.
• Fixed research consuming the required amount of items.
• Food now properly consumed from backpack
• Finished fixing the long freezes and slowdowns properly. My previous solution probably was causing bugs, which will now be fixed. Performance should be smoother.
• Fixed the black stripes on the terrain some people were getting.
• random nest items no longer spawn under the floor in buildings

3rd April

0.90.5

• Fixed dialogue crash after stealing stuff.
• Fixed getting cooked food item from campfire.
• Fixed research consuming the required amount of items.
• Meat is worth more nutrition and cooks way faster
• Can’t reproduce the Paladins in Wildlife faction bug, so I think it was because of the missing mod file before. Will enforce save imports for this version and see if it still happens.
• Fixed animals unable to attack
• Fixed multiple characters showing all at once in the character editor

0.90.6

• Books are now a little more common, and can be found in the holy empire towns
• Fixed random buildings getting navmesh-blocked so nobody could get inside
• Added a mercenary squad to the Waystation bar to help the freedom seekers start

4th April

0.90.7

• Hunger now drains slower when you are KO
• Fixed the repeat bounty exploit
• Fixed beak things & bulls unable to attack
• Eating stacked food no longer depletes the whole stack
• Fixed imported squads having an empty build list
• Bread is crafted much faster
• Fixed crash with research bench lvl IV
• Fixed player characters not updating properly offscreen
• Bunch ‘o crash fixes, particularly with the research window

0.90.8

• Added missing cooking stove
• Night time is now less dark
• Fixed camera refusing to descend

5th April

0.90.9

• Fixed some of the major navmesh issues in border zone
• Bunch ‘o crash fixes
• Another improvement to load-time framerate slowdowns
• Hivers no longer get injury penalties at full health
• Fixed hunger penalty for some skeleton NPCs

*To submit crash reports and bugs, please use our Steam forum or offical forum and we’ll look into it as soon as we can*

What are hivers?

The name says it all, hivers are a hive based race who work for one goal: to strengthen their hive and serve their queen. Often referred to in slang as bug or insect men by foreigners, hive people are physically very different to humans and Shek, they are relatively bloodless, and their wider eye positions give them a larger field of view.

Apart from their queen, they are all sexless, they have no concept of he, she, or even ‘I’ for that matter, since they work as a collective with no individual needs or aspirations. Hivers hatch from eggs, the only member of society able to reproduce is the queen via parthenogenesis. New queens can be made by having the queen’s eggs fertilized by another hiver.

Other than the queen there are three subraces of hiver: Soldiers (the guardian brutes), Workers (the farmers and labourers) and Princes (the intellects and assassins). Enforced by the queen’s pheromones, all members of society work selflessly together for the good of the hive, even crime is extremely rare since there is no real motivation for it in the homogeneous hives. When it comes to outsiders however, the hive people can be extremely deceptive and untrustworthy.

“Number one reason not to deal with a bug man, you can’t trust ‘em as far as you can throw ‘em! All us ‘no-hives’, as they call us, are just walkin’ Cat signs to ‘em.”

– Cabo, the Hub bar drunk

Bug juice

The western hive people are vegetarian, mainly living on cacti and other plant based foods due to their lesser hunting skills and superior farming/gathering skills. Their high-in-cactus diet, means that they are able to produce a kind of super hemp by using their manure as both a fertilizer and additive during it’s fermentation process. Bug juice (known as ‘nutrients’ to the hivers) is an extremely potent and addictive substance known throughout the world.

Cultures

• Southern Hives

The Souther Hives’ (location TBC) society goal is to be the sole thinking race in existence; everyone else in the world is seen as a threat to be destroyed for the hive’s well-being. They tend to be territorial and aggressive of outsiders within their area however they will only fight when numbers are in their favour.

• Western Hives

Thinking in the opposite direction to their cousins, the western hivers see warfare as the least conductive method for Hive survival. Instead, they mainly seek to strengthen their hives pragmatically through industry and trade with other factions so that they can build up a strong defensive military deterrent.
 

Ronin

When a queen dies, her subjects all either die, lose their minds or become lost “Ronin”. Alternatively, if a hive person spends too long from the hive, without the queen’s pheromones controlling them they may ‘defect’ to freedom and become an individual, a ronin. Most ronin will die as a result of separation, if madness doesn’t destroy them first. As a result of suddenly going from a higher purpose to nothing but the self, ronins who survive are the most existentially confused and depressed of people.

The official Kenshi soundtrack is available from today on Steam, Amazon and Bandcamp for $5

ALBUM INFORMATION

Around 50 minutes of music total. The Steam and Bandcamp OST versions also includes charts from the score, behind the scenes videos from both recording sessions, & artwork.

TRACK LISTING

* Kenshi
* Scorching Wind
* Sands at Dusk
* Fertile
* The Wildgrass
* As It Is
* Yearn for Night
* Breath of the World
* Bog
* Descend
* Pit
* Ashen Air

NOTES ABOUT THE SOUNDTRACK

The music system in Kenshi has been designed in such a way, that as you play through the game the engine randomly selects from a handful of different musical elements to create new compositional excerpts. It is this ambient approach and “non-player interactivity” of the music that reinforces Kenshi’s indifferent tone. Obviously for a traditional Soundtrack release we can not recreate the randomization of this music system (yet). However, we can get close and musically sculpt each track with wide brushstrokes to capture the same feeling.

In addition to the gameplay music, the Kenshi Original Soundtrack features the Main Title and a few other traditional recordings that can be heard throughout the game. Put on a good set of headphones and let the music transport you to the windy dunes, overgrown swamps, and unexplored wilderness of Kenshi. Thank you and I hope you enjoy!

CREDITS

* Cello: Jeness
* Koto: June Kuramoto
* Accordion: Bob Allaire
* Fretless Bass: Benoit Grey
* Violin & Vocals: Lucine Fyelon
* Winds & World Instruments: Wayne Hankin
* Recording Engineer (Session #1) & Mix on ‘Kenshi’: Les Brockmann
* Recording Engineer (Session #2): Jim Lang
* All Music & Guitars: Kole Hicks

SPECIAL THANKS

Chris, Natalie, Sam, & the entire Lo-Fi Games Team! Hatsune Neko, Jeness, Lucine Fyelon, Bob Allaire, Maz Baba, Heather Kjolsing, Jim Lang, Les Brockmann, Mb Gordy, Benoit Grey, June Kuramoto, Wayne Hankin, Whitney Hicks, My Friends, Family, & of course the Kenshi Community.

Follow & Tweet @kolemusician with your favorite Kenshi memory for a chance to win a digital copy of the Original Soundtrack!

The latest Newlands version has now moved over to the main Steam branch (AKA the stable branch). If you’re already opted in to Experimental there will be no noticeable change for you. Although it’s considerably more stable now, it’s still very heavy on performance and RAM, these will be optimised further over time but until then:

For performance issues: Reduce the terrain detail and view distance and turn off shadows.
For low memory: Reduce the texture quality and view distance.

It’s recommended if you get problems that you uninstall kenshi before updating to the beta version. Steam update can sometimes leave old data files in there that can cause the game to crash, so this cleans them all out before installing.

You can’t load old savegames but you CAN import your squad without buildings and research.

The ‘Oldland’ version will still be available through Steam in the other branches. To play the older version, you have to right-click on Kenshi in your Steam games list -> properties -> betas tab)

You can find the original patchnotes covering the latest content here. In the next update we’ll be adding workshop support.

Next map section release TBA

Apologies, this is a little late, but here are the patch notes for yesterday’s update (note, this is for the opt-in experimental branch only):

Features

• Steam Workshop support added, new modding structure. All mod files need to be in kenshi/mods/modname/ instead of kenshi/data/. Other data files like textures should go in these folders too.
• Loads of new audio and new animal sounds
• Holy Nation Rebirth slave camp finished
• Added holy nation slave delivery caravan to take prisoners to rebirth
• Weather and birds systems improved
• Game speed >>> button now speeds the game up to 5x instead of 3x

Fixes

• Fog islands were too foggy
• Big memory optimisation
• Lots of small technical fixes
• Fixed the/a random stopping AI bug when following roads

The next update, 0.93.0, will unlock a new world map sector, doubling the size of the current active area.

Upcoming

It’s almost time for the release of our next map section and that means introducing the new inhabitants. But…

No! We ain’t tellin’ you nothin’!

That’s right, you’re gonna have to suck it up and wait! Mooohuahahaha! Our next area is going to be full of mystery and rugged, unexplored terrain for you to discover yourself; your reward being ancient artifacts, forgotten ruins and forbidden lands.

This won’t be as civilised as the current Holy Nation territory so you won’t be stumbling across any new major factions just yet. And you also won’t have to worry so much about racist zealots chasing down your skeleton characters on robot hunts, so that’s a plus. But don’t worry, we’ll have plenty of other nasties to replace the peril of the Holy Nation – we’re not letting you off that easy.

The next part of the map will expand out to the north western coast and will double the size of our current released area. This will bring the total playable area so far to roughly 90 square miles of terrain. We’ll also be releasing lore books and notes for those who want to learn more about the history and culture of some of the societies in Kenshi.

We’re aiming to release this Friday 1st July. After that, we’ll be working on the next major faction to the south western area of the map.

The next map section is now out. Note that this is only available on the “Experimental” branch at the moment – to opt-in you have to right-click on Kenshi in your Steam games list -> properties -> betas tab -> then choose “experimental”.

0.93.0

• New world map sector unlocked, active area is now double the size. Lots of content to discover. A little rushed, will contine to add final bits of content later.
• Added hydroponic indoor farming techs
• Player characters should now attack anything eating their crops
• Stolen goods can be sold easier, shopkeepers can only detect if it was stolen from an ally faction. (before it was allies and neutrals)
• Rain now waters the farms and crops
• Updated some of the high-level research costs

CURRENT STATUS:

• Currently only runs in DirectX11 mode
• No more 32-bit support, the game’s memory requirements are too high
• Initial loading time is sometimes pretty long on non-SSDs. The terrain will take ages to load in and things will look weird for a while but once loaded everything should be fine.

Please submit any bug reports to our official forums or the Kenshi Steam forums. Thank you for your help

Out Soon: Update 0.93.5

Our next update is almost finished and ready for release on Steam Experimental this week! This won’t include the next new map area but it will include a couple of small graphical improvements and fixes.

We’ve now added character’s getting wet up to the waterline (see image above), a dialogue log window (due to popular request), ragdolls floating in water, picking up and carrying animals and a system to allow game translations (shoutout to Dertz Lycron and Hasuka for their French and German translation mods on Steam Workshop).

You can follow us on our Trello page for more details on what we’re working on.

ETA: Coming end of this week

Our latest update is now out on Steam Experimental.  To opt-in you have to right-click on Kenshi in your Steam games list -> properties -> betas tab -> then choose “experimental”. The main stable version will now shift to 0.93.4.

0.93.6

Features

• Many many content additions, tweaks and small adjustments to things. Current map area content can now be considered mostly complete.
• Characters get wet
• Added a dialogue log window
• Ragdolls now float in water
• You can now pickup and carry animals
• Buildings now cast full shadow & reflections even if you are indoors
• Added the functionality to allow game translations
• Soft particles (no more harsh ground-intersection lines)
• Resource storages are no longer infinite, they store between 25-100 items. This is an experiment, let me know if it causes problems
• When hauling, characters now only grab as many resource items as there is available storage space for

Fixes

• Fixed vanishing slaves (they were all escaping when their masters got un-loaded)
• Stopped the talking animals
• Fix for some navmesh problems when building walls
• Fixed dropped backpacks lose their items on save.

Latest patch notes for 0.93. Note that this is only available on the “Experimental” branch at the moment – to opt-in you have to right-click on Kenshi in your Steam games list -> properties -> betas tab -> then choose “experimental”. 0.93.4 is the current stable version.

0.93.7

• Hotfix for debug lines showing on birds
• Fixed fertility value bug
• Non-swimming races don’t ragdoll float in water

0.93.8

• When you pass the starvation threshold you now pass out randomly and periodically, instead of forever. Gives you one last chance to find some food and survive.
• Reduced hunger recovery rate by half. Means you recover from starvation slower, but also means that a full belly lasts longer
  FIXES
• Fixed the newly introduced hauling AI bugs
• A few small audio bugs
• Fixed construction set translation exporter

0.93.9

• crashfix

0.93.10

• Fixed another of the new AI hauling bugs and a crash
• Fixed the high-level rare artifacts not being created when you import a game
• Fixed some cases of internal town wars kicking off
• Fixed invisible characters when loading
• Translation fixes
• Translation enabled in release
• Other small AI fixes

Russian translation

Religion of Kral

Battle hungry and stubborn, the Shek base their warrior code and living caste on the philosophy of their fallen ancestor, a heroic leader called Kral. Kral is said to have unified the divided Shek tribes hundreds of years ago, and taught that only through battle could they prosper and find honor. Kral was eventually killed in battle, where he fought bravely to the end against an enemy that outnumbered him hundredfold. It’s believed that this is the most honorable way that a Shek can die, and only by living the way of the warrior can a Shek pass through to the afterlife, Gateway (AKA ‘The other side’), a spiritual kingdom where all the great heroes reside.

Because of these strong beliefs in ‘honor through death in battle’ etc, the Shek make a formidable enemy, persistent and fearless in combat.  But their warrior attitude also disadvantages the Shek, as their suicidal mindset means that their numbers are diminishing and weakening them as a nation.

Caste System

Intellect and technology have no place in Shek society. The Shek earn their respect amongst each other through strength and bravery alone. This leaves two simple castes: the noble warrior and the lowly servant. Fallen warriors shamed in defeat or cowardice have their horns cut and are demoted to menial work as retainers to the strong. Shek retainers are still regarded more highly than outsiders, however.

The Shek warrior’s comraderie makes them a tight-knit community, somewhat unwelcoming to outsiders who they see as inferior and weak because of their lesser battle spirit. Their past clashes with the Holy Nation and Empire also contribute to their distaste for other races. This Shek pride and snobbery can make them rather territorial and aggressive over other nations as they express their power through war and tribute-taking.

“Flatskins. I despise them, and if it were up to me they’d be chased away at our gates… but Bayan tells me their trade is necessary to the growth of the Shek… so I’ll tolerate them. For now.” – Esata The Stone Golem

Introducing…

Queen Esata, AKA The Stone Golem

Esata is the first of the Shek leaders to want to address their kingdom’s problem of a declining population, however this new strategic rationality has caused a divide in it’s battle hungry citizens. Fiery and fueled by her anger for her enemies, Esata is a little less conventional than other past leaders in that she places bigger victory on long-term crushing of enemies. She tries to balance prosperity with glory, while keeping the religious aspirations of her people happy.

The Shek Kingdom puts little importance on academic education, meaning that most Shek can’t read – Esata is no exception to this and is not particularly intelligent. She does, however, have formidable battle skills and an open mind to rational thought. Her aide on the other hand, Bayan, is an impressive intellect. Although the talent of intellects is normally wasted in the traditional Shek Kingdom, Esata relies on Bayan for his advice, for the good of the nation.

“Bayan is my sheath. without him, I’d have gotten lost in my own ego, a corpse on Holy Nation land long ago. Those Okran scum don’t deserve to be my defeaters. With Bayan at my side, the Shek will crush them once and for all. There will be no better glory than this.”

Only the best of the Shek warrior can earn battle names, and Esata earned hers ‘the Stone Golem’ when she joined the Invincible Five, the Kingdom’s highest ranking fighters. It was during this time that Esata served under the previous emperor, Shager, whom she challenged on his plans for a potential suicide mission against the Holy Nation.  After a hard-hitting battle one day, Bayan protested against Shager’s plans for a suicide attack against the Holy Nation to regain their honor. In response to Shager’s angry threats against his ‘cowardice’, Esata stepped in and boomed,  ‘the man speaks the truth. You want Bayan silenced, you’ll have to cut me down first”. She fought and defeated Shager, becoming the new Shek leader in his place.

0.93.19 is out now in the main stable GOG and Steam branch!

0.93.19
FIXES

• Fixed characters not getting up off the ground

Main features added since 0.93.4:

• Characters get wet, ragdolls now float in water
• Added a dialogue log window
• You can now pickup and carry animals
• Added the functionality to allow game translations
• Resource storages are no longer infinite
• Starvation balancing and difficulty options
• You can now buy and repair ruined buildings that you find
• Added 2 Shek towns and a new zone in the SW of the active map area
• Heat haze effect
• Looting law changes.
• Thievery rebalance

For a full list of fixes and features you can check our patch notes here

0.93.22 is now out on the Experimental branch. Note that this is only available on the “Experimental” branch at the moment – to opt-in you have to right-click on Kenshi in your Steam games list -> properties -> betas tab -> then choose “experimental”. 0.93.20 is the current stable version.

FOOD OVERHAUL:

This is the result of some extensive testing, to further balance the hunger system in the way originally intended

• hunger time is doubled again. It takes almost twice as long to get hungry.
• food nutritional quality is halved, but also food cost is halved too. Remember the yellow and red states are supposed to be starvation, your ribs are showing, you shouldn’t be able to fully recover from malnutrition with just 1 meal.
  So, technically speaking, those 2 above result in the same amount of eating and costs, its just stretched over a slower timeframe now.
• Food is no longer a trade good, so you only get 50% of its value when you sell it. Bread won’t make you rich anymore. This will double-up as a plot point with the Trader’s Guild later on. The cash crop will be drugs and alcohol.

FEATURES:

• Added a simple thieves/assassins guild
• You can now stealth-knockout sleeping NPCs
• Bounties are now assigned by factions. Committing a crime in the Holy Nation won’t make you a criminal in the Empire or Shek Kingdom.
• Tuned the “spawn” distributions. Should reduce the situations where you defeated a bandit or animal squad and then more and more kept coming to fill the population vacuum.
• Also implemented a mild co-existence system, so small time villages don’t get instantly wiped out by their dangerous evironment eg the BeakThing-Hiver wars
• When your character gets sucked dry by a vampiric creature and dies, it leaves behind all his gear and clothes, just sitting there empty where once was your beloved character.
• You can no longer sell a fence back their own items that you stole from them
• Athletics XP rate reduced by 25%

• A performance improvement is coming soon
• Currently only runs in DirectX11 mode
• No more 32-bit support, it’s impossible, the game’s gotten too big to fit within the 3GB memory limitation. You can still access the older 32-bit version through Steam’s [kenshi->properties->betas] tab.
• Initial loading time is sometimes pretty long on non-SSDs. The terrain will take ages to load in and things will look weird/white for a while but once loaded everything should be fine.
• You won’t see all new map content unless you import your savegame after an update

Please submit all bug reports to the Steam or Lo-Fi forums. Thank you.

For those who prefer Blender to 3dMax, we now have a blender file of the skinned characters for creating clothing and armour. We’ve also included an example weapon to get you started.

Also, because everyone seemed to have problems with exporting from blender, Sam’s also fixed up a plugin to work with Kenshi based on the one from Torchlight.

NOTES

• The template file is designed to work with this plugin.
• When exporting skinned meshes such as clothing, hair and armour, you need the tangents and binormals options on. The skeleton will be linked with the existing Kenshi male or female skeleton if your mesh is linked to the armature object in Blender.
• Don’t change the names of the armature objects, or edit any bones. Messing with the pose is fine though.
• Non-skinned meshes like weapons just need tangents enabled.
• Make sure your mesh is UV mapped.
• Material files that are created are completely unnecessary as materials are set up in the FCS. You can delete them if they are created.

Any questions? For help and advice on modding, please post your questions and check the FAQs in the Lo-Fi and Steam modding forums.

Next Up:

Our next big update will include another new map area, the southern swamps, and a long awaited performance boost. Our own code has been fully optimised to it’s best, the only thing holding us back from running Kenshi at it’s best performance is the current, rather out of date, rendering engine: Ogre.  In order to improve the frame rate we need to completely upgrade the Ogre graphics engine to the latest version 2.0.

Right now, the current Ogre engine that Kenshi uses works only on a single internal thread, meaning that the rendering process for objects in each frame acts like a bottle neck effect. The new engine will have multi-thread support on the slowest elements, significantly reducing the render time and hopefully making Kenshi run much faster for modern computers. Unfortunately this isn’t a quick job – differences in the two engine versions mean that a lot of existing code needs changing and updating to run in the new engine.

ETA:

If all goes smoothly, expect an experimental release by end of October.  

More info on the next new map faction coming soon!

Just a small balancing update. Note that this is NOT the optimisation or map update announced earlier this week. Just for clarification.

0.93.23

ECONOMIC BALANCING

Over the last few years the economy of Kenshi has seen some inflation so I’ve re-balanced it a little

• Recruits cost a lot more to hire, it’s not so easy to rapidly get a bigger squad early on.
• Cost of books is doubled
• Bounty amounts for crimes are roughly doubled
• You can no longer sell armour that is part of another factions uniform
• Cooking food speed is x3, but ingredient cost is x8. Now the focus is less on waiting around for cooking, and more on running farms and protecting your crops until harvest time.
• Properly added the research and crafting for the 3 main alcoholic drinks. These are the new cash crop as food was made less profitable in the last update.
• Chainmail is 50% heavier

AI ANNOYANCE FIXES

• Tracked down the bug where your character would keep stopping when you are trying to run away from attackers
• Stopped chars going crazy constantly cursing and chasin’ off varmints and ignoring your orders
• Stopped chars going off to get food in the middle of a fight
• turrets no longer aim too high for small or young animals
• some rare cases led to characters running away instead of fighting

FIXES

• Fixed a crash on save when you had a bounty with a minor faction

Our next experimental update is coming soon.

The Ogre 2.0 optimisation update is still a few weeks away, but we have a mini update on it’s way which includes a completely separate performance boost. With this, we’ve managed to get an average 5-10 fps increase – with more improvement incoming next month.

We’re also adding tons of new weapons, around double the current selection of weapons to be more specific. You’ll now find rare and unusual weapons, plus more interesting variations of polearms, blunt and hacking weapons and a visual overhaul of the old weaponry. As well as new looks, we’ve also rebalanced and added extra characteristics and stats for more tactical combat – larger weapons, for example, will have penalties when used indoors, and other weapons may inflict bonus damage against certain animals or opponents.

ETA:

Expect 0.93.24 within the next few days. Again, this will not be the Ogre 2.0 update.