Kenshi - open-ended sandbox RPG set in a desert world

[urmom]

https://www.thegamer.com/best-kenshi-mods/

Install most of those and watch CPU usage skyrocket LOL.

 

[DarkUnderlord]

NO ONE SURVIVES THE ASHLANDS. OH GOD THEY'RE ALL DEAD. THEY WERE SKINNED ALIVE. ALL I HAVE LEFT ARE SOME ARMS AND LEGS AND A SKELETON THAT MANAGED TO CRAWL OUT. THEY COULDN'T BE SAVED. I HAD TO WATCH THEM BEING SKINNED.

10/10 will reload.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

The Skin Bandits in the Sonorous Dark? I knocked out their leader and placed him in his own peeler machine:

 

[ERYFKRAD]

The Skin Bandits in the Sonorous Dark? I knocked out their leader and placed him in his own peeler machine:

Good job men.

 

[Galdred]

NO ONE SURVIVES THE ASHLANDS. OH GOD THEY'RE ALL DEAD. THEY WERE SKINNED ALIVE. ALL I HAVE LEFT ARE SOME ARMS AND LEGS AND A SKELETON THAT MANAGED TO CRAWL OUT. THEY COULDN'T BE SAVED. I HAD TO WATCH THEM BEING SKINNED.

10/10 will reload.

Had you taken the holy nation out already?

 

[DarkUnderlord]

NO ONE SURVIVES THE ASHLANDS. OH GOD THEY'RE ALL DEAD. THEY WERE SKINNED ALIVE. ALL I HAVE LEFT ARE SOME ARMS AND LEGS AND A SKELETON THAT MANAGED TO CRAWL OUT. THEY COULDN'T BE SAVED. I HAD TO WATCH THEM BEING SKINNED.

10/10 will reload.

Had you taken the holy nation out already?

I kind of got bored of walking into their towns and fast forwarding time while my guys wiped them out, and wanted to do some exploring for more AI cores before I assaulted the all of 3 "major" towns they have. So sent my main crew out and my workers back to base. After confidently striding around pretty much the entire map, even waking through acid rain, I ran into the whole Ashlands stuff which seemed interesting.

But I forgot that it's not the first wave of bandits that gets you. Or even the second or third. It's the fifth to seventeenth group that comes at you while you're trying to heal. I hadn't set up beds like I had been doing and was relying on slow healing sleeping bags.

 

[toro]

NO ONE SURVIVES THE ASHLANDS. OH GOD THEY'RE ALL DEAD. THEY WERE SKINNED ALIVE. ALL I HAVE LEFT ARE SOME ARMS AND LEGS AND A SKELETON THAT MANAGED TO CRAWL OUT. THEY COULDN'T BE SAVED. I HAD TO WATCH THEM BEING SKINNED.

10/10 will reload.

 

[polo]

The Skin Bandits in the Sonorous Dark? I knocked out their leader and placed him in his own peeler machine:

The peeler machine is ideal for improving thoughness, and also for "safely" extracting weak flesh limbs in order to exchange for much better skeleton ones.

(You cant improve toughness if the peeler machine is yours -blueprint in skinners base-)

 

[Jacob]

After exploring most of the early-to-midgme areas in this game I must say this is the best exploration in any games I've played ever. It's mostly a huge patch of nothing and contents can be scarce but when you do find them it's really satisfying. Those famed 12 years of development really paid off.

 

[urmom]

I really enjoyed this game! I quit when I had production set up to craft most things, and when my army grew to about 40-50 dudes. I didn't see any mods I was very excited about either, other than the one that increases your squad size to 256.

One thing I was frustrated about was how slowly the combat skills level. I had crafted +A gear for everyone but their fighting skills still weren't that high.

 

[luj1]

Any news about Kenshi 2?

 

[Smoker]

There's over 1000 mods now but I think living world changes the most.

 

[agris]

Any news about Kenshi 2?

You’re gonna want to hop into a stasis chamber if you’re interested in that. I don’t remember when it was posted, but iirc the game is being made in a new engine (UE4, hopefully it’s early enough for them to use 5), and given the long development time of the original I wouldn’t expect anything earlier than 2024.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

 

[Obsequious Approbation]

Any news about Kenshi 2?

A community update came out not that long ago. Nothing big, unfortunately. Engine, optimization, no more NPC's running off into the sky.

Spoiler

https://steamcommunity.com/games/233860/announcements/detail/2208399306492375278

Just communication.
Similar to the real world, Kenshi 2 is going to be pretty big. Previously when talking to Nat she confirmed that whilst we still don’t have a marketing friendly measured size to rally behind, it’ll be bigger than Kenshi 1. This raises two important questions: how do we make it feel alive and how will it work from a technical standpoint? Below Nat touches on the first point and the magic of the ‘narrative bark’.

“Hello! For the last few months, I've been working on the little pieces of information that subtly unfold the various histories and cultures of Kenshi's world. Writing for a sandbox game can be a little different to other RPGs where the developers normally have more control over what the player hears and sees (and even what the NPCs do!). So, for Kenshi, I need to reflect the necessary information differently while also making sure the world feels alive and immersive.

A few months back, I talked about roughly structuring our first factions' layouts on the world map, but now my job is to zone in on the individual cities and their own mini conflicts. I've been planning out what I like to call the 'Carrots' - the local goals or tempting secrets for the player to explore. I then list out all the possible ways I can convey that information, using in-game item descriptions and different dialogues, or visually with assets. We're strictly against traditional quest systems in Kenshi, so it's important for me to tell the player what they can do indirectly through the environment instead, planting seeds in your minds and making you want to do things for yourselves.

One of those 'dribbles' of information involves writing dialogue Barks. Barks are the short bits of dialogue that NPCs blurt out either in reaction to something, or just completely ambient comments - the ambient comments are the ones that I've been writing and they're perfect for breathing life into a world, reinforcing goals and lore, and simply interacting with the player to really make them feel part of the world. BUT... I have to write a lot of those suckas while actually keeping them interesting and nonintrusive. They can be a bit mind numbing to work on but they're one of my favourite methods to paint a picture of a town via gossiping and general musings from citizens.

If you'd like to read more about my process with writing barks, I've written a much more in-depth article on gamasutra[www.gamasutra.com] or you can follow me on Twitter”

Beautiful World.
As readers already know, Kenshi 2 is in development using Unreal Engine 4 which is a major jump from an aging implementation of OGRE. Following on from the narrative elements of the world, Victor, our technical artist, has kindly offered to answer some questions about the technical aspects.

Starting with a major pain point then, moving across large areas in Kenshi 1 leads to lots of ‘loading’ pauses. How does Unreal handle huge maps and will that help with this?

“UE4 has a system called World Composition - it allows us to divide the world into cells which are then automatically loaded as the camera approaches them. It can do that asynchronously, meaning it doesn't lock up the game; it's loading the data as a background task. We can divide buildings and such over these cells in order to keep them unloaded and have them automatically come in when needed. World Composition is also built to work with Unreal Engine's Landscape system.

Unfortunately, the stock Landscape system isn't explicitly designed for a world as massive as Kenshi 2. While we still intend to use world composition, there’s additional exploration going into third party options for the landscape system to go even further. It’s important for us to get this right as currently Kenshi 2's world is expected to end up even bigger than Kenshi’s ~1000km2.”

That’s pretty huge, I can’t think of that many other games with similar scale. I appreciate it’s not your field, but will World Composition mean no more units running into the sky?

“Ideally, but this also relates to pathing. We haven’t finalised exactly how pathing will be handled in Kenshi 2, but our current expectation is that we'll be working with Recast (UE4's stock navmesh which is well-tested and reliable). So tentatively, no more people walking off into the big blue yonder.

UE4 and Recast allow us to generate the navmesh where we need it with a large amount of flexibility, and it should, theoretically, handle our world really well. Either way, I'm confident we'll have a lot less weird pathing going on than we do in the original game.”

You’ve mentioned streaming bits of world in and unloading it on the fly but let’s talk about building larger spaces. In talks from Unreal Fest it seemed like developers can make presets for objects or types of buildings, set the area boundaries then let the engine create an entire city for them to edit. Do we have anything like that helping us with Kenshi 2?

“Things like city-spawners are something that we can use, but because of the oddities about Kenshi's world and a bunch of specifics, we also can't rely on a generalised system. If we do want to end up using things like generators, we’ll be developing a tool internally. One other big problem with these sorts of things is that if it’s relied on too much then the world ends up feeling ‘same-y’.

On the other hand, while it’s a lot of work for an artist to go through and manually put all the buildings and pots and pans in the right spot, it means they really are in a spot that does them justice. We do use modular (re-useable) pieces where we can, but we’re being careful with not overdoing them, after all we want Kenshi 2’s world to feel unique and distinct.”

What about when adding details to natural biomes?

“Natural environments are a lot easier to automate with those kinds of tools – at least for the menial stuff like grass placement. Of course, we could manually position every blade of grass, but that would be a nightmare. What we actually do is procedurally place grass in the right spots determined by our level designer.

There are also other procedural tools we can easily integrate into our workflow for natural assets – for example Unreal has native Speedtree integration. Speedtree is a tool that allows us to make foliage “species” and generate as many unique trees in that species as we want. It makes the foliage-creation a lot less tedious than needing to manually model them.”

If everything is going to be nicely dressed up, how do you deal with performance hits for all that extra detail?

“For starters, Kenshi 1 didn't use LODs (dynamic changes in level of detail) which meant operating with a massively constrained tri-budget for near-camera-detail. Kenshi 2 make heavy use of LODs, and we’re massively helped in that area by UE4's semi-automatic LOD generation systems. Essentially, we can have extra detailed meshes up-close, and turn them into simpler low-detail meshes when they’re further away. This all happens without any extra work on the artist's end.”

So that covers some basic software optimisations, what about from a hardware perspective - Kenshi runs an older version of OGRE that’s famously single threaded so what’s the difference with Unreal and Kenshi 2?

“It’s a huge shift here, really. When Kenshi development started, multi-threaded CPUs really weren’t that common yet, nor were the cores nearly as fast as they’re becoming now. For context, at the time Intel’s i3/i5/i7 release scheme didn’t even exist. In development, it’s important to work on systems that help as many people as reasonably possible to be able to play - Back then that meant there was no reason to go beyond a single-thread. It’s an incredibly complicated thing to code so it wasn’t worth the development time.

That’s different now, even the average user runs 4 CPU cores. Unreal Engine, by default, runs its render-thread on a separate core. Kenshi 2 runs almost all of its logic on extra threads, of which there are now more, and they’re faster. The gains made by proper multi-threading are massive at this point. Another thing which makes a big difference is that so many rendering-bottlenecks of the past decade have gone from being handled on the CPU to being on the GPU, which is significantly faster for calculations that need to happen hundreds of thousands of times per frame. GPUs have gotten exponentially faster over the past decade, and that’s power we can properly tap into.”

A lot of this works on paper but what can you do to know if you’re getting it right as it’s being made?

“This sort of thing is for a large part just developing some sort of instinct for what you should and shouldn’t do. If you show me the profiler statistics for a given scene, along with a wireframe, I can generally pretty quickly figure out where any slowdowns are coming from. It’s difficult to explain why in each case, that goes incredibly deep, but you get a feel for the patterns of what works and what consequences certain choices have.

During initial development, you work on rough ideas, generally without hugging tight performance limits for everything. Once something’s working, then it’s time to start looking whether the current cost is reasonable, and where you can easily scrape some frame time off it. The big analytical guns come out when you run into major performance problems. Generally, there’s a certain benchmark you want to hit for acceptable performance at minimum specs. Once you’re unable to hit that benchmark, it’s time to stare at lots-and-lots of numbers – indicators of how costly parts of a scene are – and go through what you can deduce from them. Starting with the worst offenders, you ‘scrape some stuff off’, ever more aggressively. Optimisation’s basically a circle, it repeats as you go. Scenes keep growing and therefore getting more expensive, so you work your ass off to make sure you’re still meeting the benchmark by tearing the existing stuff apart more. The scene grows again and the cycle repeats.

Finally, Epic just announced Unreal 5[www.unrealengine.com], as it’s supposedly seamless to migrate there’s talk of us moving along with it. Are there any features that you saw and immediately thought ‘that would be perfect for Kenshi’?

“As a technical artist, I’m incredibly excited to see what Unreal Engine 5 will bring us. If it delivers everything Epic has been marketing so far such as the lighting and geometry changes, it could be a massive game-changer.

That said, we don’t know how the final implementation will turn out so we can’t count on it yet. The promotional material stresses that porting should be easy, and I’m confident it will be, but based on current information swapping from UE4 to UE5 won’t automatically mean much. The major gains with the new tech aren’t user-oriented, they’re things that will make a massive difference for the art creation workflow and we’re already in the middle of that. We also can’t work according to the new idealised workflow either. Obviously, as it wouldn’t be worthwhile to sit here twiddling our thumbs until UE5 comes out and make everything then, the current plan is to just continue developing as before and see what we can do when it arrives.

Speculating on a hypothetical Kenshi 3 though… I imagine our workflow would be fundamentally different using UE5 as compared to our current art-pipelines, and I imagine it’d be significantly more time-efficient. That’s all very speculative though, so don’t get too excited.”

---

This month’s blog was a lengthy undertaking so I’m looking forward to hearing thoughts and questions from the community in the comments. As ever you can join us on Twitter and Facebook[www.facebook.com] where we have a soon-to-be-confirmed creator competition in the works. If you’d like a none-Steam way to keep up with the studio, blogs are available on our website[lofigames.com] and via our mailing list[eepurl.com].

Cheers,

Sam ‘Caliburn’ Hills

 

[urmom]

But I want to play Kenshi 2 nao.

 

[pidstuff]

Anything for performance?

There's that one you linked which is Less_Foliage_and_Rocks_x2 or x4, and there's Reduced Particle Effects which IMO did help a lot. There is also the Texture Options mod, but it's ugly and only affects loading times.

 

[Zombra]

[Kenshi] always looks tempting but from what I've seen and heard about it, it's a ridiculously huge grind. I always think about picking it up but that puts me off.

Absolutely not. Just because some dorks say "First thing you have to do is spend 600 hours carrying heavy weights so you become strong enough to lift the planet" does not mean that's how you should actually play, or how it is intended to be played. Like every learn-by-doing game, grinding actually ruins it. Instead, play, explore, do the things you want to do and watch your character develop naturally. This is a beautiful game. Don't miss out on it.

 

[urmom]

It is a grind if you don't cheat by raising the follower cap. Even afterward raising combat skills takes forever and forever. Still a super fun game though.

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

[Kenshi] always looks tempting but from what I've seen and heard about it, it's a ridiculously huge grind. I always think about picking it up but that puts me off.

Absolutely not. Just because some dorks say "First thing you have to do is spend 600 hours carrying heavy weights so you become strong enough to lift the planet" does not mean that's how you should actually play, or how it is intended to be played. Like every learn-by-doing game, grinding actually ruins it. Instead, play, explore, do the things you want to do and watch your character develop naturally. This is a beautiful game. Don't miss out on it.

Interesting. But don't you get stomped mercilessly almost non-stop? I know not every encounter's supposedly lethal, but being enslaved or even just getting off easy and having broken limbs and having all your cash looted sounds really harsh to play-on from, and does feel like it would encourage trying to get your combat ability as high as fast/safely as possible. It was my general understanding that there was less room for playing as a weakling, whereas in Mount and Blade you could work for a lord and a little pissant group and mostly be ignored (And faster moving on the world map).

 

[Zombra]

Interesting. But don't you get stomped mercilessly almost non-stop? I know not every encounter's supposedly lethal, but being enslaved or even just getting off easy and having broken limbs and having all your cash looted sounds really harsh to play-on from, and does feel like it would encourage trying to get your combat ability as high as fast/safely as possible. It was my general understanding that there was less room for playing as a weakling, whereas in Mount and Blade you could work for a lord and a little pissant group and mostly be ignored (And faster moving on the world map).

Well - since you start with nothing, it's not that harsh to lose everything at the beginning. Sure, if you get both arms cut off in the first 10 minutes, that playthrough may not be that fun to continue - but that's not going to happen. Most people have no reason to cripple or kill you.

The main thing to learn here is that unlike every other RPG ever, losing a fight does not mean game over. Yes, you will get the shit beaten out of you a few times, maybe a lot of times. You can quit, you can grind, or you can simply keep playing, get better, and develop strategies. Pick your battles. Build off the trade routes. Hide your valuables where bandits won't steal them. Sneak. Get a crew. Learn. Above all, don't resign yourself to playing in a way you find tiresome.

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

Well - since you start with nothing, it's not that harsh to lose everything at the beginning. Sure, if you get both arms cut off in the first 10 minutes, that playthrough may not be that fun to continue - but that's not going to happen. Most people have no reason to cripple or kill you.

The main thing to learn here is that unlike every other RPG ever, losing a fight does not mean game over. Yes, you will get the shit beaten out of you a few times, maybe a lot of times. You can quit, you can grind, or you can simply keep playing, get better, and develop strategies. Pick your battles. Build off the trade routes. Hide your valuables where bandits won't steal them. Sneak. Get a crew. Learn. Above all, don't resign yourself to playing in a way you find tiresome.

Does sound cool. That may end up taking the "Expensive game" slot in my purchase then, kinda looking like Kenshi and Outer Wilds duking it out. Though since I'm a card-whore Outer Wilds may have a slight edge just because Kenshi's hundreds of hours may be harder to swing when I always want to play a few card games every day too.

 

[TT1]

I am playing Kenshi now, and, Holy Hell... this game needs to be in a better position on Codex greateast RPGs of all time, next year.

What a brilliant game!

 

[Athrek]

Kenshi is an amazing game. I was hooked on it for quite a while around a year ago. There is a large variety in how you can play. As for the game being hard, it's more like it's meant to take time. You can't go from noob to elite in a short time without grinding a lot and losing limbs can actually be a blessing in disguise as it can make your character much more powerful. If you have a lot of time to spend on a game, I definitely recommend it.

 

[toro]

Kenshi 2 UE4 wip screenshot