YMMV / Kenshi

• Aluminum Christmas Trees: Several sets of fabric-based armor offer better protection than metal based ones. This is consistent with real life, where even steels can be less reliable and effective armor than treated leather and padded wool. Particularly without the benefits of the the Bessemer process, steel is a frankly terrible material for its weight; the chances of a significant weakness, crack, or fault within the steel from conventional fire-and-hammer forging mean that even supposedly "high quality" steels can be prone to cracking, spalling, denting, or fracturing under blows. By contrast treated leather doesn't splinter when struck and a padded gambeson was such reliable protection that even full-plate-armor wearing knights wore them under the armor itself. In one account during WWI leather greatcoat wearing troops even shrugged off bullets. Even in the modern day with substantial technological and metallurgical improvements thanks to automation, steel is rarely used as a defensive material on its own. Exotic materials such as carbon, plastic, and resin derivatives, as well as ceramics all are preferred for offering comparable protection with significantly less weight, to say nothing of the use of aluminum and other "weaker" metals in specific roles.
• Catharsis Factor: Because of the game's harsh nature it can be cathartic to overcome certain obstacles or enemies.
  • Given the Holy Nation's utterly reprehensible nature killing a group of paladins can be this.
• Demonic Spider:
  • Beak Things. They outrun even high-level athletes, so you may kiss your slow squadmates goodbye before you venture into their territory. Their attack hitbox is disjointed and can hit where they aren't even facing, and also do massive damage; more than enough to break an unprotected limb if it's hit. While on their own they are manageable, but the thing is, Beak Things travel in packs. It's not unheard of for most of the Hive villages at Vain to be wiped out by the beasts long before you get there if you increase squad size too much, or that Mourn was completely slaughtered by a pack of them. It's a testament to how dangerous they are that the strength needed to slaughter one with any swiftness is equivalent to preparing for destroying a major faction..
  • Bonedogs. Specifically, a entire pack of them. Their prevalence makes it very likely that a pack will come across you while you are in the middle of something important. Imagine barely making it through a tough battle and trying to bring your wounded to safety, only for a pack of Bonedogs to show up. You will learn to hate and fear Bonedogs after that.
  • Blood Spiders are a literal example. Extremely fragile, but capable of dealing extremely high damage, they of course travel in swarms and pose a significant threat even to heavily trained heavily prepared characters. It's easy to take out a handful of them with a single swing of your sword, but if even one or two of them get a hit in you're likely to be eviscerated and eaten alive. Even worse, unlike almost anything else in the game they can attack other creatures if they are in the water.
  • Security Spiders. They're the guardians of the abandoned Labs that dot the world. Those things can hit like a truck and very quickly, potentially enough to break or even sever a limb.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Everyone loves Beep, and to a lesser extent, Agnu.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Animals. Not only can they carry your stuff, but they can also rip your enemies apart. Unlike humanoid characters, who need extensive training to be effective, animals grow stronger with age. By the time they reach elderly, most of them can deal sub 90 damage, all without any expensive equipment or training. Since their stat growth is passive, you can safely leave a pack of them at the base and bring them out when they're strong enough. Thanks to their cheap price, you can buy them in bulk and have them all be ready at the same time. The only disadvantage to them is their high food cost, but that can be offset by settling in areas with a high wildlife population.
  • Stealth and its sibling skill, Assassination. Characters with high stealth can waltz straight by enemies undetected, and with the aid of a couple of shadows, can remain unseen in pretty much plain sight. Assassination pairs with this to allow easy knock outs, and while it doesn't actually kill foes, there's nothing stopping you from stripping them of all their equipment while they're unconscious. Stealth is also very easy to raise, and while Assassination is slow to take off, it skyrockets once it gets to a decent level. Combine the two and you have a character capable of stealth sprinting into the most secure areas of the game, kidnapping faction leaders in their sleep, and then zooming off into the night before any guards can react.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The game has a notable fandom in Japan and China, likely due to the visual inspirations the game takes from the countries. It's also very popular in Russia as well.
• Memetic Mutation: Relax. Enjoy death. ^ExplanationComing from a Twitter post from the lead dev of the game, where he posted that, in early dev builds of Kenshi, the Beak Things used to talk. The image entailed showed a Beak Thing facing down a horde of humans, saying the aforementioned phrase. It was almost immediately memetic in the Kenshi community due to how eerily serene the sentence is, especially considering it's spoken by one of the horrifically violent and aggressive Beak Things. The phrase quickly began to be associated with the Beak Things in the community, with some even asking that the ability to speak be given back to the creatures. But as the meme began to spread, many chose to associate the phrase with the game as a whole.
• Obvious Beta: Even after the official release and several subsequent patches, a plethora of bugs and performance issues remain. Some, like enemy limbs flying at extreme speeds when cut off could be considered Good Bad Bugs. Others, like the rare case of every town in the world outside your starting location being devoid of life, or your own settlements disappearing if left alone for too long... not so much. Some of those bugs can be blamed on the game's outdated OGRE engine, which wasn't designed for multi-core processors.
• Quicksand Box: The game features a wide desertic map, with no plot and no goal. It's quite easy to get lost and simply starve to death early on, or wander to one of the world's more hostile regions and die horribly to a Beak Thing, an Iron/Skin/Blood Spider, a bunch of Cannibals/Paladins (If you're a Skeleton), or simply the sheer lethality of the region (The Deadlands' acid rain, soil and water, Venge's Beam Spam, the Black Desert's gas clouds, etc...)
• The Scrappy: Harmothoe, a female Greenlander trader, by virtue of being a Straw Feminist who will openly insult any of your male characters to their face. While she does have a Freudian Excuse for hating men, her obnoxious attitude and the fact that she may randomly attack your Skeleton squad members unprovoked (which may in turn lead to the guards attacking you and leaving your squad in the dust, ripe for capture/enslavement/bleeding out) greatly outweigth any sympathy she could have inspired to the player.
• Tear Jerker: If Agnu and Beep are close to each other and Beep is killed, she will fly into a panic and scream his name.

  Agnu: BEEEP!

  Agnu: BEEEEEEEP!

  Another character: He's gone, buddy. Beep's not coming back...

  Agnu: BEEEEEEEEPPPP!!!

  • The fate of the behemoths, who were created to be a loyal servant race of the first empire which they did loyally. The humans, however, grew afraid of their power, taking them to a location that would become known as Obedience and instructing them to kill themselves in a way that left their corpses forever trapped in solid metal, their hands reaching out to the sky as the only proof that they ever were. That the only surviving behemoth, Stobe, would go on to save the world makes the fates of his kin all the more tragic.
• That One Boss: Kenshi has some boss monsters that are extremely powerful and can easily kill an untrained party with their sheer brute strength.
  • The former Emperor of the Second Empire, Cat-Lon is one of the most powerful skeletons in the world. He carries a Meitou Falling Sun that can easily kill and mutilate grouped chunks of your party, a Heavy Weapons skill far greater than anyone else could ever achieve (120, the cap for all skills is 100), and guarded by a large platoon of over a hundred Stormthralls, he is considered by many as the ultimate challenge for a strong group.
  • The King of the Southern Hive, a massive maintenance robot that protects the dome the Queen of the South lives in. As big as the Great White Gorillo, this Crimper is a horrifically strong monstrosity, worshipped by the Southern Hivers as their guardian, and the devourer of countless intruders and Hiveless. Trying to take it on one-on-one is suicidal, due to its immense strength and speed. To put details on how strong this giant robot monkey is, its combat stats are all beyond the Cap, with a Strength of ~300 and Toughness of ~150, its vital parts have massive amounts of health, with the head having 1200 and its stomach and chest at 900. Even its weakest limbs, its legs, have 450 health.
  • In the case that you side with the United Cities and go after him, Tinfist. He is the best Martial Arts fighter in the whole world, and with both its three dependent stats (Strength, Toughness, and Martial Arts itself) at maximum, he can use them to their maximum potential, easily punching limbs off people or instantly killing them if he hits a vital part and gets lucky. There's a good reason the UC fears him, and its people refer to him as "The Metal Brute".

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