About a month ago we reached out to fans across the globe and spoke about working with Unreal Engine, technical hang-ups on porting Kenshi, the potential to focus on Kenshi 2, and shared the seemingly important newfound British tradition for non-binding votes on important subjects.

As of writing, the poll stands at over 22,000 votes, 81% of which would like Lo-Fi to focus on Kenshi 2 and giving the game a more expansive feature set. Beyond the binary nature of the poll, the community wrote thousands of comments to explain their thoughts, concerns and wish lists which we’re always interested in, and finally something about an ‘Epic Game Store exclusive’, which we clarified we’re not interested in.

Today I’m happy to share that the team is focussed on Kenshi 2.

Our current plan is to bring everything together into a monthly format and make all news available in the most popular Kenshi user languages via mediums most appropriate to each language. This has lead us to launch some additional social channels which we’d love to hear from you on.

English speakers:
For our English speaking audience there’s our website, Steam news, Twitter, Facebook and our parody Instagram.

Japanese speakers:
For Japanese users, in addition to our website, Steam news, and Niconico, you can now find us on Twitter @KenshiJP – this will allow us to give you more information on Kenshi 2 and welcome you to take part in competitions hosted by Lo-Fi games or the Kenshi community.

Chinese speakers:
Finally for Chinese users, there’s our website, Steam news and two additional new platforms, Bilibili and Weibo – while both are a bit of an experiment for us, it represents an exciting way for us to hear your thoughts on Kenshi and share content directly from the studio.

Additionally, sign ups are enabled for email newsletters which we may use in the future.

For starters, check out the ongoing Halloween modding competition ran by the Kenshi Community Discord team. It’s a great chance to win a selection of awesome games (provided as Steam keys) from the community prize pool, perfect for playing whilst eating a stash of holiday candy.

To get involved:

1. Join the Kenshi Community Discord
   
2. React to the ‘Server – Events’ role in the ‘#server-roles’ channel
   
3. Submit a suitably spooky Kenshi mod on either the Steam Workshop or Nexus Mods
   
4. Link your devilish creation in the ‘#event-submissions’ channel
   
5. Submissions close November 30th.

It’s no secret that we’ve been spending more time amongst Kenshi’s user base, those of you already following us on social media have seen us celebrating fan art, memes, screenshots, and highlighting some of the more creative mods made by players – We’d like to level things up again, so in addition to the awesome Halloween event hosted by the Discord community this month, once our merchandise is available we’ve got a whole host of ideas for fans to win some physical goodies.

Creating merchandise has been a little slower than we first imagined but we’re in the home stretch now that we’ve found a good partner to help us with the process. We’re working closely with the team at https://www.merchandise.game/, whose experience includes providing merch for Smite, Furi, Paladins, Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds and other major titles – all sold in a variety of currencies and delivered globally.

Here's a sneak peak of colours for the last sample we agreed on:


Despite the focus on Kenshi 2’s development, we’re still committed to bug fixes for Kenshi 1. As of writing one option we’re exploring is the idea of a public bug tracker similar to the way browsers like Firefox and Chrome allow users to report issues, link connected issues together for investigation and give more realistic feedback on the progression of their issue. This could be Bugzilla, Mantis or something else entirely.

In the meantime, when reporting an issue please follow the format outlined in the forum sticky, many issues take a significant amount of time to investigate without reproduction steps or, despite how prolific they may seem to the reporter, can’t be reproduced on our systems at all which is far from ideal.

From everyone at Lo-Fi Games, have a spooky Halloween and let your uninitiated friends know they can pick up Kenshi 33% off for the duration of the holiday sales. There’ll be more information on Kenshi 2’s development in the next update.

Out now on the experimental branch only. To opt in to the experimental version, right-click on Kenshi in your Steam games list -> properties -> betas tab -> then choose “experimental”. If opting in, please be aware of bugs and instability.

Please report any bugs or feedback to either the Steam or Lo-Fi forums

Gameplay changes:

• Slaves are now only fed up to 100 if not in a cage, instead of 115.
  
• Pet animals now heal 2x speed when KO'd, as they have no other means of healing and spend too much of their lives in comas.
  
• Holy farm storage is no longer full of ration packs.
  
• The GUI tooltip now also shows your bounty even if you are a slave.

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed AI bug where a guard captures someone out of the boundaries of the town, and keeps picking them up and putting them down again.
  
• Slave status is no longer reset when you are arrested by police. Slaver caravans should come by and collect slaves, but mods could prevent this, meaning that a slave could get arrested and trapped in a police station forever. Now its possible to wait-out a sentence.
  
• Fixed AI stalling when crafting items when different input items are needed.
  
• Fixed inventory item limit being ignored when AI moves large item stacks.
  
• Reduced characters running through the air or underground when zones are loading in the background.

Out now on the experimental branch only. To opt in to the experimental version, right-click on Kenshi in your Steam games list -> properties -> betas tab -> then choose “experimental”. If opting in, please be aware of bugs and instability.

Please report any bugs or feedback to either the Steam or Lo-Fi forums

• Fixes for a few building interior visibility bugs
  
• A fix for NPCs sometimes dying if you knocked them out and then left the area, now it takes their health into account.
  
• Fixed bounty dialogue not triggering if you hand in Eyegor
  
• Additional crash fixes

Out now on the experimental branch only. To opt in to the experimental version, right-click on Kenshi in your Steam games list -> properties -> betas tab -> then choose “experimental”. If opting in, please be aware of bugs and instability.

Please report any bugs or feedback to either the Steam or Lo-Fi forums.

Miscellaneous:

• Stopped NPCs thinking animals are weak because they don't have weapons

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed a crash if loading an invalid item in a character inventory (eg from a missing mod)
  
• Fixed particle effects of buildings on roofs
  
• Fixed crash if character dies while rearranging squads
  
• Fixed missing temples in Holy Nation towns
  
• Fixed DC_IS_NEARLY_KO being unhandled (it is a duplicate of DC_NEARLY_KO)
  
• Fixed some dialog not triggering as DC_IS_ENEMY always returned true
  
• Some minor fixes to the navigation mesh

Translations:

• Chinese language updated to include user suggestions from the Steam Community forums.
  
• German language has been updated to change a few words to shorter alternatives.

Special thanks to: 'Prd' for helping us to pinpoint the issue behind the missing Holy Nation temples, 'RustledJimm' for flagging a few dialogue errors, and 'Good luck' for extensive feedback on the Chinese Translation

Directly from Chris Hunt, Lo-Fi Games CEO and the man behind Kenshi:

"Good news everyone! There has been a change of plans with development, and we have switched to the Unreal engine!

Now, what does that mean?

GOOD SIDE:

• Amazing graphics with little effort
  
• Better performance
  
• Less work for us long-term, as we don't have to worry about engine bugs and features. We can focus more on gameplay.
  
• Fancy features, like maybe cloth physics for example
  
• Better stability probably?
  
• New pathfinding system

BAD SIDE:

• More work for us short-term, porting is a huge job
  
• We have less control over the engine
  
• Modding support will be more complicated, Unreal is a difficult engine to work with and has limitations in this respect. I don't know the engine well enough to say how exactly. The likely scenario is "more powerful but more difficult". The FCS will remain the same, but will control less stuff. Mod support will be a high priority for us though, so don't worry.
  
• Kenshi 1 update now uncertain:
  Here's the kicker: Porting Kenshi 1 to Unreal engine is now way more work than making Kenshi 2, because we have to port assets and make the old stuff work, where for Kenshi 2 we are making the assets from scratch in the Unreal-compatible way. We have started porting Kenshi 1, but I'm not sure whether to finish it because it is a lot of extra work and will delay Kenshi 2

So I'd like some feedback from people. Personally I feel like it would be better to focus on Kenshi 2, which will have exciting new features, new content and world to explore and mechanics to play with, rather than remaking kenshi 1, which would be essentially the same game."

To get some more definitive feedback we've also put up a poll here: https://www.strawpoll.me/18697532

P.S. This does not mean Epic Exclusive, it's just a game engine choice. Don't panic.

• Fixed a crash related to adjusting the font size.
  
• Fixed an issue with loading screen tips displaying incorrectly for some users.
  
• Fixed an issue with character and NPC names displaying incorrectly.