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.




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

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.




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

In my last announcement I said we'd be quiet for a while on the update front, but I totally lied. And Captain Deathbeard ninja'd me with this extra sneaky patch. So note that this is NOT the optimisation or map update announced earlier this week. Just for clarification :)

This is on experimental only, 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.


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

• 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

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

In my last announcement I said we'd be quiet for a while on the update front, but I totally lied. And Captain Deathbeard ninja'd me with this extra sneaky patch. So note that this is NOT the optimisation or map update announced earlier this week. Just for clarification :)

This is on experimental only, 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.


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

• 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

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

We're gonna have a quiet period for the next few weeks so expect patch releases to be on hold while we work on the next update. Here's what's going on...


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.


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

***UPDATE: Delayed ETA 4th November***

More info on the next new map faction coming soon!

We're gonna have a quiet period for the next few weeks so expect patch releases to be on hold while we work on the next update. Here's what's going on...


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.


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

***UPDATE: Delayed ETA 4th November***

More info on the next new map faction coming soon!

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.

DOWNLOAD BLENDER TEMPLATES

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.

DOWNLOAD BLENDER PLUGIN

• 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.

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.

DOWNLOAD BLENDER TEMPLATES

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.

DOWNLOAD BLENDER PLUGIN

• 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.

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". 0.93.20 is the current stable version.

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.

• 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%

NOTES:

• 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 here. Thank you.

* EDIT: Following commonly asked questions about performance improvement - This is in progress but will be a longer job of upgrading to Ogre v2.0 engine. We have no eta for this yet, but it will likely still be a few months down the line from now.

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". 0.93.20 is the current stable version.

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.

• 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%

NOTES:

• 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 here. Thank you.

* EDIT: Following commonly asked questions about performance improvement - This is in progress but will be a longer job of upgrading to Ogre v2.0 engine. We have no eta for this yet, but it will likely still be a few months down the line from now.