2-11: Weapons of the World

Ells sets a foot inside the Leviathan Coast ruins, immediately whips round and walks right back out. On the inside, the place looks impressively intact—there is definitely treasure here! It's also crawling with security spiders. These are like the iron spiders the gang saw back in the Floodlands outside Burn's tower but even deadlier. Ells is not having any of this.

Ells rushes back to the group and breathlessly relays what he saw. There's no chance they could overcome the spiders as they are but perhaps, come nightfall, he could sneak around them. Unfortunately, dawn just broke, so the gang has some time to kill before he can make the attempt.

Tentatively, the gang looks for something to do further along the Leviathan Coast. Beasts rule here. Apart from the leviathans, the ecosystem is populated by beak things and large herds of garru.

Riddly, the seasoned wanderer, calmly yet firmly instructs the gang to freeze when one such herd of garru comes galloping by. Garru are herbivores and not particularly aggressive by nature, but they can interpret a large enough group of people as a threat if they get close enough. Like many herbivores, though, they're not great at differentiating a person standing still from a tree or some other feature of the landscape. Thus, the gang does as they're told and the garru pass by without a fuss.

Once the garru are a safe distance away, the gang gets to butchering a freshly dead beak thing they found. Up here, the beak things prey on garru, but they tend to bite off more than they can chew against such numerous herds. An hour later, the gang comes upon another fresh beak thing corpse surrounded by a number of dead or unconscious garru and it occurs to them that despite the beak things' numbers, they're much safer from them here than they were in the Cannibal Plains. The beak things seem to get themselves killed pretty frequently. It goes without saying that beak things will die if they decide to try and take on a leviathan but they usually aren't that foolish. Usually.

The gang finishes filling their packs with meat and strolls onward. Much to their surprise, they actually run into other people in this land of beasts.

This trio of tech hunters doesn't have much to say, merely exchanging polite nods with the gang as their paths cross. Sometimes, roving tech hunters will be willing to be hired as mercenaries, but not these three. Not that the gang has any interest in hiring anyone right now anyway. Even with their combined forces, they wouldn't be a match for the security spiders in that ruin the gang scoped out. No, if anything, these are rivals. The gang hopes these three won't beat them to their score come nightfall.

In game terms, wandering tech hunters won't actually loot ruins, though in my first playthrough I was worried they would. They just kinda walk around getting into fights like any other wandering group. They're generally nice to see around as they're a neutral faction and since there isn't much reason to antagonize them, they'll likely stay neutral.

The rest of the day brings more of the same. Well-fed after taking time in the evening to cook some beak thing and garru meat, the gang arrives back at the ruin at 11 PM, which is when it gets dark in this world. It's time for Ells to go to work.

Deadly as the security spiders are, they don't see in the dark any better than humans do. Maybe even worse. Ells can pick locks right in front of their faces and they don't cotton on. It takes him a bit—he's still relatively novice in the art of lockpicking—but he gets into the chests they're guarding and finds treasure indeed: A trove of weapons of vastly superior grade to what the gang currently has.

This naginata is a Mk II, the 6^th best out of the game's 16 weapon grades. There's not even a fleck of rust on it! Fantastic.

Seeing as Ells has an inventory full of a variety of weapons and has some time to put his feet up after a successful heist, it's a good time to talk about weapon classes. Kenshi's assortment of melee weapons is divided into six classes: Polearms, blunt, sabres, hackers, katanas, and heavy weapons.

Polearms, like this fancy naginata Ells just looted, have a nice long reach and give their wielders significant attack bonuses on account of being easy to use. This is balanced by middling damage as well as massive penalties to fighting with such a long weapon indoors. So long as you don't run afoul of that penalty, they're a good reliable weapon, especially for weaker characters who will need those attack bonuses in order to hit much of anything. Most kinds of polearms also do significantly much more damage against animals—a very welcome bonus against the beak things the gang's been contending with lately.

Blunt weapons, like the spiked club in Ells' secondary weapon slot, are also unimpressive in terms of raw damage. They don't cause much blood loss either, which is theoretically an advantage if you're trying to take someone alive for a bounty, but personally I find it very unlikely to accidentally flat out kill someone unless you're far stronger than them—in which case you're probably past the point of needing their bounty anyway. Instead, blunt weapons' actual niche is in crushing heavily armoured opponents. Heavy armour, like the plate suits samurai wear, protects against cutting damage far better than it protects against blunt damage. Most weapons do some mix of cutting and blunt damage, with blunt weapons rather obviously being almost entirely blunt damage. On top of that, a couple types of blunt weapon carry hefty bonuses to armour penetration.

Sabres are excellent generalist weapons. They're good for blocking with, giving bonuses to defense, though most models pay for this with modest penalties to attack. The penalties aren't generally a huge deal, though—sabres deal good damage, good blood loss, swing pretty fast and have OK range. They can be a bit weak against heavy armour since they mostly deal cutting damage, but they're not the worst in that regard. You can see a couple models of sabre in Ells' inventory: The first of the three swords there is a ringed sabre and the third is a desert sabre. The desert sabre is kind of a weird one in that it's the only sabre without an attack penalty and also the only sabre with bonuses against specific enemy types—we'll give it a closer look shortly.

Hackers is a bit of a weird name for the weapon class since every single weapon in that class is called some variation of "cleaver", but I digress. They're heavy-handed swords that split their damage more or less evenly between cutting and blunt. They don't deal much blood loss and many take small damage penalties against animals, but they hit hard against robots and many get bonuses to armour penetration. The flesh cleaver, like the one Ells has in his inventory between the two sabres, uniquely deals extra damage to humans as well. He got it off a cannibal, which is exactly the sort of person you would expect to find carrying something called a "flesh cleaver".

Katanas are all over the damn place. Kenshi kinda treats them as the default weapon. Paradoxically, they're also really expensive. The game's excuse for this is that grade matters more for them than for other weapons. I don't really buy it, but it makes 'em good to sell, so it's fine by me. In terms of combat, katanas are nice and fast, dealing respectable raw damage, bonus damage against humans, and crazy good blood loss. They can really underperform against anything more substantial than your average bandit, however, as they sport considerable penalties to armour penetration and most take further massive penalties against robots. I won't be neglecting them but they're not my favourite weapon class.

Finally, heavy weapons are just that—heavy. They're all huge bastards with big wide swings, indoor penalties, and a heaping pile of blunt damage. Some of them also deal decent to great cutting damage on top of that and the blood loss to go with it. It's quite satisfying to swing with them and send a whole group of enemies reeling at once. The drawback (other than the indoor penalties) is that they take strength to swing well and toughness to actually get through a big slow swing without getting staggered by enemy attacks.

So, about that "weird" desert sabre:

The desert sabre is one of two weapons that gets bonuses not against broad enemy categories but very specific enemy types: Bugs, small bugs, big bugs, and bonedogs (not bugs). Despite this seeming hyper-specialization, it's also a perfectly good all-purpose sabre, so the gang will definitely be using it. The other weapon with hyper-specific bonuses is the falling sun, a heavy weapon and the most damaging weapon in the game once you can actually swing it. The gang probably won't be lucky enough to get their paws on one for quite a while. Its bonuses are against beak things, leviathans, and a third kind of large animal the gang hasn't met yet.

Bags laden with equipment, meat and hides, the gang is ready to head back to town and sell. Keeping to the coast, they leave the leviathan coast just as easily as they entered. After yet another run-in with a thankfully lone beak thing, they reach the relative safety of the ghost village once again.

Spurred by Ells' success looting the ancient armoury, Jam finally remembers the loot from the other ancient ruin they've visited—the library in Darkfinger. All those treasure maps have sat unread at the bottom of their pack this whole time! It's time to change that.

There's a few different types of treasure maps. As I mentioned when the gang picked these up, they're consumable items, so we have to choose between reading them to add the location they describe to our map or keeping them to sell. As they've still only seen a fraction of the big, wide world, the gang is going to sink their teeth into every last map they have.

Ancient Military documents are the map types that lead to Lost Armouries, ruins that hold various high-grade weapons and armour. The ruin the gang just visited was a Lost Armoury but there's plenty scattered all over the world. This map points to...

...One smack in the centre of the continent. It's in some kind of craggy looking area. Normally, the only icons visible with the map zoomed all the way out are cities, but the first time we open our map after reading a treasure map, it'll helpfully show the newly unveiled location with a bright green border regardless of zoom.

Jam also has an Engineers Map, which points to a place where they might find Engineering Research. That's an advanced kind of research material, something the gang won't be able to use for a decent while, but the location this particular engineer's map points to is a little interesting.

This Post-Ancient Workshop appears to be located on a tiny little island a little bit off the west coast of the continent. Nobody builds boats these days, so getting there could pose a unique sort of challenge... but that's a problem for later.

The other maps turn up a second Lost Armoury close to the first, a Post-Ancient Workshop southwest of Deadcat (the easternmost city revealed on the map), and something intriguing called the Swamped Lab far to the south.

This lab was revealed by a map type called Old Treasure Map, which is described thus:

If you care about research, these locations are the most valuable. Jam's excitement is only tempered by the fact that the swamped lab is clean across the world. The gang hopes to visit all of these ruins eventually but this one, they're absolutely going to make a point of going to when they're able.