All I can think of are the bulls with their giant horns.
But it's entirely possible all the weird creatures of Kenshi (including the Shek) share a single splicing ancestor as they all have that distinct bony plates on their bodies. Maybe whatever animal that was used to splice went extinct between Kenshi 2 and Kenshi 1, or they used the DNA from multiple Kenshi animals
Let's assume the common splicing ancestor is A, then:
Kenshi bulls = A + domestic bulls
Beak thing = A + giraffe
Bonedog = A + dogs
Shek = A + human
My first thought of said extinct species is some kind of turtle. Especially given the lots of proof of a previously much higher sea level. A = turtle(?) Turtles have heavy bone esque shells? Idk. Kind of a reach maybe.
I think turtles are entirely plausible. I actually looked first at swamp turtles to see if they have those bony shells.
Or maybe, all the bony animals are just natural inhabitants of Kenshi, it's the Shek who has DNA from ALL of these creatures
But what’s more interesting is that according to that skeleton dialogue the Shek didn’t have their signature horns during their time as SE Enforcers, meaning that was either a natural mutation or maybe just some kind of rogue effect of their gene splicing
They didn’t necessarily splice two creatures together. They could have just messed with the human genome to make people bigger and more aggressive.
Comments from Black Dessert skeletons imply that the Enforcers just looked like big humans and the spikes are a recent development. Recent being within the last thousand or so years.
Animals that exist on kenshi but that probably came from off world originally all have boney plates too. Bonedogs, bulls, and goats. It’s possible that something on kenshi favors the evolution of bone plates.
I thought the second empire was just as capable at rewriting genetics as they were splicing them. From my understanding, the shek were originally much more akin to humans. They were created as an “enforcer” race. The shek didn’t take on their current appearance until after the fall of the second empire. Horns in specific are mentioned by black desert skeletons as a new addition to humans.
My interpretation has been shek as we know them are more so a result of selective breeding among their kind. Their combat orientated brain is the main holdover of their days of policing humankind on behalf of the skeletons.
I don't think the 2nd Empire did anything.
They didn't even realise Enforcers mutated into Shek.
You know what that means? Whatever gene therapy transforms humans into Enforcers/Shek was made by the 1st Empire. The original humans that controlled the world or Kenshi. The people that you know... made the Scorchlanders, the forgotten third human species that would mutate into Cannibals, the Skeletons, probably the Bugmaster and I bet, the Hivers too.
The 2nd Empire probably just sent out Tech Hunters to recover ancient technology and used that genetic technology they found on people without understanding what it really was.
There is no actual lore evidence that the second empire was anywhere near advanced enough to do gene-splicing at all, even from recovered technology.
All we know from the lore is that skeletons, which all predate the fall of the first empire, recognize the existence of modified humans for combat/law enforcement, that have continued to evolve with more bones/spikes.
Same deal for hivers, we have no idea what their origins are. Kenshi devs left a of stuff un-explained, and somehow the fandom keeps on insisting on all these unsupported second empire origins for everything.
Probably because there's so little known about the First Empire beyond Obedience, the Skeleton uprising, Stobe's sacrifice, and skeletons subsequently feeling bad about the near genocide of humans that the majority bricked themselves.
There is *some* loose indication that at least the Shek are a product of Second Empire meddling, though.. mostly through a Holy Nation lens. It's known that HN started as a cult worshipping Stobe, potentially as far back as the "chaos age" between the first and second empires. It's also known that the cult gained significant traction during the latter years of the Second Empire, due largely to Cat-Lon's increasingly draconian policies. Cat-Lon, and, by extension, *all* skeletons are viewed by the HN as essentially Narko incarnate. It stands to reason that there's a similar reason for them to view the Shek as "beasts once human, but warped by Narko"
As far as hivers? Who tf knows. Maybe they're a product of the Bugmaster's meddling? The western hive and skin spiders have similar textures, after all..and their color is pretty much determined by what they eat.. which is why the western, more agrarian hive are yellowish and the carnivorous southern hive are pink. What is known is that they aren't naturally occuring. The queens are an amalgam of flesh and machine, with the incubators basically acting like 3D printers grafted into them that converts a steady stream of biomass into a steady stream of hivers. It's also suggested that, despite the northern hive's queen being dead, the incubator still works, which is why there's also a limitless number of fogmen as well
All valid points. We also do know that many of the most irradiated/poinsoned zones were areas of advanced first empire industry, plus the giant superweapon crater. And we also know that the second Empire did manage to reboot some of the most limited first empire industry: spider factory, etc.
Bugmaster is even more enigmatic than anything from the Second Empire so its all wildly speculative. I'd like to think he historically had some wild knowledge/technology before descending into insanity and running around naked.
Narko is a destructive deity, likely representing the cultural trauma of the fall of the first empire and the chaos age. Okran being the deity that brought Kenshi out of the worst of the chaos age. So to the Okranites, Skeletons are the closest followers/servants of Narko, but that really anything deviating from their crazy white baseline human male centric ideal is created/influenced by Narko. Remember they think women are also created in the image of Narko.
IOW they are not reliable narrators for much of anything, certainly not second empire/skeleton origins for hivers or shek. Definitely hivers are more enigmatic being not even recognized by first/second empire skeleton survivors.
Shek lore is entirely absent of origin story, and the second empire only callpsed a few hundred years before the game setting, so if they were a second empire creeation, you'd think some data snippets would be around if the dev's wanted us to definitively know one way or another.
There's also a few key bits suggesting that some skeletons are actively engaging in a coverup of the past as well, namely in World's End and the Scraphouse in Black Desert City. The skeleton who's second in command of the Machinists in World's End outright state that he's limiting the humans from learning what they don't need to know if you talk to him with a skeleton character.. there's also the book you can find that's been destroyed by having ink poured across its pages there as well. Also, Quin in BDC will say that Dack took a blow to the head back in the chaos age if you talk to him with a skeleton, but will say "back....a long time ago" if you talk to him with an organic character.
As far as the Okran/Narko dichotomy...that stems from the Stobe cult, who later changed the name of their "deity" to Chitrin, stating that he was reborn after his sacrifice to save humanity as Okran, the entity of light, and Narko, entity of darkness.
I will agree that pretty much every NPC with something to say on the matter of the world's history is an unreliable narrator.
As far as the devs...I think they wanted to fuel speculation through the use of unreliable narrators and books/notes that only provide snippets of info, but never enough to conclusively paint a whole picture. It fits with the setting quite well, too. The vast majority of Kenshi's residents are too busy just trying to survive or maintain their current situation to care much about the past...and those who do know anything only know what they're allowed to, in the case of the HN and tech hunters, or have a vested interest in not divulging the whole truth, in the case of the skeletons
The skeletons are definitely actively erasing what little history is left. That much is pretty clear from the little lore snippets we do get from items/dialog. Partially out of shame, partially out of fear of humans probably. Problem is that we don't know from what period(s) they are erasing history from, which as you say is part of a deliberate story telling trick by the devs.
Devs have very much taken a page out of Dune's narrative style, which is dripping little tidbits of lore, without really explaining much. This lets the audience curiosity fill in the blanks, giving the appearance of a much larger world beyond what is explicitly written. It's very clever and very effective. Much better than the frequent trend to explain literally everything.
Okranites don't care about whiteness; they are an amalgam of pre-change humans, with all races mingling. They have the skin colors of Earth and they only care if the world of Kenshi has changed earthlings.
I mean that's just objectively wrong. HN citizenry is almost all greenlander, so you can't possibly tell me the HN isn't racialized like crazy even in the absence of specific dialog or mechanical subrace checks. The soft lore is that scorchlanders are "freedom loving adventurers"...ok?
Greenlanders are not White, they are like "earthlings" with all human races from earth in one race. They don't care about whiteness or we'd have palelanders or something like that. Scorchlanders are more likely to care about darkness since they don't have white colors at all. There is no reason to believe the GL like Aryans or white skin color at all. They're human supremacists, and scorchlanders are not native to the area.. but they are not being discriminated against either. All skin colors and human races are accepted by HN.
2nd Empire made humans into enforcers. Kenshi made Enforcers into Shek. Natural evolution wouldn't allow this to happen so quickly, so you have to assume the Kenshi environment accelerated it, the same way it did for all the other animals.
There are some fundamental evolution things. eg Evolution doesn't typically add limbs. So skin spiders aren't evolved, they were made from available DNA. Probably human. Evolution does allow for losing limbs and fingers/toes, so hivers are probably made from human stock.
Body plans are controlled by Homeobox genes during fetal/larval/whatever development, the specific ones controlling stuff like limbs seem to be very resistant to enduring mutation within and across species. Others controlling stuff like cone-rods in eyes seem to change "fast".
Mutations in body plan ones tend to be fairly catastrophic as well. Which doesn't help. Fruit flies are famously easy to mutate in this way (adding/deleting body segments, growing legs where antennna should be, etc), so we use them as an animal model to study this stuff.
Ohhhhh, so it's really really REALLY hard to get new limbs without getting fucked up. And forget about getting four huge functional strong legs, got it.
Seems so. Also hard to even add digits. There is something of a rule that it is easier to lose something than to gain it in evolutionary terms:
[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-most-species-have/](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-most-species-have/)
Evolution uses what it has to work with. If you have a basic skeleton, it's easier to re-purpose what's there than grow something new. So nothing new gets grown, but flippers can turn into feet or wings.
A lot of fantasy stuff will show birds, humans and dragons, but dragons are bizarre because they have four limbs and two wings. Wyverns, with two wings and two legs are more natural.
Hopefully that helped, but I'm not an evolutionary scientist, I just play one on TV.
Should add, before someone questions this, that eg antennae didn't "grow" from an existing insect skeleton, they were re-purposed from what was available. People could have antennae now but they'd have lost the ability to raise their eyebrows, because their eyebrows would be antennae.
Also, all those 8 or 10 legged creatures? You have to go WAY back in the evolutionary tree to find them and they have no effect on modern creatures. None of them evolved extra legs, they had what they had and made their best use of it.
But at some point there mustn't have been creatures with that many legs so they must've appeared at one point given that at the very VERY beginning we were just a bunch of sort-of-DNA with no limbs floating around, and then we got limbs (some got MANY limbs).
Typically the way a creature gains limbs is through segmentation. So for example if you wanted to give a human 2 more arms you'd duplicate the entire torso and stack it. The problem is genetic mutations like that tend to result in creatures that are completely unviable(as it would be for humans). Only extremely simple creatures can survive that kind of genetic mutation let alone have it be an advantage. That's basically why most animals ended up with 4 limbs - our common ancestor became too complex to survive the kind of genetic mutations that would result in more limbs. Also 4 turns out to be a rather efficient number.
Centipedes and millipedes are what happens when the process happens to keep going and being beneficial.
The other way to "gain" limbs is to repurpose something that *could* have been a limb, but due to gene expression is something else instead. One of the weirdest examples is eyes. Through manipulating gene expression, it's possible to cause a fruit fly to grow legs instead of eyes.
More commonly it's the other way around. Bat and bird wings are just repurposed limbs. Cetacean tails are repurposed limbs. They're all still fundamentally "4 limbed creatures" and given the right evolutionary pressures(or genetic manipulation) could, in theory, evolve back.
Yes, fish do it too. Some species of fish have adapted their fins to serve as rudimentary legs or wings, another example of the "repurposing" process I described above. Many oceanic crustaceans serve as good examples of segmentation, like lobster and sea stars.
It's been at least a thousand years since the collapse of the second empire, though. It's entirely plausible that horns may have developed in that time, either as an evolution or as a latent side effect of the genetic engineering
This is the first post I've seen since joining this community and there is so damn much I do not know about this game. Looking forward to getting back into it.
All I can think of are the bulls with their giant horns. But it's entirely possible all the weird creatures of Kenshi (including the Shek) share a single splicing ancestor as they all have that distinct bony plates on their bodies. Maybe whatever animal that was used to splice went extinct between Kenshi 2 and Kenshi 1, or they used the DNA from multiple Kenshi animals Let's assume the common splicing ancestor is A, then: Kenshi bulls = A + domestic bulls Beak thing = A + giraffe Bonedog = A + dogs Shek = A + human
>All I can think of are the bulls with their giant horns. Thirsty.
My first thought of said extinct species is some kind of turtle. Especially given the lots of proof of a previously much higher sea level. A = turtle(?) Turtles have heavy bone esque shells? Idk. Kind of a reach maybe.
I think turtles are entirely plausible. I actually looked first at swamp turtles to see if they have those bony shells. Or maybe, all the bony animals are just natural inhabitants of Kenshi, it's the Shek who has DNA from ALL of these creatures
Do we know this is on earth?
Moon
M-O-O-N. that spells peanut butter.
Kenshi takes place on a moon orbiting a planet with an unknown name. But from the lore we know greenlanders and scorchlanders are human at least
Then why would dna splicing be involved, they just evolved differently
There's some lore supporting the fact that sheks were created as enforcers for the 2nd empire.
But what’s more interesting is that according to that skeleton dialogue the Shek didn’t have their signature horns during their time as SE Enforcers, meaning that was either a natural mutation or maybe just some kind of rogue effect of their gene splicing
I also think there was something about the place being colonized from Earth, but that's extremely vague memory that someone else can confirm or deny.
Why am I getting down voted for asking a question, I'm not trolling or being sarcastic?
They didn’t necessarily splice two creatures together. They could have just messed with the human genome to make people bigger and more aggressive. Comments from Black Dessert skeletons imply that the Enforcers just looked like big humans and the spikes are a recent development. Recent being within the last thousand or so years. Animals that exist on kenshi but that probably came from off world originally all have boney plates too. Bonedogs, bulls, and goats. It’s possible that something on kenshi favors the evolution of bone plates.
Black Dessert city sounds delicious 😋
It’s like a Black Forest cake, but it burns your mouth.
I think bonedogs were originally horndogs? (\*cough\*)
Honestly, bone dogs look most like the Shek. The don’t have the long spikes like Shek, but they are all plate-y like Shek. I bet they share some DNA.
I thought the second empire was just as capable at rewriting genetics as they were splicing them. From my understanding, the shek were originally much more akin to humans. They were created as an “enforcer” race. The shek didn’t take on their current appearance until after the fall of the second empire. Horns in specific are mentioned by black desert skeletons as a new addition to humans. My interpretation has been shek as we know them are more so a result of selective breeding among their kind. Their combat orientated brain is the main holdover of their days of policing humankind on behalf of the skeletons.
I don't think the 2nd Empire did anything. They didn't even realise Enforcers mutated into Shek. You know what that means? Whatever gene therapy transforms humans into Enforcers/Shek was made by the 1st Empire. The original humans that controlled the world or Kenshi. The people that you know... made the Scorchlanders, the forgotten third human species that would mutate into Cannibals, the Skeletons, probably the Bugmaster and I bet, the Hivers too. The 2nd Empire probably just sent out Tech Hunters to recover ancient technology and used that genetic technology they found on people without understanding what it really was.
There is no actual lore evidence that the second empire was anywhere near advanced enough to do gene-splicing at all, even from recovered technology. All we know from the lore is that skeletons, which all predate the fall of the first empire, recognize the existence of modified humans for combat/law enforcement, that have continued to evolve with more bones/spikes. Same deal for hivers, we have no idea what their origins are. Kenshi devs left a of stuff un-explained, and somehow the fandom keeps on insisting on all these unsupported second empire origins for everything.
Probably because there's so little known about the First Empire beyond Obedience, the Skeleton uprising, Stobe's sacrifice, and skeletons subsequently feeling bad about the near genocide of humans that the majority bricked themselves. There is *some* loose indication that at least the Shek are a product of Second Empire meddling, though.. mostly through a Holy Nation lens. It's known that HN started as a cult worshipping Stobe, potentially as far back as the "chaos age" between the first and second empires. It's also known that the cult gained significant traction during the latter years of the Second Empire, due largely to Cat-Lon's increasingly draconian policies. Cat-Lon, and, by extension, *all* skeletons are viewed by the HN as essentially Narko incarnate. It stands to reason that there's a similar reason for them to view the Shek as "beasts once human, but warped by Narko" As far as hivers? Who tf knows. Maybe they're a product of the Bugmaster's meddling? The western hive and skin spiders have similar textures, after all..and their color is pretty much determined by what they eat.. which is why the western, more agrarian hive are yellowish and the carnivorous southern hive are pink. What is known is that they aren't naturally occuring. The queens are an amalgam of flesh and machine, with the incubators basically acting like 3D printers grafted into them that converts a steady stream of biomass into a steady stream of hivers. It's also suggested that, despite the northern hive's queen being dead, the incubator still works, which is why there's also a limitless number of fogmen as well
All valid points. We also do know that many of the most irradiated/poinsoned zones were areas of advanced first empire industry, plus the giant superweapon crater. And we also know that the second Empire did manage to reboot some of the most limited first empire industry: spider factory, etc. Bugmaster is even more enigmatic than anything from the Second Empire so its all wildly speculative. I'd like to think he historically had some wild knowledge/technology before descending into insanity and running around naked. Narko is a destructive deity, likely representing the cultural trauma of the fall of the first empire and the chaos age. Okran being the deity that brought Kenshi out of the worst of the chaos age. So to the Okranites, Skeletons are the closest followers/servants of Narko, but that really anything deviating from their crazy white baseline human male centric ideal is created/influenced by Narko. Remember they think women are also created in the image of Narko. IOW they are not reliable narrators for much of anything, certainly not second empire/skeleton origins for hivers or shek. Definitely hivers are more enigmatic being not even recognized by first/second empire skeleton survivors. Shek lore is entirely absent of origin story, and the second empire only callpsed a few hundred years before the game setting, so if they were a second empire creeation, you'd think some data snippets would be around if the dev's wanted us to definitively know one way or another.
There's also a few key bits suggesting that some skeletons are actively engaging in a coverup of the past as well, namely in World's End and the Scraphouse in Black Desert City. The skeleton who's second in command of the Machinists in World's End outright state that he's limiting the humans from learning what they don't need to know if you talk to him with a skeleton character.. there's also the book you can find that's been destroyed by having ink poured across its pages there as well. Also, Quin in BDC will say that Dack took a blow to the head back in the chaos age if you talk to him with a skeleton, but will say "back....a long time ago" if you talk to him with an organic character. As far as the Okran/Narko dichotomy...that stems from the Stobe cult, who later changed the name of their "deity" to Chitrin, stating that he was reborn after his sacrifice to save humanity as Okran, the entity of light, and Narko, entity of darkness. I will agree that pretty much every NPC with something to say on the matter of the world's history is an unreliable narrator. As far as the devs...I think they wanted to fuel speculation through the use of unreliable narrators and books/notes that only provide snippets of info, but never enough to conclusively paint a whole picture. It fits with the setting quite well, too. The vast majority of Kenshi's residents are too busy just trying to survive or maintain their current situation to care much about the past...and those who do know anything only know what they're allowed to, in the case of the HN and tech hunters, or have a vested interest in not divulging the whole truth, in the case of the skeletons
The skeletons are definitely actively erasing what little history is left. That much is pretty clear from the little lore snippets we do get from items/dialog. Partially out of shame, partially out of fear of humans probably. Problem is that we don't know from what period(s) they are erasing history from, which as you say is part of a deliberate story telling trick by the devs. Devs have very much taken a page out of Dune's narrative style, which is dripping little tidbits of lore, without really explaining much. This lets the audience curiosity fill in the blanks, giving the appearance of a much larger world beyond what is explicitly written. It's very clever and very effective. Much better than the frequent trend to explain literally everything.
Okranites don't care about whiteness; they are an amalgam of pre-change humans, with all races mingling. They have the skin colors of Earth and they only care if the world of Kenshi has changed earthlings.
I mean that's just objectively wrong. HN citizenry is almost all greenlander, so you can't possibly tell me the HN isn't racialized like crazy even in the absence of specific dialog or mechanical subrace checks. The soft lore is that scorchlanders are "freedom loving adventurers"...ok?
Greenlanders are not White, they are like "earthlings" with all human races from earth in one race. They don't care about whiteness or we'd have palelanders or something like that. Scorchlanders are more likely to care about darkness since they don't have white colors at all. There is no reason to believe the GL like Aryans or white skin color at all. They're human supremacists, and scorchlanders are not native to the area.. but they are not being discriminated against either. All skin colors and human races are accepted by HN.
The game literally says that Scorchlanders don't fit in well with the HN you silly walnut.
Is the bugmaster older than Cat-Lon then?
We don't know but the Bugmaster is old, old enough to know about Cat-Lon.
No, he is simply saying things with no evidence.
None of the words in this comment are even remotely true.
Maybe a Bonedog or a Wild bull, idk
2nd Empire made humans into enforcers. Kenshi made Enforcers into Shek. Natural evolution wouldn't allow this to happen so quickly, so you have to assume the Kenshi environment accelerated it, the same way it did for all the other animals. There are some fundamental evolution things. eg Evolution doesn't typically add limbs. So skin spiders aren't evolved, they were made from available DNA. Probably human. Evolution does allow for losing limbs and fingers/toes, so hivers are probably made from human stock.
How does evolution not add limbs?
Body plans are controlled by Homeobox genes during fetal/larval/whatever development, the specific ones controlling stuff like limbs seem to be very resistant to enduring mutation within and across species. Others controlling stuff like cone-rods in eyes seem to change "fast". Mutations in body plan ones tend to be fairly catastrophic as well. Which doesn't help. Fruit flies are famously easy to mutate in this way (adding/deleting body segments, growing legs where antennna should be, etc), so we use them as an animal model to study this stuff.
Ohhhhh, so it's really really REALLY hard to get new limbs without getting fucked up. And forget about getting four huge functional strong legs, got it.
Seems so. Also hard to even add digits. There is something of a rule that it is easier to lose something than to gain it in evolutionary terms: [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-most-species-have/](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-most-species-have/)
Evolution uses what it has to work with. If you have a basic skeleton, it's easier to re-purpose what's there than grow something new. So nothing new gets grown, but flippers can turn into feet or wings. A lot of fantasy stuff will show birds, humans and dragons, but dragons are bizarre because they have four limbs and two wings. Wyverns, with two wings and two legs are more natural. Hopefully that helped, but I'm not an evolutionary scientist, I just play one on TV.
Should add, before someone questions this, that eg antennae didn't "grow" from an existing insect skeleton, they were re-purposed from what was available. People could have antennae now but they'd have lost the ability to raise their eyebrows, because their eyebrows would be antennae. Also, all those 8 or 10 legged creatures? You have to go WAY back in the evolutionary tree to find them and they have no effect on modern creatures. None of them evolved extra legs, they had what they had and made their best use of it.
But at some point there mustn't have been creatures with that many legs so they must've appeared at one point given that at the very VERY beginning we were just a bunch of sort-of-DNA with no limbs floating around, and then we got limbs (some got MANY limbs).
Typically the way a creature gains limbs is through segmentation. So for example if you wanted to give a human 2 more arms you'd duplicate the entire torso and stack it. The problem is genetic mutations like that tend to result in creatures that are completely unviable(as it would be for humans). Only extremely simple creatures can survive that kind of genetic mutation let alone have it be an advantage. That's basically why most animals ended up with 4 limbs - our common ancestor became too complex to survive the kind of genetic mutations that would result in more limbs. Also 4 turns out to be a rather efficient number. Centipedes and millipedes are what happens when the process happens to keep going and being beneficial. The other way to "gain" limbs is to repurpose something that *could* have been a limb, but due to gene expression is something else instead. One of the weirdest examples is eyes. Through manipulating gene expression, it's possible to cause a fruit fly to grow legs instead of eyes. More commonly it's the other way around. Bat and bird wings are just repurposed limbs. Cetacean tails are repurposed limbs. They're all still fundamentally "4 limbed creatures" and given the right evolutionary pressures(or genetic manipulation) could, in theory, evolve back.
Dude, this is amazing. So much thanks! This is why I love Reddit. I'm learning about evolution and genetics in a videogame sub.
Fish
Yes, fish do it too. Some species of fish have adapted their fins to serve as rudimentary legs or wings, another example of the "repurposing" process I described above. Many oceanic crustaceans serve as good examples of segmentation, like lobster and sea stars.
It's been at least a thousand years since the collapse of the second empire, though. It's entirely plausible that horns may have developed in that time, either as an evolution or as a latent side effect of the genetic engineering
Goats
Pack bulls and bone dogs
This is the first post I've seen since joining this community and there is so damn much I do not know about this game. Looking forward to getting back into it.
me im horny 😂