Kenshi 2 - November Community Update

A new update on Kenshi 2 details progress so far.

During October we confirmed our focus on Kenshi 2 before covering ways to get your fix of curated and studio-led Kenshi content, existing events and upcoming competitions, merchandise and our ongoing support for Kenshi 1 which has received a number of experimental updates pushed recently. If you missed last month's update you can read it here.

Community Events:

The Kenshi Community Discord team’s Halloween modding competition officially draws to a close with the end of November meaning they’ll be featuring a winner and handing out prizes (read: free games) shortly. If you’d like to take part in future community driven events, be sure to join the community Discord soon as there’s something special coming up for the festive season…

Building Kenshi 2:

As we aim to finish creating Kenshi 2 prior to the heat death of the universe, Lo-Fi Games has been expanding our staff team and working with freelance artists to get Kenshi 2 started. Outside of the studio, eagle eyed users on the Kenshi subreddit noticed Eugenia Peruzzo’s recently shared ‘Samurai Military Guards’ armour set.



This was created following on from concept art by 5518 Studios, which should give a small peek at one aspect of the aesthetic users can expect this time around.



Concurrently, inside of the studio we welcomed two additional members to the team, joining the programmers there’s Harrison aka ‘Boodals’ who’s currently working on GUI and a number of things we intend to keep from Kenshi 1. On the art team, we’re joined by concept artist Guy Warley who’s been drafting incredible buildings and environments that we’re keeping a secret for now. Finally on top of all of that we’re searching for an experienced technical lead and a lead artist to join the team full time.

Blasts from the past:
In our original post about the engine change Chris mentioned that creating Kenshi 2 in Unreal would likely make modding "more powerful but more difficult", though we’d do our best to keep up the trend of allowing users to a relative sandbox in how they modify their playable sandbox (it’s sandboxes all the way down, ideally...). Access to the project and Unreal Editor’s toolkit means we’re expecting to see even more depth to community mods but also raised some concerns about the average player who may want to tweak the game without learning a new and complicated piece of software, regardless of how powerful it may be. To that end, we’ve been exploring what functions can be kept from the Forgotten Construction Set and current methods of map editing. The overarching aim here is to retain a lot of the ability for players to make small modifications similar to what’s popular in Kenshi 1 and fan translations without needing to touch Unreal Editor, though it’s important to stress that it’s too early to promise an exact feature set right now.

The world of tomorrow:
In addition to what to keep from Kenshi, we’re investing a lot of time in understanding what the features in Unreal can add to Kenshi 2. To give some obvious examples, unlike the older systems used for Kenshi, Unreal supports more detailed lighting, expansive weather conditions and more intricate time of day cycles which make sense to investigate as we build the new game. As with above, it’s too soon to commit to specifics but if and when it’s time they would comfortably warrant their own posts to detail how they change character interactions in the world.

Future reveals:
As a firm believer in managing expectations, posting during exploration and investigative stages will leave the initial updates lighter than those further into the project but a monthly schedule will probably seem almost too infrequent later down the line. To that end, we’re sticking with it and things may get a bit more technical for the next few.

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