Kenshi is a fun sandbox game that dumps the player’s character into a hostile post-apocalyptic world and find a way to keep them alive while carving out an empire for themselves.
But this game can prove difficult even for the most experienced player and progress can often be very, very slow. For those who aren’t opposed to cheating in a single-player game there are a number of cheats that can make the game much easier. Be aware that in order to use many of these cheats you will have to become familiar with the game’s built-in modding program Forgotten Construction Set or be willing to hunt down mods made by other players.
Updated By Benjamin Baker On February 25th 2020: All these years later, and even with several mods installed Kenshi can still be a difficult game. Going from lonely wanderer to ruler of your own empire is no small feat. To help with this here are some additional cheats that can make the early part of the game faster and make managing an empire much easier.
15 Remove Hunger
Hunger can be an annoying problem to deal with in the beginning of the game, or when out exploring and your funds are running low. It is possible to use the Forgotten Construction Set (or FCS editor) to modify your hunger values.
Go to your save file, find your character’s name, and find the MEDICAL_STATE entry. Your hunger range is 0-3 with a value of three representing 300 hunger in-game. You could also alter the NU value which determines hunger regeneration with a 1 value, equaling 100 NU in game.
14 Claim Towns
Take Over The World is a mod that allows you to conquer and claim towns for your own use. While it sounds incredibly fun, it is also very much a cheat as you can use an army to remove problematic factions and nearby threats.
After meeting the mod’s in-game requirements you can have a fully functioning base without spending any resources. We’re talking walls, shops, houses, and general infrastructure for free. Sure you need an army and the will to use it, but a couple of neighborhood raids and you’re in a profitable and safe position for the rest of the game.
13 256 Squad
The Incredibly popular mod 256 Recruit And Squad raises the limit on the size of your squad from 30 to an astounding 256. With 256 squadmates you can turn over a handsome profit farming, crafting, mining, manufacturing, and engineering.
With a squad this size you could do all of those things and still have a sizeable army to go conquering other towns, assuming you’re using the mod mentioned earlier. Bandit attacks, wandering hostiles, and other threats will be a thing of the past when you can have 256 bodyguards following you around.
12 Longer Mercenary Contracts
Longer Mercenary Contracts is a simple mod that makes the game a heck of a lot easier and qualifies as a cheat in many players’ minds. It extends the number of days after which a contract will expire, giving you more time to fulfill them.
This makes the game much easier and you can complete contracts at a more leisurely pace. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself completing fewer contracts as a result.
11 Double Learning Rate
There are a number of mods that achieve this cheat, but it’s simple enough to do in the game files with FCS. In global game settings find the race your character is, locate the xp stat values and modify the multipliers.
Depending on what you set them to this can dramatically speed up how long it takes to train skills. Do keep in mind that using the FCS route will lead to all NPCs of your character’s race receiving the same XP boost. This can be awesome if they’re your squadmates, but a problem if they’re a hostile group.
10 Hang Onto The Past
While some may not consider this a useful cheat starting out, it’s handy for players who have built up a decent base, strong squad, and a good collection of gear and want to restart with everything they’ve built. It’s also one of the easiest cheats on this list to implement.
Simply import your old save to a new game and you’ll start with your old base, squad and whatever items you had stored in the chests in your base. It does require struggling through the game initially, but it makes restarting less of a hassle.
9 Not So Rare
The best weapons in the game are Meitou quality crafted by the legendary weaponsmith Cross. These rare weapons are held by high-level bosses and only a handful exist in the entire game.
If you want to have more than a handful of these legendary weapons you can implement the import save cheat mentioned earlier. Simply kill the wielder of say a Meitou Katana, store the weapon in a chest in your base, then import your save to a new game. Now you have the Meitou Katana at your base and the person you killed before is alive and well with the same weapon in their possession.
8 God Mode
A cheat expected to be in every game is surprisingly not easy to implement in this one. At the time of this article the easiest and best way to give your character invincibility is to download a mod called Zatoichi, the last samurai.
The mod gives the player character a regeneration rate of 10,000 meaning about 40 health is regenerated every second. The player will also be faster, take longer to starve, and is unfortunately restricted to a single race. It’s possible to reverse engineer the changes in the mod to make your own, but it’s something beyond the scope of this article.
7 Instant Mastery
Now we'll be diving into the Forgotten Construction Set or FCS for short for the rest of the cheats in this article. To obtain maxed stats players can open the FCS, load their save, find their character’s name and open it, look for the desired stats and then change the values to the desired level. Although it should be noted anything above 100 will cause problems.
It wont make your character invincible and they’ll still have trouble fighting armies of enemies even with the proper gear, but it removes the need to train and practice various skills and the ability to run at max speed is a god send for this game.
6 Infinite Backpack Space
A very basic and incredibly useful cheat to have, you can create a backpack that can carry an infinite amount of items inside making you the Mary Poppins of the wasteland. To do this simply open the FCS, create a new mod for items, select bags, pick the desired bag you want, then change the “Stackable Bonus” minimum and maximum values to whatever you want, and then save the mod.
Then you can either create a starter character that already has the bag or you can find it within the game. It’s a handy cheat and makes trading, looting, and stealing a much easier endeavor when you can carry anything and everything.
5 Unlimited Money
If you want to save yourself some time or don’t want to learn how to mod, this is by far one of the most common mods to find on the steam workshop. If you want a little more control over what you get or to learn how to make your own mods then this is a fairly easy cheat to create.
Open the FCS, open your save, in the “Changes List” open “Camera” and then edit the player’s money value to whatever you want. It’s recommended you don’t give yourself billions of cats as it could bug the game and don’t ask why the game developer put the money files under “Camera”.
4 Raise The Dead
If you feel your death was unfair or you’d rather not lose your favorite unique recruit forever, then this cheat will allow you to bring any character back from the dead. Simply Open the FCS, load your save, find your character’s name or the desired NPC’s name, open Medical_State, change the death value to false, set the bandage, rig, stun and wear values to 0, and set flesh value to the maximum value for the chosen character.
When you load your game the character or NPCs you manipulated will pop up like daisies, unless you forgot to change the flesh value in which case the character will rise up and then die and fall back down.
3 Instant Buddies
It’s very easy to become enemies with various factions in the game, shoot, if you play as a woman or nonhuman you’re already on The Holy Nation’s blacklist. But there’s a way to alter your relationship with any faction.
Open FCS, load your quick.save file, find the desired faction, look for the “relationSID” with the “204gamedata.base”. What you need is the number next to the “relationSID”, write it down and then go back up the list to the “relation” values. Look for the one that has the same number you wrote down and change it to whatever you want between -100 and 100. When you load the game that faction will be your biggest fan, or worst enemy depending on what you set the value to.
2 They Wont Know What Hit Em
If you find yourself having trouble taking down a particular base or have come under attack from a particularly powerful group, there’s a cheat that allows you to kill them instantly and it’s very similar to the cheat that brings people back to life.
Open FCS, load your save, find the NPC’s name you wish to kill, open medical_state, set the death value to true, and set the flesh value to 0 (the other values don’t matter in this cheat). When you load the game the NPCs you manipulated will instantly die and drop to the ground, unless you forgot the flesh value again then they’ll come back to life and get up ready for a fight.
1 Advantaged Or Disadvantaged Start
This is one of the trickier cheats on the list and is recommended to find an appropriate guide regarding new starter construction. Basically you open the FCS, create a new mod, from here you can duplicate and modify characters, create custom squads, give your new character powerful gear, high starting money amounts and so much more.
Using this cheat you can start the game with a powerful warrior with legendary gear and an equally powerful squad at their side or you can start as a lowly escaped slave with nothing but a name.