Removed the "Disable civilians in towns" option as it was causing some issues with things like Waystations being unpopulated, and no longer made a noticable performance gain.
Fixed use cursor appearing on player built tables.
Stealing backpacks from animals now correctly flags as stealing.
Fixed building town allocation when placing town markers.
Fix for animals walking into buildings.
Additional fix related to previous ragdoll crash.
Fixed translations, fonts and audio when kenshi install path contains non-ascii characters.
Fixed restricted food tooltip potentially missing some races.
Fixed a few minor dialog bugs.
Fixed texture loading error handling - with invalid textures (eg from file corruption or a broken mod) you now just get black, instead of a crash.
Fixed crash with the restricted food tooltip for some mods.
Fixed character editor crashing if character model fails to load from a mod.
Fixed interior layout editor mod tracking (level editor).
Changes:
Added 'character limit reached' message when buying animals.
Added error number to CRASHDUMP FAILED log message (description was garbled).
Cleaned up list of races that can eat restricted food in item tooltip.
Backpack contents marked as stolen when you steal a backpack.
Translations:
Chinese updated
Special thanks to 'Victory Forever' for spotting the issue around disabling civilians and waystations.
December Community Update
Now that the holiday season is officially behind us and Michael Bublé prepares to return to hibernation, there’s a lot to look back on in 2019. It’s important to remember though with a lot of time away from the studio December was a slower month overall.
(If you’re just here for the latest Kenshi 2 gossip, scroll down a bit)
Taking our place as torch-bearers for Valve’s first foray into pre-release support, we’ve pushed a huge number of post-release updates and continue to polish Lo-Fi’s first project. Last month, in addition to highlighting a large patch, we touched on release frequencies – the gist of which is to continue liberal use of the experimental branch and periodic combined releases on the main branch when we’re happy with the stability.
Journey into the East
Another huge focus of last month was our attendance at WePlay as indiePlay awards finalists in Shanghai, China. Chris and Nat travelled across the globe to meet fans, translation partners, and gracefully accept defeat surrounded by a crowd chanting ‘Kenshi!’ right to the end.
Whilst we would have rather taken the crown, losing to Touhou, another game series with a rich history that started as a one-man passion project, feels somewhat poetic. Congratulations to ZUN for realising a high school design idea as an iconic game series and Team Ladybug for taking it in a fresh direction with Touhou Luna Nights.
A slow boat to Japan(ese)
As a final note on last month’s Kenshi progress, fans waiting for updates to the Japanese translation and localisation haven’t been forgotten. Initially we were optimistic that it wouldn’t take long to correct but unfortunately it required a lot more work than we realised. Meg, our Japanese community manager, has been putting a lot of time into this and currently estimates it to be about 80% finished. We’ll share more news when appropriate via the official Japanese Twitter to keep everyone informed.
Recast replaces Havok
Switching to a more modern engine gives us an opportunity to change things in ways that are otherwise difficult for Kenshi, first of which is the technology behind navigation mesh generation (or navmeshes). A navmesh essentially defines which parts of the environment a character can travel through, understanding positions for height changes, terrain types, and obstacles which is fed into systems for pathfinding.
Kenshi 1 used Havok AI™, seen elsewhere in several popular titles and made by the same team behind the well known Havok Physics™. Kenshi 2 will use a different system called Recast, it has a well documented integration with Unreal Engine in addition to being open source allowing us a much greater degree of control and adaptability. Greater control of Navmesh generation is the first step towards better path finding in Kenshi 2.
As mentioned in our previous update, we’re not just creating brand new stuff – there are a number of important items for us to keep so that modding remains within reach of the wider community. Right now we have a functional version of the level editor ported for Kenshi 2 giving us time to define an appropriate feature set. This approach pairs well with more complicated functions such as terrain editing directly in the Unreal Editor. If this is a tool you use regularly it would be great to hear from you in the comments.
Game Merchandise.game
Also requested by fans, we have a small update on the status of merchandise. Before the holidays we caught up with the team at merchandise.game who’ve been working with us on our first drop of Kenshi gear. As we’re close to production there was some discussion about whether or not we should open pre-orders, in the end we decided it would be a better if we simply wait for initial stock and order more based on the sales. Assuming no issues with the paperwork Kenshi merchandise could be on their store and ready to ship as soon as next month.
We’d like to take the opportunity to thank everyone for an amazing 2019 and wish you all the best of luck with any resolutions you’ve made. To our fans getting ready for lunar new year at the end of the month, don’t forget to sweep before you enjoy the holidays!
Kenshi v1.0.43 & v1.0.44 (Experimental Branch)
Out now on the experimental branch only. To opt in to the experimental version, right-click on Kenshi in your Steam games list -> properties -> betas tab -> then choose “experimental”. If opting in, please be aware of bugs and instability.
Please report any bugs or feedback to either the Steam or Lo-Fi forums
1.0.43
Bug Fixes:
Fixed character editor crashing if character model fails to load from a mod
Fixed interior layout editor mod tracking (level editor)
Fixed crash with the restricted food tooltip for some mods
Fixed restricted food tooltip potentially missing some races
Fixed a few minor dialog bugs
Translations:
Chinese updated
1.0.44
Bug Fixes:
Hotfixed the recent character editor infinite loading fix breaking new games
Added 'character limit reached' message when buying animals
Fixed building town allocation when placing town markers
Added error number to CRASHDUMP FAILED log message (description was garbled)
A fix for animals walking into buildings
Kenshi v1.0.42 (Experimental Branch)
Yesterday's patch notes, out now on the experimental branch only. To opt in to the experimental version, right-click on Kenshi in your Steam games list -> properties -> betas tab -> then choose “experimental”. If opting in, please be aware of bugs and instability.
Please report any bugs or feedback to either the Steam or Lo-Fi forums
1.0.42
Hotfix for a crash with the backpack stealing thing from yesterday.
Cleaned up list of races that can eat restricted food in item tooltip
Kenshi v1.0.41 (Experimental Branch)
Out now on the experimental branch only. To opt in to the experimental version, right-click on Kenshi in your Steam games list -> properties -> betas tab -> then choose “experimental”. If opting in, please be aware of bugs and instability.
Please report any bugs or feedback to either the Steam or Lo-Fi forums
1.0.41
Removed the "Disable civilians in towns" option as it was causing some issues with things like Waystations being unpopulated, and no longer made a noticable performance gain. Thanks to Victory Forever for spotting that one.
Fixed use cursor appearing on player built tables
Fixed stealing backpacks from animals not counting as stealing
Backpack contents marked as stolen when you steal a backpack
FIXES
Fixed a crash with the new fix for the previous new fix for the previous ragdoll crash
Fixed translations, fonts and audio when kenshi install path contains non-ascii characters
Fixed texture loading error handling- with invalid textures (eg from file corruption or a broken mod) you now just get black, instead of a crash
November Community Update
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 ‘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.
Supporting Kenshi 1:
Despite some users loudly decreeing the end of support for Kenshi 1, as mentioned before this isn’t the case and we’re still actively squashing bugs and tweaking gameplay. We’ve deployed a number of fixes across the last month using our opt-in only experimental branch as a means of testing them before merging them into the release build that typical users play, most recently v1.0.40 includes fixes for a number of issues such as several crashes reported on the forums. This also helps reduce the amount of time community members have to invest in upkeep of their modifications and changes to the game as generally the release version updates are better tested compilations of several patches and therefore less frequent.
Kenshi x WePlay: indiePlay awards:
In a previous post we got to test out Steam’s new ‘IRL event’ feature noting that Kenshi is a finalist in WePlay’s indiePlay awards. Making it to the finals prompted us to send Chris and Natalie over to Shanghai, China for a chance to meet another side of the community and, if we win, to accept the award directly. To grab a ticket check out WePlay’s website, our booth will be on the first floor in area I-05 (in the indiePlay area).
Steam Awards:
Those of you logging in to Steam will have seen that the Autumn Sales are here along with the opportunity to nominate games for this year’s Steam Awards, and whilst it’s tempting to shoot for “The Game of the Year Award”, we’re aiming for “The Best Game You Suck At Award” in homage to all of the would be protagonists that met an untimely end fighting everyone’s favourite murderous pseudo giraffe or entered the world for the first time and expected to win a duel against an angry goat. You can help us win by voting here for Kenshi in that category here.
On behalf of everyone at Lo-Fi Games, if you’re a fan from the United States finishing up celebrations of Thanksgiving, we hope you had a wonderful holiday and for everyone else remember – it doesn’t take a special time of year to call friends and family, ask them how things are going and tell them to try Kenshi.
Kenshi v1.0.40
Patch is live v1.0.40 pushing previous experimental branch updates to the main Kenshi branch for all users. Below is a collated list of all of the patches included in this update.
Gameplay changes:
Slaves are now only fed up to 100 if not in a cage, instead of 115.
Pet animals now heal 2x speed when KO'd, as they have no other means of healing and spend too much of their lives in comas.
Holy farm storage is no longer full of ration packs.
The GUI tooltip now also shows your bounty even if you are a slave.
Stopped NPCs thinking animals are weak because they don't have weapons
Bug Fixes:
Fixed a crash if loading an invalid item in a character inventory (eg from a missing mod).
Fixed particle effects of buildings on roofs.
Fixed crash if character dies while rearranging squads.
Fixed missing temples in Holy Nation towns.
Fixed DC_IS_NEARLY_KO being unhandled (it is a duplicate of DC_NEARLY_KO).
Fixed some dialog not triggering as DC_IS_ENEMY always returned true.
Some minor fixes to the navigation mesh.
Fixes for a few building interior visibility bugs.
A fix for NPCs sometimes dying if you knocked them out and then left the area, now it takes their health into account.
Fixed bounty dialogue not triggering if you hand in Eyegor
Fixed AI bug where a guard captures someone out of the boundaries of the town, and keeps picking them up and putting them down again.
Slave status is no longer reset when you are arrested by police. Slaver caravans should come by and collect slaves, but mods could prevent this, meaning that a slave could get arrested and trapped in a police station forever. Now its possible to wait-out a sentence.
Fixed AI stalling when crafting items when different input items are needed.
Fixed inventory item limit being ignored when AI moves large item stacks.
Reduced characters running through the air or underground when zones are loading in the background.
Fixed a random crash that would happen if someone caught someone else committing the crime of assault against nothing (no victim).
Fixed a random crash when picking up characters, or something related to that. Would only happen with certain people's PCs, so was hard to catch. There is a small chance that this could fix the passable walls bug too.
Clamped a value to hopefully avoid the cursed money item bug, where you would pick up a coin and get minus a billion cats.
Mostly fixed the issue with characters patrolling into private buildings.
Fixed interior visibility in build mode.
Fixed interior not loading correctly if you complete a building while inside it.
Fixed item labels being cut off at certain resolutions.
Fixed a crash with the new fix for the previous ragdoll crash.
Fixed bodyguard betrayal triggering more than once per betrayal, leading to oversize relation penalties. Penalty should be 20 to reputation.
A bunch of small stability fixes to the FCS.
Additional crash fixes.
Translations:
Chinese language updated to include user suggestions from the Steam Community forums.
German language has been updated to change a few words to shorter alternatives.
Special thanks to: 'Kapaer' for contributions to a number of crash fixes originally outlined in the Kenshi v1.0.38 (experimental) update, 'Prd' for contributions leading to fixing issues with missing Holy Nation temples, 'RustledJimm' for listing a number of dialogue errors and 'Good luck' for extensive feedback on the Chinese Translation originally outlined in the Kenshi v1.0.35 (experimental) update.
Out now on the experimental branch only. To opt in to the experimental version, right-click on Kenshi in your Steam games list -> properties -> betas tab -> then choose “experimental”. If opting in, please be aware of bugs and instability.
Please report any bugs or feedback to either the Steam or Lo-Fi forums
1.0.38 "These 2 insidious random crashes were fixed with the help of the player Kapaer. He is a total genius who managed to track down the crashes on his own system and make a mod that hacked the game and fixed them. Thanks to this and the info he provided we were able to use the memory addresses to track down the problems at the source. Kapaer's name has been added to the game in his honour." - Chris
Kapaer's fixes:
Fixed a random crash that would happen if someone caught someone else committing the crime of assault against nothing (no victim)
Fixed a random crash when picking up characters, or something related to that. Would only happen with certain people's PCs, so was hard to catch. There is a small chance that this could fix the passable walls bug too.
Bug Fixes:
Clamped a value to hopefully avoid the cursed money item bug, where you would pick up a coin and get minus a billion cats
Mostly fixed the issue with characters patrolling into private buildings
Fixed interior visibility in build mode
Fixed interior not loading correctly if you complete a building while inside it
Fixed item labels being cut off at certain resolutions
1.0.39 A few additional fixes have been added prompting an update to the original post and a newer version number.
Additional Bug Fixes
Fixed a crash with the new fix for the previous ragdoll crash
Fixed bodyguard betrayal triggering more than once per betrayal, leading to oversize relation penalties. Penalty should be 20 to reputation.
A bunch of small stability fixes to the FCS
1.0.40
Quick fix for the newly introduced bug that caused the zone loading to get stuck
Kenshi x WePlay: indiePlay awards
Earlier this year we worked alongside an external team of translators to localise Kenshi for Chinese players, at the same time we were encouraged to check out the fan created expo, WePlay and it’s accompanying indiePlay awards.
The indiePlay awards cover several different categories such as art, design, narrative, and music aiming to celebrate the freedom that allows indie games developers to create successful titles like 2018 shortlistees Iconoclasts, Muse Dash and Yuppie Psycho. This year sees the return of the international category for best overseas work, which we’re now proud to announce Kenshi is a finalist for.
Attending from Lo-Fi Games, Chris – our studio lead and designer of Kenshi, and Natalie – writer of Kenshi’s narrative and storytelling will both be accompanied by dedicated translators allowing them to answer questions from our Chinese audience. Fans can find them staffing our Kenshi booth near the indiePlay stage, so be sure to stop by. Date: 7th - 8th December 2019 Booth: First Floor Area I-05 (In the indiePlay area) Location: Shanghai Convention & Exhibition Center of International Sourcing
For more information on the event check out the WePlay and indiePlay websites.
October Community Update
About a month ago we reached out to fans across the globe and spoke about working with Unreal Engine, technical hang-ups on porting Kenshi, the potential to focus on Kenshi 2, and shared the seemingly important newfound British tradition for non-binding votes on important subjects.
As of writing, the poll stands at over 22,000 votes, 81% of which would like Lo-Fi to focus on Kenshi 2 and giving the game a more expansive feature set. Beyond the binary nature of the poll, the community wrote thousands of comments to explain their thoughts, concerns and wish lists which we’re always interested in, and finally something about an ‘Epic Game Store exclusive’, which we clarified we’re not interested in.
Today I’m happy to share that the team is focussed on Kenshi 2.
Kenshi 2 update news:
Our current plan is to bring everything together into a monthly format and make all news available in the most popular Kenshi user languages via mediums most appropriate to each language. This has lead us to launch some additional social channels which we’d love to hear from you on.
Japanese speakers: For Japanese users, in addition to our website, Steam news, and Niconico, you can now find us on Twitter @KenshiJP – this will allow us to give you more information on Kenshi 2 and welcome you to take part in competitions hosted by Lo-Fi games or the Kenshi community.
Chinese speakers: Finally for Chinese users, there’s our website, Steam news and two additional new platforms, Bilibili and Weibo – while both are a bit of an experiment for us, it represents an exciting way for us to hear your thoughts on Kenshi and share content directly from the studio.
For starters, check out the ongoing Halloween modding competition ran by the Kenshi Community Discord team. It’s a great chance to win a selection of awesome games (provided as Steam keys) from the community prize pool, perfect for playing whilst eating a stash of holiday candy.
React to the ‘Server – Events’ role in the ‘#server-roles’ channel
Submit a suitably spooky Kenshi mod on either the Steam Workshop or Nexus Mods
Link your devilish creation in the ‘#event-submissions’ channel
Submissions close November 30th.
It’s no secret that we’ve been spending more time amongst Kenshi’s user base, those of you already following us on social media have seen us celebrating fan art, memes, screenshots, and highlighting some of the more creative mods made by players – We’d like to level things up again, so in addition to the awesome Halloween event hosted by the Discord community this month, once our merchandise is available we’ve got a whole host of ideas for fans to win some physical goodies.
Merchandise:
Creating merchandise has been a little slower than we first imagined but we’re in the home stretch now that we’ve found a good partner to help us with the process. We’re working closely with the team at Merchandise.Game, whose experience includes providing merch for Smite, Furi, Paladins, Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds and other major titles – all sold in a variety of currencies and delivered globally.
Here's a sneak peak of colours for the last sample we agreed on:
Supporting Kenshi 1:
Despite the focus on Kenshi 2’s development, we’re still committed to bug fixes for Kenshi 1. As of writing one option we’re exploring is the idea of a public bug tracker similar to the way browsers like Firefox and Chrome allow users to report issues, link connected issues together for investigation and give more realistic feedback on the progression of their issue. This could be Bugzilla, Mantis or something else entirely.
In the meantime, when reporting an issue please follow the format outlined in the forum sticky, many issues take a significant amount of time to investigate without reproduction steps or, despite how prolific they may seem to the reporter, can’t be reproduced on our systems at all which is far from ideal.
