As I mentioned in my review, Kenshi will give you a whole lot of WTF moment. I had one yesterday, and would like to share.

I bought a map from an NPC vendor, which revealed that a ruin was somewhat close to my town/base. Having never been to a ruin in Kenshi before, I was curious, so I grouped up my six best fighters and sent them off on the journey, with one party member wearing a medium sized backpack to bring extra food and meds, and (hopefully) some loot back. The backpack gives you extra inventory, at the cost of lowering your combat stats a little. It also increases the total weight you can carry, and things in the backpack count less against the weight penalty.

The trip was longer than I had expected, as the overall size of the world in Kenshi is still much bigger than I expect when looking at the map. That ‘close’ ruin was a solid 25 minutes of running for my characters. When we finally arrived, the ruin was three destroyed buildings with some scattered weapons, armor, and resources around. The fourth building was intact, and the front door was locked.

As we approached, blood spiders attacked us. I paused and looked at the stats of the spiders. They weren’t as weak as lowly bandits, but they didn’t seem overly strong either. The fight started, and initially things were going well. The spiders hit fast, but they didn’t deal much damage, and we were able to cut down a good number of them. But more kept coming, and slowly, one by one, my group was going down. Those that were up had injuries, so weren’t as effective in combat. The tide was turning.

Then an animal called a Beak Thing (looks like a giraffe with a huge beak) ran into the fight and started attacking the spiders. This got most of the spiders off our party, and things were looking up. The Beak Thing was a brute, killing many spiders, but eventually the bites from the spiders added up and it was knocked unconscious.

However this bought us enough time to recover a little and regroup, and we were able to kill the remaining spiders. Victory. Or so we thought.

As we were bandaging the wounded, the Beak Thing regained consciousness, and since we were the only living things around, attacked us. It was heavily wounded, but so were we, and it ended up knocking everyone left down.

And then it started to eat one of the party members…

I had never seen an animal in Kenshi eat a human, let alone one of mine! The game helpfully shows teeth on that character’s portrait to indicate they are, in fact, being eaten, and the stats of that character drop as more of them is consumed. Yay.

I watched in morbid curiosity what would happen, and the Beak Thing continued eating until it had killed one member, then it moved to the next. It become full halfway through that member. It also stopped eating and knocked down any party member who regained consciousness, which was comically sad looking from my perspective. My poor guys just wanted to save their friend from being eaten, but nope.

Eventually the Beak Thing left, and I spent a few moments looking around the ruin. In those moments however another group of spiders came across the bodies, and they too had a feast with who remained.

Good times.