I got this a little while back, but haven’t played it yet beyond creating a character. The graphics aren’t the greatest, but from what I’ve read and seen, is that your character’s visual appearance is fairly fluid. There’s a wide selection of sliders (with mods that expand the slider limits), and your character’s appearance apparently does change over time (increase your strength, and your character’s muscles visibly get bigger.
The question I have is can mods directly modify the character’s visual appearance or stats? There is a Construction Kit out there for building mods, but like the game itself, I just haven’t had time to check it out yet. Has anybody here played around with that, and has an idea what can and can’t be done with modding?
I’ve played a lot of Kenshi and I think even a rudimentary weight gain mod would be somewhat difficult. While there are mods that have custom meshes and it should be possible in theory to have both a mod that both adds a “weight gain mesh” to a custom body (like coldsteelj’s Fallout 4 mod) and a way to have that mesh “morph” in game (as muscle definition and bulk can change visibly through gameplay) it might be difficult to have those actions tied to anything. Food isn’t necessarily interactive in Kenshi, it gets removed from your inventory when hungry. The closest thing I can think of that might work is creating a new stat in the FCS (i.e “Weight”) and having that tied to the overall “fatness” morph of the body, then having a way for that stat to increase organically through the game. My first thought was having different interactive items that characters will interact with and increase their fatness stat, like a training dummy of sorts. Perhaps one could research these buildings at a research bench, with better research requiring ancient books and AI cores, but allowing for better buildings (for example, feeding tanks with chairs for your character to sit in and custom animations to help sell the illusion as they very slowly increase in size.) Stats in game, like toughness, tie into character stats, so having Fatness 0 could offer light benefits like slower hunger rate (like the racial hunger bonuses) and marginally faster movement or something, Fatness 50 moderately slows down the character but provides a buff to their incoming damage and possibly even limb health if that’s something the FCS allows for, Fatness 100(+?) slowing the character to an utterly agonising crawl and massively crippling their attack speed and dexterity but allowing them to tank hits like a Leviathan.
Depending on how complex this hypothetical mod wants to be, it could be anything from a superficial Skyrim-like morph where you just create a fatty in the character menu and that’s it as far as the game is concerned, or you could go full-blown insanity and create the majority of what I listed above, along with a whole bunch of extra trims and fancies- custom dialogue, animations, NPCs and the like. I’m not entirely sure all of that is even doable, and even if it was, it’d be an immense amount of work, but to summarize, the framework should allow for at least characters that you could use the in-game systems to morph into fatties at any point, whether we can make this happen organically is honestly beyond me since Kenshi is cataclysmically janky and basically on a shoestring spaghetti engine as is. It’s fun to talk about, though.