increasing character limit beyond 256?

[nordlys]

Is there any chance to lift the hardcoded character limit of 256 with a future patch? Recruiting and drilling people into respectable combatants was basically the most fun part, and now that I hit the cap (and after a couple of forced imports) it hurts to see all those would-be recruits and slaves all over the place that I can't put to use.

(yes, I know one doesn't need this many people to run a base... that's why I have about 30 of those lined up from Mongrel to Ark )

[Shidan]

This isn't some arbitrarily chosen cap, this is a system cap. The game literally can't go higher without crashing instantly.

It's probably technically possible the devs could make some workaround somewhere to functionally add more slots, but it would require reworking backend systems, some of which have likely not been touch in many years. The likelihood of major bugs and issues caused by it is high. I don't see them doing such things.

For Kenshi 2 though, I could easily see the hard limit being higher. We'll have to wait and see.

[dragonalumni]

How do you feed / recruit / manage 256 people?

I think my largest population was 60 and my computer cpu and my brains were both fried. (Of course I trained /equiped all 60 in specialist/edge level gear instead of specializing a bunch into just turreters?/farmers.

[swillo]

Most of my games have more then 150 characters. several have 250, which is the limit I set.
Those games become all about base management. setting everyone to jobs and making sure they don't get stuck in the food chain.
You also lose a lot of character personality. the first dozen characters have personality, but the rest just tend to become fodder.
The most interesting part of those games for me is to make all the extra people "survivors status" I have a core group that moves around and finds what the "survivors" need to continue. The biggest thing you can do to a big group like that is cause a catastrophe that will stop their food. It gets really interesting when suddenly there is no food for 250 people.

[nordlys]

How do you feed / recruit / manage 256 people?

The game is pretty good at automating. I have a large capital city and a network of small self-sufficient castles (2 men per 4 vegetable hydroponics). I have so much food stored across these I would have needed to build the Amazon central warehouse facility to store it all if I did not mod containers to hold 10000 or 100000 units.

The total bar population alone is pretty close to 256 even without importing game, and if you add force-recruiting from slaver farms, the sky is the limit.

I have a main melee platoon of all unique characters to do most of exploring, 3 crossbowmen platoons to back them up for major military operations, and the rest are either working the capital or garrisoning outposts. The only management problem is that the morons at the outposts tend to regularly fall from the walls somehow then starve at the gates.

[nordlys]

A little necro-ing and some good news (for the curious and very adventurous) to celebrate the anniversary of this thread. First, as "The Horde" (https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/ ... 1723305406) mod proves beyond doubt, the game can in fact function with more than 256 PCs (barring failing to generate portraits for excess characters). I have replicated its success by editing faction allegiances of some platoons and their individual characters in savegame (using FCS), and for the past week has been running over 300 characters without any noticeable issues.

Now, digging into save editing anytime you fancy recruiting somebody is not very convenient, so, having armed myself with IDA debugger and my near-unexisting coding skills, I went and dabbled with reverse engineering to find and disable that pesky "It looks like your squad is a little full" check in the executable. Surprisingly, in the end I had some success: by changing offset 0052BF03 (gog 1.51 version) from 41 to 00 , I have enabled myself to recruit past 256 in game, at least using the recruitment option from "Player slavery" mod (https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/ ... 1629774647). Had no opportunity to test it with legit recruits (the world has been scoured already), and slaves bought on the markets haven't been eager to join yet, but it's a start nonetheless.

Code: Select all

Open the executable in hex editor. Look for the following byte sequence:
0000 7541 498B 0649

and change to:
0000 7500 498B 0649

No guarantees given, backup the file, all usual disclaimers apply.

[philthymcnasty]

This isn't some arbitrarily chosen cap, this is a system cap. The game literally can't go higher without crashing instantly.

It's probably technically possible the devs could make some workaround somewhere to functionally add more slots, but it would require reworking backend systems, some of which have likely not been touch in many years. The likelihood of major bugs and issues caused by it is high. I don't see them doing such things.

For Kenshi 2 though, I could easily see the hard limit being higher. We'll have to wait and see.

What about a workaround? instead of a direct squad, you create a separate friendly faction which has a very limited AI but also uses your food and beds? So you would create a separate faction and call them "farmers" or "miners" and they do a specific job at a base?

I am surprised that slave rental was never implemented. That would have been a lore friendly work around to the labor problem.

[nordlys]

What about a workaround? instead of a direct squad, you create a separate friendly faction which has a very limited AI but also uses your food and beds? So you would create a separate faction and call them "farmers" or "miners" and they do a specific job at a base?

That's what Player Slavery mod tries to do, and the result is... underwhelming. The workers from slave factions can only work on unaligned resource nodes outside of your cities, so you can forget about staffing your fields and steel ovens. In fact, I am not even sure whether they actually produce any output or merely pretend to mine like slave farm prisoners do.

Not to mention the game regularly despawns generic characters who do not belong to the player's faction when the region is out of focus.

[Stone-D]

Surprisingly, in the end I had some success: by changing offset 0052BF03 (gog 1.51 version) from 41 to 00 , I have enabled myself to recruit past 256 in game

Good find. How has your experience been thus far? Any issues after doing this?

[nordlys]

Surprisingly, in the end I had some success: by changing offset 0052BF03 (gog 1.51 version) from 41 to 00 , I have enabled myself to recruit past 256 in game

Good find. How has your experience been thus far? Any issues after doing this?

Over 700 characters at this point, no noticeable issues. Of course, having all of them at the same place with lanterns on at night may stress your hardware.

For new version 1.55JP (gog), the offset to edit 41>00 is 005310A3.

[philthymcnasty]

I have found lately that with the massive battles in lost in the ashlands that the game is unstable, especially when combined with UWE. Currently we are in day 25 of the 20 day war for hub. What started off as "oh look how big our britches are" holy nation outlaws, turned into a slaughter, with hub becoming a HN city, and the shek and UC fighting to kick them out.

So in hindsight, i can see why the squad size was capped down. There is some heavy performance issues and stability when you have multiple battles across the map in real time.