KenshiFP — First-Person Mode for Kenshi

Play Kenshi in true first person: the camera is welded to your character's head, and the RTS click-to-move scheme is replaced with WASD + mouse-look. Built as a native code plugin — no game files are modified.

Showcase

Click to watch the mod in action.

Current release: v0.4.1.

Two editions cover every Kenshi build:

• Standalone — for standard Steam. Ships address tables for both 1.0.68 and 1.0.65 and auto-detects the build at load; on an unrecognized build it disables itself cleanly (logged). Windows or Linux/Proton.
• RE_Kenshi Edition — runs as an RE_Kenshi plugin and resolves its hooks by runtime signature scan, so it works on every build RE_Kenshi supports — GOG and old versions included. Feature-identical to the standalone.

Features

• In-game settings panel — press F10 for a live settings window: sliders for FOV, sensitivity, and camera feel, plus checkboxes for every feature toggle, all applied instantly. A "Reset to Defaults" button, close via the X / Escape / F10. No more editing files by hand (the .ini still works and stays in sync).
• True first-person camera — attached to the head bone; tracks animations and ragdolls, roll-free, with FOV and near-clip tuned for FP. The camera leads your movement and scales with game speed, so it keeps up at 2x/5x.
• Engine-native WASD movement — drives the game's own direction-based locomotion: reliable inside buildings, on ramps and platforms, real walk/jog/run gaits. WASD overrides move orders, works with UI panels open (inventory/squad/jobs), and gets you up from playing dead, beds, or sitting.
• Works in combat — WASD wins the fight's locomotion race, so retreat, strafe, and kite work even while locked onto a target.
• Character switching — first person follows your selected squad member; camera-lock another character and FP swaps to them.
• Aim-lean — with a weapon drawn, your character physically bends through the spine as you look up/down (procedural spine IK).
• Ranged free-aim in combat — the aim pose tracks your crosshair, bolts fly where you aim (vanilla accuracy spread kept), and lock-on no longer overrides your look.
• Ragdoll camera — knocked out, the camera tumbles with your head (roll/pitch/yaw) and recovers on get-up.
• Mouse-look via DirectInput — raw-quality hardware deltas that coexist with the game's own input (no stolen registrations, no cursor-warp lag).
• Scroll wheel speed control — from a slow walk to a full run.
• Turn in place — your character's body follows the camera while idle.
• Colored crosshair — replaces the arrow cursor; turns red over hostiles and yellow over allies; the game's tool cursors (talk, doors, loot) still appear when relevant.
• Smart cursor release — the mouse frees automatically for dialogue, inventory, trade/looting, stats, map/factions, options, save/load, message boxes, and the right-click context menu; recaptures on close.
• Building interiors preload as you approach from outside — no more empty doorways.
• Foliage fix — grass no longer vanishes underfoot in first person.
• Unconsciousness blackout — knocked out, the screen fades to black through a closing tunnel; on coming to, vision returns with a gradual wake-up fade while the camera untumbles.
• Live-tunable settings — via the F10 panel (above) or by editing KenshiFP.ini, which is hot-reloaded in-game (edit and save, changes apply within a second). Toggles (aim-lean, ranged free-aim, wheel speed, KO blackout), camera/feel tuning (fov, near_clip, sensitivity, eye_forward, move_forward, move_speed_ref, aim_lean_amount), key rebinds (FP toggle, WASD, settings key), and an FPS cap (fps_cap=N — precise frame limiting without vsync).
• Framerate-independent mouse — look input captured at ~1kHz on a dedicated thread; identical feel at any fps.

Controls

Input	Action
Right Alt	Toggle first-person on/off for the selected character
Mouse	Look
W A S D	Move (camera-relative)
Scroll wheel	Movement speed (walk ↔ run)
F10	Open/close the settings panel
Everything else	Vanilla Kenshi bindings

All keys are rebindable in KenshiFP.ini.

Installation

Standalone edition (standard Steam):

1. Download the standalone release zip.
2. Copy KenshiFP_x64.dll and the kenshifp/ folder into your Kenshi install directory (next to kenshi_x64.exe).
3. Open Plugins_x64.cfg in the same directory and add this line at the end of the plugin list:

   Plugin=KenshiFP_x64
   

4. Launch the game, select a character, press Right Alt.

RE_Kenshi edition (GOG / old builds / anyone using RE_Kenshi):

1. Download the RE_Kenshi edition zip.
2. Copy the KenshiFP folder into your Kenshi mods/ folder.
3. Enable KenshiFP in the in-game mod list. (Requires RE_Kenshi.) Do not also add the Plugin= line — that's the standalone only.

To uninstall the standalone, remove that line (and optionally the files); for the RE_Kenshi edition, disable it in the mod list.

A log (KenshiFP.log) is written next to the game exe — include it in any bug report.

Compatibility

• RE_Kenshi: the standalone edition runs with or without it (RE_Kenshi downgrades installs to 1.0.65; KenshiFP auto-detects and adapts). On GOG or any other build, use the RE_Kenshi edition, which resolves its hooks by runtime signature scan and works on every build RE_Kenshi supports.
• Coexists fine with other mods that don't replace the game executable.

Known limitations

• The settings panel opens in-game, not on the main menu.
• Backpedaling (S) turns the character around rather than walking backward facing the camera (the engine's physics drives orientation during movement; a facing-locked backpedal is future work).
• Grass billboards shimmer when rotating the view — an engine impostor artifact that eye-level viewing makes more visible.

Building from source

Cross-compiles from Linux (or MSYS2) with mingw-w64 — no Windows SDK needed. Both editions build from the same client/kenshifp_client.c:

cd client && ./build.sh          # standalone -> KenshiFP_x64.dll
cd re_plugin && ./build.sh       # RE_Kenshi edition -> KenshiFP.dll

The RE_Kenshi edition is the same client compiled with -DKFP_RE_PLUGIN, so it resolves game addresses by runtime signature scan instead of the hard-coded per-version tables. Requires x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc with libdinput8/libdxguid (mingw-w64 ships both). MinHook (BSD-2-Clause) is vendored under third_party/minhook/.

How it works

The DLL loads through Ogre's plugin path and detours the game's per-frame update plus the camera update with MinHook. All game structures and functions were located by reverse engineering the 1.0.68 binary with headless Ghidra — the offset map and methodology live in re/NOTES.md and DESIGN.md. Risky calls into game code run inside a vectored-exception guard, so a bad pointer degrades a feature (with a log line) instead of crashing the game.

Field-layout documentation from the KenshiLib headers was used as a reference map during reverse engineering (function addresses there are stale for 1.0.68; every address this mod calls was re-derived and verified against the live binary).

License

GPL-3.0 (see LICENSE). Vendored MinHook is BSD-2-Clause (see third_party/minhook/LICENSE.txt).