Armor Crafting Redux – Core
Tired of digging through endless tiny blueprint icons just to craft a single armor piece? Hate seeing your workbench clogged with half a dozen mods you didn’t even know you had? Armor Crafting Redux puts an end to the chaos—organize, unlock, and craft your armor without ever losing your sanity (or your scroll wheel).
🛡️ Overview 🛡️
Crafting Redux Series is a modular overhaul of Kenshi’s armor and weapon crafting system. Its goal is to reduce blueprint clutter, organize armor and armour mods, and make crafting more intuitive—while preserving immersion and compatibility.
All core and expansion modules are conveniently available in one Steam Workshop Collection:
🔗: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3586168016
🏆 Advantages 🏆
• Fully modular: Want everything in one place? The original benches remain intact. Want focus? Just use the Redux benches.
• User experience: Scrolling through 50+ recipes is now manageable. Recipes are alphabetically ordered, so finding exactly what you want is effortless.
• Dedicated Menu: All Redux benches and research appear under new categories, keeping them neatly separated from vanilla content.
• Reduce bloat: Multiple armor mods clutter the vanilla crafting system. Redux organizes everything by bench and research node.
• Improve accessibility: No more hunting tiny blueprint icons in shops or wondering if you’ve already purchased them. Unlock everything through research.
• Easy to Recognize: Each Redux bench is easy to identify: they use the Plate Beating Station as a base, topped with a signature headpiece that reflects its craft—like a Crab Helmet for Plate armor or a Tricorn Hat for Leather. You’ll know exactly which station is which at a glance.
⚙️ How It Works ⚙️
• Research-Driven Unlocks: Instead of purchasing individual blueprints, unlock armor types via research nodes.
• Core Node: The "Armor Crafting" researches must be completed first. There are four: Cloth, Leather, Plate, and Chain. Each serves as your foundation, unlocking its respective bench and opening up the individual armor tree.
How It Feels: Very similar to vanilla. Cloth is cheap and early, Plate feels like a true investment, and the Advanced tier ensures that true mastery still demands rare artifacts. Research progression stays meaningful while blueprint shopping no longer bottlenecks your crafting.
📔 Holy Nation Bonus! 📔
Bucket Zukins now unlock at Tech Level 3 and can be crafted at the Plate bench—though they still appear at the Chain bench too. This is partly because the Holy Nation never gets access to Tech 4 (no Ancient Science Books, sorry Okran), and partly because, well… half of that helmet is basically plate anyway.
Think of it as a special treat for all you Okran fanboys out there.
⚖ Why This Works ⚖
• Immersion: Ancient research is still important—you need artifacts to unlock the system itself. After that, crafting knowledge is "commonplace," requiring only Books.
• Balance: Shops no longer restrict progression, but Books still cost cats, so instant unlocks aren’t possible.
• Player Agency: Specialize your crafting. Ignore Leather if light armor isn’t your thing, or rush Chain if Zukins are your obsession.
🚩 Compatibility 🚩
• Core is fully compatible with everything: all new entries, zero conflicts, load in any order.
• Expansion modules must be loaded after Core.
• I highly recommend installing the Research patch so that you do not have to pay for both Vanilla and Redux unlocks:
🔗: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3585385588
🧩 Developer’s Note 🧩
Across all its modules, Crafting Redux adds a lot of new content — this is just from the Core modules:
• Weapon Smithing: 9 Weapon Grades, 32 Weapon Types
• Armor Crafting: 4 Benches, 129 Armors
That’s 174 new entries between the two Cores alone. I’ve done my best to make sure every recipe works perfectly, but if you spot something missing or broken, please let me know in the comments — I’ll patch it up as soon as I can. 👍
🧠 An Afterthought: Why Blueprints Feel Bad 🧠
• Microscopic UI: Tiny icons, easy to miss in shop inventories.
• No progress overview: You can’t see all your known blueprints in one place.
• Scaling issue: Even vanilla with 50+ armors, blueprint hunting becomes overwhelming clutter instead of fun scavenging. If you mod Kenshi, forget it…
If you enjoy my mod, feel free to hit that 👍
Positive ratings let me know I’m doing a good job! 😊
I appreciate all feedback, so please leave a comment! I read every single one of them!
I’m also working on updating all my old mods, so I’d love it if you checked them out. They’re featured on my workshop page:
https://steamcommunity.com/id/2PercentNate/myworkshopfiles/?appid=233860
Permissions & Use
Feel free to translate, edit, chop up, deep fry, or otherwise modify my mods to your heart’s content. All of my mods are freely distributed. If you end up editing one, I’d really appreciate receiving credit with a link to the original mod. It’s not required, but it would make my day! 😊
[File: 2PN8CraftingReduxVanilla.mod | ID: 3585383286]
