Modder Au has released Squad Autonomy on Steam Workshop, turning your squads into something closer to NPCs. They can guard gates, work on farms and travel between towns on their own. The mod attracted 2,040 subscribers in half a month! You'll find all my coverage of the game in the Kenshi section.
What Squad Autonomy does, and how it works
Previously, Kenshi squads stood around until you gave them orders. Now you can use the AUT button on the main panel or in the squad menu to assign the same AI packages used by NPCs. Set a home and a work building, and the squad will alternate between working, sleeping and training on its own.
That lets you play one character while the others get on with their lives. The mod requires RE_Kenshi version 0.3.5 or newer.
- The “Labour at home” package sends the squad to farms and mines; combined with the job system (Shift + right-click), workers will operate workstations.
- “Guard gate” posts the squad at a gate, but you need to assign that gate as the work building first, or the leader's AI may misbehave. Reloading the save usually fixes it.
- “Guard town” enables town patrols, while the “Man Turrets” checkbox assigns fighters to turrets.
- Set “Wandering from town to town” to a priority above zero and “Hang out in town” to a lower priority to send the squad travelling and relaxing in bars. It's best not to assign buildings to these squads.
- The new Solo Squad package gives everyone except the leader autonomy, if you want to play a single hero.
- You can add custom packages through FCS: just append <SquadAutonomy> to the package name.
🔥 What this means for players: the main benefit is escaping the endless micromanagement. Your outpost finally gets on with life: guards make their rounds, workers do their jobs, and injured fighters rest when nothing more urgent needs doing. The creator confirmed this in the Reddit comments.
The mod still isn't perfect. One player says it works very well for base defence, but job allocation needs more work. The creator openly lists bugs too: travelling squads lose their routes, and leaders sometimes stop for no reason.
How the mod has developed, and what still needs fixing
The mod appeared on Workshop on 13 September, and its latest update at the time of the original news article was 29 September, bringing the total to 19 updates. The creator responds quickly to reports: a recent fix restored the AUT button on older saves. Another bug remains, though: switching squads with keyboard shortcuts doesn't switch the autonomy window.
The code is available on GitHub under GPLv3. When Reddit users asked whether AI had written the mod, Au replied that 99% of the code was not generated by a neural network, and that he drew the cover himself in Clip Studio Paint. A different way to give a long campaign a sense of continuity is Children of Kenshi's gradual character growth. That is a separate mod, so check compatibility before combining them.
What will the creator add to Squad Autonomy next?
Au's plans include presets for quickly configuring squads and automatically opening and closing town gates. He also wants to add automatic trading with merchants and the ability to build bars in your outpost. He's considering slave support, possibly as a separate mod.
These are still just plans, with no dates announced. I'll keep following the updates and covering the most notable ones in the modding news section.
