u/xKiwiNova

A recurring topic in Kenshi is starvation. Although there are some regions which seem to be reasonably agriculturally productive like Okran’s Pride and (formerly Bast), the moon of Kenshi as a whole is suffering from serious food insecurity. The Tech Hunters speculate that extreme food scarcity in the Northern regions was a major contributing factor in the rise of the cannibal tribes. 

>[The Cannibal's] degeneration could be put down to toxic environmental factors which they were unable to adapt to; damaging substances from their very own labs; induced madness from experiments gone wrong; or simply being reduced to cannibalism due to severe famine.

Anthropologists recognize a distinction between survival cannibalism - cannibalism that appears during periods of famine when people go desperate, and institutional cannibalism - cannibalism as an integrated part of a culture. In general, integrated cannibalism does not emerge as a result of long term food scarcity.

Put simply, eating a human provides a minuscule fraction of the energy and nutrients needed to make that human. As a long term strategy it is arguably one of the most inefficient ones possible.

In the short term, consuming other humans acts as a way to exploit an otherwise inaccessible store of energy (in the form of the body mass of another person); however, morality aside, this process is inefficient. It requires there to have been a prior long-term source of food needed to build that reserve, and your only getting a tiny amount of bang for your (their) buck.

So, cannibalism isn't a particularly smart feeding strategy...

>“but u/xKiwiNova!”

you say,

>“The Painted Tribes seem to have suffered massive cognitive decline due to pollutants, radiation, and genetic experimentation from the ancient laboratories. Most of them look like they’d get an F on a DNA test. They're probably not even be sapient, much less smart enough to understand long term sustainable feeding strategies!"

The problem is, in Kenshi, the cannibal tribes are said to be one of the oldest factions in the game. The Tech Hunters speculate they may even predate the fall of the First Empire, and they certainly existed by the second as we know Cat-Lon launched numerous campaigns against them. They don't farm, hunt, or fish, and cannibalism cannot be a long term subsistence pattern for even a few years, much less several millennia.

As stated previously, the moon of Kenshi does not have a great caloric abundance. For cannibalism to work, it would require the mass of capturable non-cannibal humans in cannibal territory to outnumber cannibals by a massive margin; however, cannibals are currently among the most populous groups in-game, and I don't think Deadcat refugees, UC peasants, escaped slaves, and shrieking bandits are present in sufficient numbers to sustain them.

In fact, we are told that outside of their namesake inhabitants, the Cannibal plains are sparsely inhabited:

>The cannibals have a savage nature and are known to frequently fight amongst themselves and feed on one another, particularly given the severe lack of victims outside their tribes since the area is mainly avoided by most rational thinking individuals.

Unless these cannibals can break the second law of thermodynamics or I'm overanalyzing the subsistence patterns of a fictional tribe from a video game about post-apocalyptic space ninjas and senile robots, something isn't adding up. I assume of course that Kenshi II will go into great detail concerning cannibal society and how they get their caloric surplus.

I can't wait for my grandchildren to find out.

I feel like exploring with my entire squad, but I don't want everyone to take my stuff.

Is it actually safe to explore like the loading screen hint says, or is that a lie to trick players?