Where to buy Crab Armour Recipes - Kenshi

Crab Armour is some of the best Heavy Armor that you can get in Kenshi offering some of the most coverage and protection that you can get on a single piece of armor. How it works is the Crab Helmet and Crab Armour are best in slot but the legs and the boots are not. Samurai Legplates and Wooden Sandals (or Samurai Boots) are the best items you can get for legs and feet. For a complete run down about what is best and why check out my Kenshi Best Equipment Guide.

This page is going to talk about how and where to get Crab Armour. For starters, Crab Armour is only worn by the Crab Raiders faction which is native to the southeastern portion of the map. You can loot the armor off the Crab Raiders who wear it but you'll rarely ever get anything better than [Standard] quality which is probably not what you want.

In order to reliably get [Masterwork] and [Specialist] Crab Armour you'll need to obtain the Crab Armour recipes and make your own. These recipes are found exclusively at the armor shop in Crab Town which is the Crab Raider's capital city found in The Pits East. You have 2 ways of obtaining these recipes, through force or by joining the Crab Raiders and buying them. A map location of where Crab Town is can be found below.

Joining the Crab Raiders is much easier than you probably think. All you have to do is run into Crab Town and speak with the Crab Queen who is found inside of the largest building; a picture of her is shown below. Go through some dialogue with her and tell her you want to join and.... that's it. You'll get -75 Reputation with the Reavers and Skin Bandits and +75 with the Crab Raiders.

Before you come to this location I strongly recommend you have high Athletics with a character that can run over 26mph and Toughness in the 30s at minimum. There are a lot of enemies in the zones that you have to run through to get here with stats in the 40s - 60s and you should have a character capable of taking a few hits. Over all I would say that it is probably safer to come here on a single character; unless you have an entire team of characters who have stats in the 40s - 60s. Then you may stand a chance of making it through the endless onslaughts of Reavers that you'll come across.

Once you've joined up with the Crab Raiders you'll be able to purchase the Crab Armour recipes from the Crab Smithy in this town. He sells every available blueprint/diagram whatever you want to call it for Crab Armour. If you don't want to join up with the Crab Raiders then your only alternative for getting this armor is to kill this NPC and loot his shop.

Aside from the Crab Armour recipes there are 2 more unique things you can do in this town. There is a Crab Shop which you can visit that will sell you Crabs as a unit that you can control, kind of similar to pack animals, bonedogs and goats. Despite what you may think the Crabs in this game are pretty underwhelming, much like most of the other animals.

The last thing of note in Crab Town is the unique recruit Lumi who you can find in the Bar.