Dust - A Kenshi Rendering Framework

Dust - Graphics Enhancement for Kenshi

Dust modernizes Kenshi's visuals with global illumination, ambient occlusion, improved shadows, color grading, depth of field, bloom, and more. The goal is to make the game look better while staying true to its original art style.

Everything is tweakable in-game with an F11 settings menu, so you can adjust things to your taste or turn off what you don't like.

Under the hood, Dust works differently from ReShade or other injectors. It hooks directly into the game's rendering pipeline, which means effects like SSAO can work with the actual lighting system instead of being applied on top after the fact. This avoids common issues like fog bleed and UI getting affected.

The mod is also built as a plugin framework. Effects are separate DLLs, so anyone can make and share their own.

Requirements

• RE_Kenshi

What it does

Lighting & shadows

• Global Illumination (RTGI) - Screen-space ray-traced indirect light bounces and ambient occlusion, multi-bounce, temporally denoised. Very expensive - for high-end GPUs.

• Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) - Contact shadows in corners and crevices, integrated with the game's lighting and day/night aware.

• Indirect Lighting (SSIL) - A cheaper single bounce of colored indirect light from nearby surfaces.

• Improved Shadows - Improved shadows resolution, range, and control over their parameters.

Image & post-processing

• Color Grading - Full HDR pipeline, selectable tonemapper (ACES, Reinhard, AgX, Khronos PBR Neutral...), lift/gamma/gain and split toning.

• Depth of Field - Auto-focus camera blur with independent near/far control.

• Bloom - Physically-based HDR glow, extracted before tonemapping.

• Clarity - Local contrast that brings out fine detail without changing overall brightness.

• Outline - Depth and normal edge detection with configurable thickness and color.

• Kuwahara - Anisotropic painterly filter for a hand-painted look.

• SMAA - Subpixel morphological anti-aliasing (luma, depth or combined).

• Deband - Removes 8-bit color banding in skies and gradients, with optional sky-only mode.

• Chromatic Aberration / Vignette / Film Grain / Letterbox - Lens and cinematic finishing touches.

Features

• In-game settings (F11): Tweak every effect in real-time with sliders, save your settings, reset anytime

• Preset system: Quick-switch between Low, Medium, High, and Ultra presets (plus cinematic and stylized variants), share custom presets within the community

• DLSS / FSR upscaling & DLAA: Vendor-selectable temporal super-resolution and anti-aliasing with real motion vectors; backend auto-filtered by your GPU

• Performance overlay: See exactly how much GPU time each effect costs

• Hot-reloadable configs: Edit .ini files while the game is running

• Plugin system: Effects are separate DLLs, anyone can create and share new ones

In-Game Settings

Press F11 to open the settings overlay. From there you can adjust every effect, see performance stats, save your configuration, or reset to defaults. Double-click any slider to type in an exact value.

Compatibility

The mod should be compatible with any other mod, except specific mods that hook directly into the render pipeline of the game, or mods that modify the render pipeline directly (ReShade REST addon seems to be causing issues). The mod currently does not officialy support Proton/Wine for now. It seems to work for a lot of users, but it depends on the version.

A startup notification appears for 30 seconds indicating the mod is active and which key toggles the GUI. This can be disabled in the framework settings.

How it works

Dust is not a ReShade preset or a post-process overlay. It hooks into Kenshi's D3D11 deferred rendering pipeline and injects effects at specific points in the render pass (after GBuffer, after lighting, after tonemapping, etc). This means effects have access to the actual depth buffer, HDR scene data, and lighting state before the game flattens everything to the final image.

For example, SSAO is injected into the deferred lighting pass so it affects both ambient and direct light. Color grading captures the HDR render target before the game's tonemapper runs, applies its own ACES tonemapping, and writes the result back. This would not be possible with a generic post-process injector.

Effects are loaded as plugin DLLs via a stable C API. The framework handles shader compilation, state management, constant buffers, GPU timing, config I/O, and the settings GUI. A new effect only needs to fill out a descriptor struct and provide a pixel shader.

Credits

• BFrizzleFoShizzle - RE_Kenshi (plugin loader) and KenshiLib (game structure library)

• disi30 - ShaderSSAO, the original Kenshi SSAO mod that inspired this project

• Bob - Native Stylise, also an inspiration

• Dear ImGui - In-game GUI library

• Atlas - Made the video that gave me the idea of this mod

• NVIDIA - DLSS (NVIDIA DLSS is a trademark of NVIDIA Corporation)

• AMD - FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR)

Source Code

github.com/Bazouz660/Dust

Discord Server

https://discord.gg/3fd3c7EFvT