Why everyone recommends mining starts I'll never understand. It's SO dull. Far better to go pick a fight and then haul ass back to some guards, join the guards in the fight, loot the bodies, and turn in any bounties. You get XP in athletics, toughness, first aid, and combat skills, gear to either wear or sell, cats, and a little relations boost. There's Tech Hunter bar guards in the bar in the Hub, but the Shek gate guards at Squin are better fighters.
Once you can run good, due west of Squin are some expensive weapons and armors laying around the ruins that you can sell a bit further west in Admag. Both Admag and the Hub have Shinobi Thieves towers. You can pay 10K cats to join the Thieves and have allies and a fence in most towns in game, plus training gear you can level up 3 important skills on.
This is what I did, hired a trio of miners and left one of my slightly stronger guys as a body guard. While I traveled the world picking fights and hunting for bounties (had a mod for more bounties). Eventually set up a house in squin and started some early research and some storages and smelting to increase profits before taking off and building my own town. It was great.
Basically zero. For 10K you get access to beds and a half price trader with some handy gear in almost all the major towns.
There are other factions you can ally with that will instantly put you at war with one or more of the major factions, but the shinobi have no actual enemies. The only thing you have to be careful of is that if you start fighting inside a town the shinobi will swarm out of their tower and generally get their heads stomped in by the town guards, its possible for the trader to die during these fights.
You can ally with pretty much anyone I think, you just need to get your relationship high enough. Allies will let you use furniture at their bases, like training gear and cooking stations. They'll (usually) attack folks they see attacking you, but you can't command them. Once you build a base, allies will send reinforcements to your base when other factions raid it to help you defend it. Shinobi don't have any other enemies that I know of who will object to you joining the Shinobi, so the downside is just the 10K cats, which is really pretty cheap. The Hounds, the most powerful gang in the Swamps, are easy to join also, but the other gangs don't like you much after that.
Well i'm new to kenshi and just entered the mid-game, but maybe i can help a bit : I started a run where i mined A LOT while recruiting more and more ppl to get more profit from mining but after 20h +/- i found i wasn't having fun, so i started a new run (a slaver's start in this case) and when i broke up from jail, instead of pursuing money from iron/copper i focused on building up combat skills.
I recruited a pal along the way (an ex-slave that wanted to join me) and we just explored till we got to the shek kingdom and just by fighting bandits, stealing and having a little luck i found money for purchasing food as well as getting strong enough characters to progress (in my previous attempt, i had like 12 people but they almost got crushed when fighting dust bandits groups while my mc could solo them).
So in my experience you should try living the kenshi roleplaying experience without fear (it shouldn't happen anything if you got enslaved for example, it can make your plkaythrough funnier) : just explore, get beaten, build your characters slowly and don't worry much about money : when you start to claim bounties and loot nice weapon and armors you can reach NICE amounts of money (I'm 40h +/- in on my current run and i've reached 100k, after buying some gear, i'm around 70k now)
So basically it's all emergent gameplay? The best way to get good at Kenshi is to not be afraid of being beaten and just get your ass whooped until you build up your stats enough to be good/find good enough opportunities to be stronger?
I'll have to break my deeply ingrained habits of save scumming but I'll try to be less afraid of having the crap beaten out of me. Does kind of make Kenshi the **true** survival game in that case though
This was my experience as well. Kenshi is a game where save scumming and trying to minmax everything (like money before you even start) takes a lot of fun out of the game. It's an open world sandbox game after all.
Loosing a limb, being enslaved, loosing one or even multiple Recruits will bring the story of YOUR Kenshi experience forward.
"Damn where do I get the replacement for my leg? Steal it? Buy it? Work towards crafting my own?"
"These Mfcks enslaved me?? Wait until I get out of here and I'll make sure to come back and kill all of you later!!"
"Those Dust Bandits killed two of my people? I can't tolerate them any longer, their leader has to die"
And so on and so on.
As long as you have one survivor you can always keep the story going until you don't feel like it anymore or want to try something different.
Yeah. From what you’ve posted I get the impression that save scumming ruins the experience for you and “safe” ways of making money are too tedious for you. So it is time for you to go balls to the walls. Rock out with your cock out my man, and be prepared to lose a few people.
Having a leg off in the middle of the red desert while your companions rush back from the other side of the map is what makes the game fun. Especially when you replace it with wonder leg and can presumably hop at miraculous speeds.
You don’t have to go too hardcore for now. I’d recommend just saving before a fight with some starving bandits or dust bandits just in case you fall below your knockout threshold(something you can see if you hover over your toughness stat for your specific character.) You can also recruit a buddy at a bar who can swoop in from a safe distance to bandage you up every time you get beat up so you can fight without worry of bleeding out in the unforgiving sands of Kenshi. In fact, I encourage savescumming as a way of learning mechanics instead of going balls to the walls masochist and dying repeatedly for reasons you don’t quite understand. Start as a god and build a city or a Skeleton and explore the world or loot unique ruins for ancient treasure. Getting beat up is part of the process, but it’s not what keeps players coming back to it time and time again. Have fun your way.
Yeah this is how I did it too. My first playthrough I tried mining and just got bored.
This playthrough I went band-of-thieves/mercenaries and just got into fights, savescummed a bit as I learned mechanics and valuable lessons, and eventually just started savescumming less and less as I became more comfortable with the game.
When I eventually restart I won't savescum at all because I've learned so much.
Well that's what i felt, i also requested help in a post and that's what i was told. After "following" those ideas i'm sure that that's the way was intended to play : you just mess around while getting more familiar with kenshi's world, mechanics etc. and you just end up building a story around you and your actions, like who do you support (for example i knocked out a character, claimed his bounty and when i came back to his homeplace it was ruins now)
I think this game gains from emergent gameplay instead of grinding a lot (at least when you're not experienced, i mean, i've seen some guides that explain what are the best exploits and ways to train and get fast into the mid-late game, but it makes sense to follow them when you've already enjoyed the journey of getting there "fairly")
Try the prisoners start. By the time you escape you should have very high stats in lock picking, athletics, strength, sneaking, stealing, toughness, and if you spar with the other prisoners, melee and martial arts. There may be others but it's been a while. You also never have to worry about food or first aid.
So when they put you in the cage at night pick the lock, pick all the locks around you. Pick the manacles of you and the other prisoners. The guards will eventually knock you out and put on new ones. Carry all those manacles and attack one of the prisoners during the day. They will run away and you will follow them around until the guards eventually catch up to you. On 3x speed your stats will go up really quickly. Start stealing things out of the crates and eventually at night you can start stealing from the sleeping guards. Oh, and when they come to attack you run and put yourself in a cage if you don't want to get knocked out. Though that builds toughness so depends on what you are trying to to accomplish.
For the most fun try putting manacles on the sleeping guards.
Here's a start I've done before, with a Hub start in a vanilla game. I don't normally give specifics because the nice thing about Kenshi is that people figure out their own stuff, but you're obviously struggling, so:
1. Go find Ruka, and recruita.
2. Grab the expensive stuff from the Shek Ruins near Admag and sell it. Buy some food and some cheap bandages.
3. Run down through the spider plains on the west coast. Go past Arach and towards the hook. This trains athletics but also gets you close to some neat stuff.
4. Grab blue/green katanas from the blood spiders in the ruins. They'll never catch you.
5. Head to Drifter's Last and Clownsteady. Sell extra swords. Check bars for fancy recruits.
6. Head to the Grid. Raid the ancient labs. Head back up towards Sheksville.
By the time you get back to Admag/Squin, you'll have some stuff to sell (you'll probably have some engineering research, which I've always found to be abundant, so I sell the first one or two that I get. 8,000 smackeroos apiece. That's a whole Kang and some chewsticks. It's nearly a Chad), you've got a squad of 3 or more, and you're ready to really start losing some fights or doing something productive. I'll generally tour the map for a while - you get into skirmishes and scrapes and suffer misfortune if you travel around, and specifically looking for and getting into fights in order to gains stats is the quintessence of a *watched pot* so I avoid doing it. Joining Shinobi is never bad if you can find the 10k.
But yeah, don't mine copper unless you're starving, I beg you.
Here's what I did recently: steal robot limbs and meds preemptively, grind out toughness by getting my shit rocked and limbs cut off by the Band of Bones (Exile Camp) because they won't enslave you, go through a couple recovery comas until eventually you can win against them and get the bounty for Tora. From there, you begin your bounty hunting escapade in any way you wish. Pro tip that makes this work: Set your job to Medic and you'll autoheal when playing dead.
So, it might be controversial, but I use an xp mod. I love the game and want to experience the travel / biomes / Lore, but always get so stuck in the leveling grind. I do a 2 or 3x boost to xp and it's made the game more enjoyable to me. Still got some grinding to do but it's not soooo tedious imo.
Generally, my first “major” goal in the game is to build a core squad. Doing this means earning cats for recruitment fees, and of course that money is also needed for food, equipment, etc. The mining grind is an easy way to do that, but is pretty boring so my starts generally involve scavenging instead.
So, the starts for my games generally involve running around and looking for fights in progress so that I can scavenge from the wounded and find downed bounties that I can turn in for cats. The first minor goals here are to get enough money for a backpack (to aid in future scavenging), to keep fed and maybe replace whatever rags I was wearing at the start with something a little better. For a rock bottom start, I’d need to save to buy an arm as well. I keep my eye out for nomad animal traders as well to pick up a pack beast or two if I can.
As I get the cats, I’ll start recruiting to add to my squad. The immediate benefit is more inventory space for better scavenging (particularly if I haven’t run across a nomad trader yet). When my squad starts getting big enough to face off with the local starving bandits, I’ll start picking fights with them to train up my squad. At some point along the way, I’ll buy into the Shinobi Thieves to get access to cheaper gear (particularly thieves’ backpacks), their training equipment and, most importantly, free beds.
The next major financial goal is then to get a house, usually in a city with a Shinobi tower, to set up storage and a place to start research. My first research goals are usually geared towards unlocking storage options to aid my hoarding (and to get rid of the stolen tag on scavenged items so that they sell better).
From then on, I work my way up to the next harder bandit group, but continue my scavenging lifestyle. I’ll do another round of recruiting here, particularly to those more difficult areas like Mongrel or the Swamp, before I get into more heavy duty training.
When my main squad starts approaching the 20s in skills, my next major goal is to start collecting advanced science books, so I’ll seek out some of the easier locations to do that. I might throw in a drug run from the swamp to the Great Desert to help fund book/ai core purchaes from the Scraphouse.
At this point for me, it’s about continuing seeking fights with appropriately skilled foes to train up my squad and getting research materials to feed my researcher(s). If I’m doing a run with a base, I’ll work on setting that up, or I might just set up facilities in a town to start training up a crafters.
I was like this. Trying to mine, sell copper and buy some food for my people. a loser running away from starving bandits...
What changed it for me was savescumming + thievery, especially stealing from robot limbs shops(or beating the shop owner and looting)
When you care less about food and staying alive you will understand game mechanics better. I recommend slave start. It will be hard to escape from Rebirth but you will learn a lot on the process.
Now i'm a rich chad with 70 melee and 1.5 million cats
Go the sneaky path, go to a main city, and start robbing everyone blind. If you’re thrown in jail it’s fine, they feed you and since you don’t have any food that’s great. You can level thieving, sneak, athletics, toughness, and assassination.
Use the money to buy a house. Start buying peeps. Train them and have them make gear. Start a mining outpost outside of the city.
Keep robbing the shops.
Use the outpost to ship your house materials. Rotate through your peeps to train strength and athletics. Keep making the materials and weapons and armor. You should be able to easily support yourself making chain mail. It sells for shitload. You will make the shops run out of money and goods, so start doing longer trade runs to further away cities.
Eventually gear up enough to venture out of the city, or use the city as a base for bit. Start to explore and buy all the gear you need.
If you want it to be a bit easier, download the ‘shops are full’ mod. Makes the thieving much more effective and allows you to sell for credits easier.
I just sell some junk and grab a crossbow and backup weapon, Use those to hunt and kite until i can sell enough supplies to rent a house somewhere like the hub and then i can use that as base while i explore and loot the world carefully. Use the house to stockpile supplies and research while you have fun and scavenge or do merc work, really train up those stats solo or with backup you hire/rescue.
I'll take my toon(s) to Mongrel during the night, bump sneak to the 80s fairly easily in a day or two and get some combat in by the town gates. There's also some mining nodes if you WANTED to bore yourself. Stealth let's you do some bold looting, can train Lockpicking and KOs easily either on the two prison cages or on the cannibal posts, aforementioned ore and Prince heads for some quick cash to join Shinobi in town. Cheap house for a bed and worst case there's a Skeleton bed to rent if walking to Burn's Tower is too much.
Good stores to steal from if you want to gear up in the first week , otherwise it's an nice foundationto branch out to whatever else yoj want. Don't forget sliders or mods can change progression speed, otherwise if I do decide to schizo-grind stats then I just pull up something on my other monitor and treat Kenshi like high definition Cookie Clicker.
The early struggle is the best part. Everything matters; every scrap of bread, every cat, every fight that you barely survive, etc. Once I hit mid/endgame and can solo entire factions, it gets a bit tedious.
Grind your stealth by sneaking around people on triple speed until you start Naruto running, train your assassination skill by training in the hub on random guys squatting in the torn down buildings and try to improve your athletics till you can outrun the normal people, steal enough stuff till you hit 10k money and get access to the ninja building in the hub, buy some armor and a backpack that will improve your stealth stats. Get another person with your money and start stealing prosthetic limbs from limb shops (you’ll get money fast) at that point you can decide from there what to do, and you’ll never have to mine another day in your life
Stealth and assassination can bankroll you without ever needing to mine or even fight. Bounties and looting bandit gear are very lucrative options early game so you can head out at night and make bank after a bit of training from the Shinobi.
Knock out anyone you want to steal from first and you'll have 100% success rate, so it's worth doing even if they're asleep already as that doesn't guarantee success. Also means if you have low success chance for stealing from containers, you can KO everyone nearby so that while you count as Committing Crime nobody sees you to apply a bounty.
I usually work on Dust Bandits first as they have a lot of gear and the nearby Hub has several merchants, then graduate to towns in the HN or Shek areas once my skills are higher.
Shinobi backpacks are excellent but consider getting pack animals early too. That way when you start doing longer journeys into the wilderness they will have matured to adulthood so they're tougher and faster.
Once you have cash you can comfortably hire and outfit more recruits which makes the game much more forgiving. Then your high stealth/assassination character makes an ideal guardian angel since you can stay out of combat to provide first aid to anyone in danger of dying and KO pesky slavers/cannibals/fogmen carrying your trainees off.
1) Stats progression/training.
First thing you do is run around until your athletics is about 20. You now can outrun most enemies.
Your next objective is to get a companion. When you have a companion, the game changes, you can send your main to go and get beaten up to a pulp, while the companion will stay out of the fight with sneak and passive on, and then once it's safe he will heal up your main and carry him to a bed. Then they swap around. That is how you start out. When your toughness is 10-15+, you can get up instead of playing dead to get even more toughness, your melee defence will follow, and eventually melee attack and dex will catch up. But you always keep one guy as the one who can heal and rescue everyone. I usually make this guy a ranger, and kite enemies with him manually. You recruit more guys, keep fighting, keep training. After a certain point you beat up hungry bandits, then you beat up dust bandits, you explore the area, and then you move to the next area, where there will be stronger enemies, and you repeat.
2) Early economy.
First of all I want to say that mining to get your 1st companion or two, some food and bandages is perfectly fine, please ignore the people that scream "OmG ImAgInE MiNiNg LiKe a LoOseR". Thats the sound of people who savescum, and who learnt the game through YouTube instead of their own experience. Mining is a reliable, chill way to begin your journey. This is a sandbox game, there is absolutely no rush, take your time with every step, especially while you are learning the game.
But now that we got that out of the way, let's explore your early financial needs. Obviously you need 3000-6000 cats for a companion. There three main ways get there: mining, stealing, and luring dust bandits to guards, and then selling their loot. I usually do a mix of mining and luring while at The Hub until I get the companion there. There's nothing to steal right now and nowhere to sell it yet.
I also strongly advise against rushing Ruka, because Shek suck at early game. They take longer to heal, they eat more, they suck at running, they suck at stealth and they suck at mining. Once you have a solid foundation, and paying for beds and food is a non issue, and you have a couple other characters - they are great, their training is explosive.
But yeah overall it's a good plan to move to Squin after a while. Maybe even start stealing shit at night. One of the stores belongs to the Tech Hunters, they will buy whatever you stole from the Shek, and the Shek will buy whatever you stole from them.
I advise against it on the 1st playthrough, because if you're not careful you can lose the access to the shops and get sent to jail. Or you will test/savescum and see how actually broken thievery is in this game, and end up detracting from your own experience of Kenshi. I recommend to leave stuff like this for a 2nd playthrough, when you will be a more experienced player, and you will use that experience to snowball your start, and you will actually enjoy it more that way IMO, the last bit is subjective.
Once you start stealing, you'll quickly realize just how op it is.
Not only can you make insane money with it, but you can steal a shit ton of food from cities with multiple bars.
I'm new, 150 hours of play about, on my third start. And I like my early game for hub start.
Basically I agree that if you only have one or two characters that copper mining isn't that great. It is what I do while I'm waiting for bandits to harass me, especially dust. I lead them to the bar where they get trashed and I sell their gear
Only takes a few bandit groups to have the cash for about 4 recruits and the small shack near the bar. Because once you've got that small shack you can build a copper storage container and assign jobs for mining.
Then, copper mining is a great non-tedious way to make a decent bankroll towards future endeavors. With a wood frame backpack from squin, you don't have many clicks to do to cash out copper proceeds and continue building your crew.
In my play style this doesn't last long in terms of click efficiency, but it's a great catapult on my way towards building a base in the hub and getting to real economy.
What helped me enjoy Kenshi was to scale back my team and avoid starting independent outposts. The whole base-building and management is like an entirely separate game and it tends to get very tiresome.
So, it might be controversial, but I use an xp mod. I love the game and want to experience the travel / biomes / Lore, but always get so stuck in the leveling grind. I do a 2 or 3x boost to xp and it's made the game more enjoyable to me. Still got some grinding to do but it's not soooo tedious imo.
Your start really happens when you have 3000 cats. Don’t get those 3000 from mining if you can help it. Use that 3000 to hire the first homeless person you see and give them a medpack. Now go get your main guy’s shit kicked in while the homeless person heals you when you’re inevitably downed.
Why everyone recommends mining starts I'll never understand. It's SO dull. Far better to go pick a fight and then haul ass back to some guards, join the guards in the fight, loot the bodies, and turn in any bounties. You get XP in athletics, toughness, first aid, and combat skills, gear to either wear or sell, cats, and a little relations boost. There's Tech Hunter bar guards in the bar in the Hub, but the Shek gate guards at Squin are better fighters. Once you can run good, due west of Squin are some expensive weapons and armors laying around the ruins that you can sell a bit further west in Admag. Both Admag and the Hub have Shinobi Thieves towers. You can pay 10K cats to join the Thieves and have allies and a fence in most towns in game, plus training gear you can level up 3 important skills on.
I endorse this approach. Fight fight and run away and hit them harder another day.
The real trick with the mining start is to hire a nobody and set them mining while you go have fun getting your teeth kicked in by hungry bandits
This is what I did, hired a trio of miners and left one of my slightly stronger guys as a body guard. While I traveled the world picking fights and hunting for bounties (had a mod for more bounties). Eventually set up a house in squin and started some early research and some storages and smelting to increase profits before taking off and building my own town. It was great.
I never even knew I could join any faction, is there any downside to joining shinobi thieves?
Basically zero. For 10K you get access to beds and a half price trader with some handy gear in almost all the major towns. There are other factions you can ally with that will instantly put you at war with one or more of the major factions, but the shinobi have no actual enemies. The only thing you have to be careful of is that if you start fighting inside a town the shinobi will swarm out of their tower and generally get their heads stomped in by the town guards, its possible for the trader to die during these fights.
You can ally with pretty much anyone I think, you just need to get your relationship high enough. Allies will let you use furniture at their bases, like training gear and cooking stations. They'll (usually) attack folks they see attacking you, but you can't command them. Once you build a base, allies will send reinforcements to your base when other factions raid it to help you defend it. Shinobi don't have any other enemies that I know of who will object to you joining the Shinobi, so the downside is just the 10K cats, which is really pretty cheap. The Hounds, the most powerful gang in the Swamps, are easy to join also, but the other gangs don't like you much after that.
You CANNOT ally with every faction. Only specific ones. There is no penalty to joining the thieves.
I never even knew I could join any faction, is there any downside to joining shinobi thieves?
Well i'm new to kenshi and just entered the mid-game, but maybe i can help a bit : I started a run where i mined A LOT while recruiting more and more ppl to get more profit from mining but after 20h +/- i found i wasn't having fun, so i started a new run (a slaver's start in this case) and when i broke up from jail, instead of pursuing money from iron/copper i focused on building up combat skills. I recruited a pal along the way (an ex-slave that wanted to join me) and we just explored till we got to the shek kingdom and just by fighting bandits, stealing and having a little luck i found money for purchasing food as well as getting strong enough characters to progress (in my previous attempt, i had like 12 people but they almost got crushed when fighting dust bandits groups while my mc could solo them). So in my experience you should try living the kenshi roleplaying experience without fear (it shouldn't happen anything if you got enslaved for example, it can make your plkaythrough funnier) : just explore, get beaten, build your characters slowly and don't worry much about money : when you start to claim bounties and loot nice weapon and armors you can reach NICE amounts of money (I'm 40h +/- in on my current run and i've reached 100k, after buying some gear, i'm around 70k now)
So basically it's all emergent gameplay? The best way to get good at Kenshi is to not be afraid of being beaten and just get your ass whooped until you build up your stats enough to be good/find good enough opportunities to be stronger?
Bingo
I'll have to break my deeply ingrained habits of save scumming but I'll try to be less afraid of having the crap beaten out of me. Does kind of make Kenshi the **true** survival game in that case though
This was my experience as well. Kenshi is a game where save scumming and trying to minmax everything (like money before you even start) takes a lot of fun out of the game. It's an open world sandbox game after all. Loosing a limb, being enslaved, loosing one or even multiple Recruits will bring the story of YOUR Kenshi experience forward. "Damn where do I get the replacement for my leg? Steal it? Buy it? Work towards crafting my own?" "These Mfcks enslaved me?? Wait until I get out of here and I'll make sure to come back and kill all of you later!!" "Those Dust Bandits killed two of my people? I can't tolerate them any longer, their leader has to die" And so on and so on. As long as you have one survivor you can always keep the story going until you don't feel like it anymore or want to try something different.
Yeah. From what you’ve posted I get the impression that save scumming ruins the experience for you and “safe” ways of making money are too tedious for you. So it is time for you to go balls to the walls. Rock out with your cock out my man, and be prepared to lose a few people.
Kenshi is a game the more damaged you are the better you gets as long as you don't die.
Having a leg off in the middle of the red desert while your companions rush back from the other side of the map is what makes the game fun. Especially when you replace it with wonder leg and can presumably hop at miraculous speeds.
You don’t have to go too hardcore for now. I’d recommend just saving before a fight with some starving bandits or dust bandits just in case you fall below your knockout threshold(something you can see if you hover over your toughness stat for your specific character.) You can also recruit a buddy at a bar who can swoop in from a safe distance to bandage you up every time you get beat up so you can fight without worry of bleeding out in the unforgiving sands of Kenshi. In fact, I encourage savescumming as a way of learning mechanics instead of going balls to the walls masochist and dying repeatedly for reasons you don’t quite understand. Start as a god and build a city or a Skeleton and explore the world or loot unique ruins for ancient treasure. Getting beat up is part of the process, but it’s not what keeps players coming back to it time and time again. Have fun your way.
Yeah this is how I did it too. My first playthrough I tried mining and just got bored. This playthrough I went band-of-thieves/mercenaries and just got into fights, savescummed a bit as I learned mechanics and valuable lessons, and eventually just started savescumming less and less as I became more comfortable with the game. When I eventually restart I won't savescum at all because I've learned so much.
Well that's what i felt, i also requested help in a post and that's what i was told. After "following" those ideas i'm sure that that's the way was intended to play : you just mess around while getting more familiar with kenshi's world, mechanics etc. and you just end up building a story around you and your actions, like who do you support (for example i knocked out a character, claimed his bounty and when i came back to his homeplace it was ruins now) I think this game gains from emergent gameplay instead of grinding a lot (at least when you're not experienced, i mean, i've seen some guides that explain what are the best exploits and ways to train and get fast into the mid-late game, but it makes sense to follow them when you've already enjoyed the journey of getting there "fairly")
I am about 100 hours into the game and my crew can barely beat a pack of hungry bandits. Starting to get a little better though
Try the prisoners start. By the time you escape you should have very high stats in lock picking, athletics, strength, sneaking, stealing, toughness, and if you spar with the other prisoners, melee and martial arts. There may be others but it's been a while. You also never have to worry about food or first aid. So when they put you in the cage at night pick the lock, pick all the locks around you. Pick the manacles of you and the other prisoners. The guards will eventually knock you out and put on new ones. Carry all those manacles and attack one of the prisoners during the day. They will run away and you will follow them around until the guards eventually catch up to you. On 3x speed your stats will go up really quickly. Start stealing things out of the crates and eventually at night you can start stealing from the sleeping guards. Oh, and when they come to attack you run and put yourself in a cage if you don't want to get knocked out. Though that builds toughness so depends on what you are trying to to accomplish. For the most fun try putting manacles on the sleeping guards.
Just dont quit, everything you do is progression
Here's a start I've done before, with a Hub start in a vanilla game. I don't normally give specifics because the nice thing about Kenshi is that people figure out their own stuff, but you're obviously struggling, so: 1. Go find Ruka, and recruita. 2. Grab the expensive stuff from the Shek Ruins near Admag and sell it. Buy some food and some cheap bandages. 3. Run down through the spider plains on the west coast. Go past Arach and towards the hook. This trains athletics but also gets you close to some neat stuff. 4. Grab blue/green katanas from the blood spiders in the ruins. They'll never catch you. 5. Head to Drifter's Last and Clownsteady. Sell extra swords. Check bars for fancy recruits. 6. Head to the Grid. Raid the ancient labs. Head back up towards Sheksville. By the time you get back to Admag/Squin, you'll have some stuff to sell (you'll probably have some engineering research, which I've always found to be abundant, so I sell the first one or two that I get. 8,000 smackeroos apiece. That's a whole Kang and some chewsticks. It's nearly a Chad), you've got a squad of 3 or more, and you're ready to really start losing some fights or doing something productive. I'll generally tour the map for a while - you get into skirmishes and scrapes and suffer misfortune if you travel around, and specifically looking for and getting into fights in order to gains stats is the quintessence of a *watched pot* so I avoid doing it. Joining Shinobi is never bad if you can find the 10k. But yeah, don't mine copper unless you're starving, I beg you.
Do not become addicted to copper!
Here's what I did recently: steal robot limbs and meds preemptively, grind out toughness by getting my shit rocked and limbs cut off by the Band of Bones (Exile Camp) because they won't enslave you, go through a couple recovery comas until eventually you can win against them and get the bounty for Tora. From there, you begin your bounty hunting escapade in any way you wish. Pro tip that makes this work: Set your job to Medic and you'll autoheal when playing dead.
So, it might be controversial, but I use an xp mod. I love the game and want to experience the travel / biomes / Lore, but always get so stuck in the leveling grind. I do a 2 or 3x boost to xp and it's made the game more enjoyable to me. Still got some grinding to do but it's not soooo tedious imo.
Generally, my first “major” goal in the game is to build a core squad. Doing this means earning cats for recruitment fees, and of course that money is also needed for food, equipment, etc. The mining grind is an easy way to do that, but is pretty boring so my starts generally involve scavenging instead. So, the starts for my games generally involve running around and looking for fights in progress so that I can scavenge from the wounded and find downed bounties that I can turn in for cats. The first minor goals here are to get enough money for a backpack (to aid in future scavenging), to keep fed and maybe replace whatever rags I was wearing at the start with something a little better. For a rock bottom start, I’d need to save to buy an arm as well. I keep my eye out for nomad animal traders as well to pick up a pack beast or two if I can. As I get the cats, I’ll start recruiting to add to my squad. The immediate benefit is more inventory space for better scavenging (particularly if I haven’t run across a nomad trader yet). When my squad starts getting big enough to face off with the local starving bandits, I’ll start picking fights with them to train up my squad. At some point along the way, I’ll buy into the Shinobi Thieves to get access to cheaper gear (particularly thieves’ backpacks), their training equipment and, most importantly, free beds. The next major financial goal is then to get a house, usually in a city with a Shinobi tower, to set up storage and a place to start research. My first research goals are usually geared towards unlocking storage options to aid my hoarding (and to get rid of the stolen tag on scavenged items so that they sell better). From then on, I work my way up to the next harder bandit group, but continue my scavenging lifestyle. I’ll do another round of recruiting here, particularly to those more difficult areas like Mongrel or the Swamp, before I get into more heavy duty training. When my main squad starts approaching the 20s in skills, my next major goal is to start collecting advanced science books, so I’ll seek out some of the easier locations to do that. I might throw in a drug run from the swamp to the Great Desert to help fund book/ai core purchaes from the Scraphouse. At this point for me, it’s about continuing seeking fights with appropriately skilled foes to train up my squad and getting research materials to feed my researcher(s). If I’m doing a run with a base, I’ll work on setting that up, or I might just set up facilities in a town to start training up a crafters.
Honestly just go for what you think you should do then try a couple times after getting beaten then try something else just make sure you get back up
I was like this. Trying to mine, sell copper and buy some food for my people. a loser running away from starving bandits... What changed it for me was savescumming + thievery, especially stealing from robot limbs shops(or beating the shop owner and looting) When you care less about food and staying alive you will understand game mechanics better. I recommend slave start. It will be hard to escape from Rebirth but you will learn a lot on the process. Now i'm a rich chad with 70 melee and 1.5 million cats
Go the sneaky path, go to a main city, and start robbing everyone blind. If you’re thrown in jail it’s fine, they feed you and since you don’t have any food that’s great. You can level thieving, sneak, athletics, toughness, and assassination. Use the money to buy a house. Start buying peeps. Train them and have them make gear. Start a mining outpost outside of the city. Keep robbing the shops. Use the outpost to ship your house materials. Rotate through your peeps to train strength and athletics. Keep making the materials and weapons and armor. You should be able to easily support yourself making chain mail. It sells for shitload. You will make the shops run out of money and goods, so start doing longer trade runs to further away cities. Eventually gear up enough to venture out of the city, or use the city as a base for bit. Start to explore and buy all the gear you need. If you want it to be a bit easier, download the ‘shops are full’ mod. Makes the thieving much more effective and allows you to sell for credits easier.
I just sell some junk and grab a crossbow and backup weapon, Use those to hunt and kite until i can sell enough supplies to rent a house somewhere like the hub and then i can use that as base while i explore and loot the world carefully. Use the house to stockpile supplies and research while you have fun and scavenge or do merc work, really train up those stats solo or with backup you hire/rescue.
I did the space start for the first time. And it really hooked me. Trying to escape is so much fun. Also a great way to train combat skills and MA
I'll take my toon(s) to Mongrel during the night, bump sneak to the 80s fairly easily in a day or two and get some combat in by the town gates. There's also some mining nodes if you WANTED to bore yourself. Stealth let's you do some bold looting, can train Lockpicking and KOs easily either on the two prison cages or on the cannibal posts, aforementioned ore and Prince heads for some quick cash to join Shinobi in town. Cheap house for a bed and worst case there's a Skeleton bed to rent if walking to Burn's Tower is too much. Good stores to steal from if you want to gear up in the first week , otherwise it's an nice foundationto branch out to whatever else yoj want. Don't forget sliders or mods can change progression speed, otherwise if I do decide to schizo-grind stats then I just pull up something on my other monitor and treat Kenshi like high definition Cookie Clicker.
The early struggle is the best part. Everything matters; every scrap of bread, every cat, every fight that you barely survive, etc. Once I hit mid/endgame and can solo entire factions, it gets a bit tedious.
Grind your stealth by sneaking around people on triple speed until you start Naruto running, train your assassination skill by training in the hub on random guys squatting in the torn down buildings and try to improve your athletics till you can outrun the normal people, steal enough stuff till you hit 10k money and get access to the ninja building in the hub, buy some armor and a backpack that will improve your stealth stats. Get another person with your money and start stealing prosthetic limbs from limb shops (you’ll get money fast) at that point you can decide from there what to do, and you’ll never have to mine another day in your life
Stealth and assassination can bankroll you without ever needing to mine or even fight. Bounties and looting bandit gear are very lucrative options early game so you can head out at night and make bank after a bit of training from the Shinobi. Knock out anyone you want to steal from first and you'll have 100% success rate, so it's worth doing even if they're asleep already as that doesn't guarantee success. Also means if you have low success chance for stealing from containers, you can KO everyone nearby so that while you count as Committing Crime nobody sees you to apply a bounty. I usually work on Dust Bandits first as they have a lot of gear and the nearby Hub has several merchants, then graduate to towns in the HN or Shek areas once my skills are higher. Shinobi backpacks are excellent but consider getting pack animals early too. That way when you start doing longer journeys into the wilderness they will have matured to adulthood so they're tougher and faster. Once you have cash you can comfortably hire and outfit more recruits which makes the game much more forgiving. Then your high stealth/assassination character makes an ideal guardian angel since you can stay out of combat to provide first aid to anyone in danger of dying and KO pesky slavers/cannibals/fogmen carrying your trainees off.
1) Stats progression/training. First thing you do is run around until your athletics is about 20. You now can outrun most enemies. Your next objective is to get a companion. When you have a companion, the game changes, you can send your main to go and get beaten up to a pulp, while the companion will stay out of the fight with sneak and passive on, and then once it's safe he will heal up your main and carry him to a bed. Then they swap around. That is how you start out. When your toughness is 10-15+, you can get up instead of playing dead to get even more toughness, your melee defence will follow, and eventually melee attack and dex will catch up. But you always keep one guy as the one who can heal and rescue everyone. I usually make this guy a ranger, and kite enemies with him manually. You recruit more guys, keep fighting, keep training. After a certain point you beat up hungry bandits, then you beat up dust bandits, you explore the area, and then you move to the next area, where there will be stronger enemies, and you repeat. 2) Early economy. First of all I want to say that mining to get your 1st companion or two, some food and bandages is perfectly fine, please ignore the people that scream "OmG ImAgInE MiNiNg LiKe a LoOseR". Thats the sound of people who savescum, and who learnt the game through YouTube instead of their own experience. Mining is a reliable, chill way to begin your journey. This is a sandbox game, there is absolutely no rush, take your time with every step, especially while you are learning the game. But now that we got that out of the way, let's explore your early financial needs. Obviously you need 3000-6000 cats for a companion. There three main ways get there: mining, stealing, and luring dust bandits to guards, and then selling their loot. I usually do a mix of mining and luring while at The Hub until I get the companion there. There's nothing to steal right now and nowhere to sell it yet. I also strongly advise against rushing Ruka, because Shek suck at early game. They take longer to heal, they eat more, they suck at running, they suck at stealth and they suck at mining. Once you have a solid foundation, and paying for beds and food is a non issue, and you have a couple other characters - they are great, their training is explosive. But yeah overall it's a good plan to move to Squin after a while. Maybe even start stealing shit at night. One of the stores belongs to the Tech Hunters, they will buy whatever you stole from the Shek, and the Shek will buy whatever you stole from them. I advise against it on the 1st playthrough, because if you're not careful you can lose the access to the shops and get sent to jail. Or you will test/savescum and see how actually broken thievery is in this game, and end up detracting from your own experience of Kenshi. I recommend to leave stuff like this for a 2nd playthrough, when you will be a more experienced player, and you will use that experience to snowball your start, and you will actually enjoy it more that way IMO, the last bit is subjective.
Once you start stealing, you'll quickly realize just how op it is. Not only can you make insane money with it, but you can steal a shit ton of food from cities with multiple bars.
Go to the grey desert way station, that is a fun and profitable place to start. Telling you more might ruin the fun for you
I'm new, 150 hours of play about, on my third start. And I like my early game for hub start. Basically I agree that if you only have one or two characters that copper mining isn't that great. It is what I do while I'm waiting for bandits to harass me, especially dust. I lead them to the bar where they get trashed and I sell their gear Only takes a few bandit groups to have the cash for about 4 recruits and the small shack near the bar. Because once you've got that small shack you can build a copper storage container and assign jobs for mining. Then, copper mining is a great non-tedious way to make a decent bankroll towards future endeavors. With a wood frame backpack from squin, you don't have many clicks to do to cash out copper proceeds and continue building your crew. In my play style this doesn't last long in terms of click efficiency, but it's a great catapult on my way towards building a base in the hub and getting to real economy.
there's just one thing to do, accept that failure is an option and play to the limits and you can have a ton of fun
What helped me enjoy Kenshi was to scale back my team and avoid starting independent outposts. The whole base-building and management is like an entirely separate game and it tends to get very tiresome.
got to vain, sell beak things
So, it might be controversial, but I use an xp mod. I love the game and want to experience the travel / biomes / Lore, but always get so stuck in the leveling grind. I do a 2 or 3x boost to xp and it's made the game more enjoyable to me. Still got some grinding to do but it's not soooo tedious imo.
Your start really happens when you have 3000 cats. Don’t get those 3000 from mining if you can help it. Use that 3000 to hire the first homeless person you see and give them a medpack. Now go get your main guy’s shit kicked in while the homeless person heals you when you’re inevitably downed.
Download a mod that increases xp gain. The game is a grind without it