This game is my new addiction but I need some advice

[deuceyd]

Just lost my 3rd playthrough, my last and longest got to day 13. I had around 30k cats and 7 people in my squad and decided to build a small outpost outside of stack to try to make a cotton farm because someone told me you can basically make a tens of thousands per day if you can make clothes and stuff to sell. So I managed to build 1 small cotton farm, 1 loom thingy, and some storage chests but then I got raided literally the next day by black dragon ninjas and everyone died. Literally everyone bled out, It was my mistake for having everyone working in the same area but I thought the 9000 cats I spent on a band of mercenaries would help at all, but it didn't. They got demolished, within seconds.

But I did learn something before I died on my very last surviving guy, when they raided my base - they took nothing. So I have a couple ( a lot ) of questions if anyone is willing to answer them, I'd greatly appreciate it:

Can I avoid raids completely by just running back to a nearby city for safety? And if so will the raiders just sit at my base or will they eventually leave? (Black dragon ninjas chased my last dude all the way back to stack and the guards did NOT help or attack them or heal me when I was downed).

Is there a better city/area I could build at so I can do the small outpost idea, and was the cotton farming idea good? Is there anything better than manufacturing clothes for profit? Also how does the farming work in this game because my 1 cotton plant I dont think produced even one cotton...

Best starting character/Starting location? - sidenote I have tried the rock bottom start and I instantly got enslaved, I retried that same start and im pretty sure the guards even let me get enslaved too...

Sorry for so many questions, but thanks to anyone who can manage to read all that and lend me some good tips.

[Hatsune Neko Gaming]

you can run away before a raid gets to close

there is no better area, just areas that one might prefer more due to the faction that controls it.

start's are user preference and the difficulty of starting out.

[Leah]

I play a single woman with pets and start up my own base in Okran Valley, you can avoid raids by leaving and hiding out before they get there. You can also pit bandits and Holy Nation against one another if the raids time out right.

[Gerustroncio]

Well, when I had an outpost in UC territory, near Heng, I only ever got raided by very low level stuff, bloodraiders mostly, also manhunters would sometimes attack because they didn't like me very much.

And as I understand the raiders will eventually leave, but I heard sometimes they just hang around for a looong time, making the possibility of any of your characters recovering pretty much unlikely.

Weapons sell for a whole lot too, but in fact you don't even need an outpost to make money selling clothes/leather armor, you can just buy a big house in a city, put a bunch of workbenches in, then just buy leather/fabrics from the vendors, given the price of the material and the amount you sell it for you make a good profit anyway.

Though it will take some time to train your characters in order for them to start producing good stuff, a very nice way to do it is to make bandanas, they use very little material and produce pretty fast.

And farming does work indeed, you gotta be in the right biome though (cotton needs green), when you put down a farm it will tell you the fertility and yield, a large farm with a good yield will give you like 90 or so per harvest I think, and you need a lot of cotton to make a good amount of fabric.

Hemp fabric is better, it's more efficient, plus hemp will grow anywhere (though it grows better in green biome)

The start is your preference really, I like "A guy with a dog", but it's a bit tricky since you start in te middle of nowhere.

the"Empire Citizen" one is a fairly mellow start since you'll start in UC territory (largely the easiest starting location), and you'll already be in a city.

[tebow baggins]

start out in a town like stack or hub, like start out i mean hours and hours,,

Originally posted by Deucey D:

Literally everyone bled out,

you have to spam medics at first, everyone has to be an auto medic with medkits at first

Originally posted by Deucey D:

Can I avoid raids completely by just running back to a nearby city for safety? And if so will the raiders just sit at my base or will they eventually leave?

yes and yes they eventually leave,

it sux at first, its like the season of walking dead where they get punked out by saviors,, but this is the werid thing about kenshi- once you have an auto base that is slaying an area you will crave a restart back to the the beginning challenge.

best starting location imo is hub and stack where you start out, you have to deal with some of holy nations BS but its tolerable, shek can be tough opponents, so if you build kinda by stack, their raids vs you can sometimes be attack by holy nation who live in Stack.

i had a base set up where shek ended up ranskacing Stack a city of the Holy Nation, whenever they tried to raid me,,, they also can burn out it seems as in they run out of troops to raid you.

the point is, there is strategy to where you place your base- raids are not exactly random it seems, they emerge and travel and are subject to whatever danger they come across..

when you spam enough medics in the beginning you watch your squad systematically recover from assaults and then after so long eventually they start killing them,, as long as 1 guy gets up and starts healing, usually the assault has moved by then.. toughness is being grinded.

farming is OP i was feeding 100+ ppl with only 4 weats in a 60% zone

[deuceyd]

I have no idea how farming works though. Do I need to water the plants? Feritilize them?

[Germania516]

Originally posted by Deucey D:

I have no idea how farming works though. Do I need to water the plants? Feritilize them?

It depends on the crops you are planting,and yes every crop except rice needs water and no you don't use fertilizer

[flu007]

Yup, farms need water, so you'll have to build a Well as well.
And when they're low skilled, your farmer will get a lot of "failed" messages (which I assume means they got nothing from that planr,) but they get better as they farm more.

As for the raids: Yup, you can run away without too many consequences.
Some raiders (like the Black Dragon Ninjas) take the food out of your storage, others take nothing at all.

Most people will say, don't build a base until you can defend it, but there are definitely ways to cheese it if you started a base before that.

When it gets announced that the raid is on its way, the raiders show on the map. It'll be either a white dot or a red dot depending on your faction standing with them (or multiple dots, but it usually shows as one dot.) They can come from quite a distance away.

What I used to do is, transport all my food to a shack in the nearby town. Park all my people except one a safe distance away, between the town and my base. And leave one fast guy in town, to start the raid. (If there's nobody at your base at all, I think the raid start doesn't trigger until next time one of your guys gets close.)

Then once they're there and it starts, the raid boss usually yells some stuff for a while, giving my guy time to run out the other gate.

And then I'd just watch what happens. Sometimes they'd run around between all the buildings for a while and eventually just leave. Other times they stayed longer, and I'd have to pull them out one by one, or in small groups.

And gradually you get better and get more options to deal with them. First I dragged them to the guards and got afew hits in here and there. Later my group was strong enough so they could handle one or two of them away from the rest.
Then you can build walls and turrets and at some point you'll be ready to actually defend the base instead of having to lure them away.



Also, in general, there's no shame in running. Especially early on, there's not much you can comfortably kill. So it's ok for your number one objective in every situation to be: survive. And that usually means running like a coward. And getting a few hits in once the guards are rushing over to help.
And gradually you get better and can start taking a few more risks.


Clothes selling is indeed quite profitable, by the way. Though you'll make a small loss at first until your crafter gets some armour smithink skill.
It doesn't take very long before it starts breaking even, though, and at higher levels it makes a nice profit.
And you could build a leather tanning station as well, to turn animal skins into leather. That skills armour smithing as well, and once your crafter is skilled enough, they can make nice quality leather armor etc.


In short, it's definitely a viable path, just have to get over the early hump pf figuring out how to deal with defending your base before you're strong enough. But it's doable.

[Gerustroncio]

Originally posted by Deucey D:

I have no idea how farming works though. Do I need to water the plants? Feritilize them?

Heh, I read "Does the farming work in this game?" in your first post, for some reason I glanced over the "How" part of your question :P

It's pretty simple really, you'll first need to research the crop (which will require a few units of said crop plus some research books), then you have up to 4 sizes of farms, from small to XL, building farms require a certain amount of that particular crop (which makes sense), said amount will depend on the size you choose, and of course the yield will increase according to the size (plus you still have to consider fertility and biomes).

Another thing youll need will be wells/rain collector to gather water, and water tanks to store it.

And finally some storage containers for the crop you'll be planting, that way the characters will automatically harvest and store it

Once you have all that in place you just assign workers to the farms (hold the shift button when assigning orders, so it will be added to their jobs list), you can assign multiple characters to a single farm to go faster, then they'll tend to it on their own, they'll water when needed and harvest when it's ready.

and that's it.

[thecelt]

I just updated my original review on this and i will add a little bit here to try and help.
With the help of some other comments this is how i got a base up and running and i will try to describe the exact location i did it because it may not work everywhere.

My starting town was the hub as a single player with a few cats.

Just south of the hub on the ridge line there is a copper deposit which is where i started doing some mining to get some cats saved. I chose that spot because it is easy to spot groups of wandering bandits fairly easily as they can only come at you from one of two directions.

Then i purchased a storm house inside the Hub and repaired it because you need something big enough to hold upgraded research benches. The small shacks can't fit a large research bench inside. Just right click on the building you want repaired after you purchase it and you can start the repair process.

I built training items in the storm house, melee attack dummies, assassination, lock picking, thievery, etc... and trained my first companion and myself as far as we could. I also built the upgraded research bench and started collecting standard research books.

I kept buying books to get the research levels on everything as far as i could with just the standard research books. I made sure to research everything i could with the standard books in that station inside the storm house i purchased in the Hub.

After all that was done i started collecting food and focused on dry meat because you can kite goats and bulls to city guards and then collect the meat, teeth, and leather from the bodies. At the same time i also collected iron plates and building materials.

After i had a all the research done and a large amount of food stored i ran around and started hiring followers until i had 8 people in my first group. I then trained all of the followers as much as i was able on the training stations at my house in the Hub.

Location: the spot i chose for the base lies in between Stack and the Hub, as you run north from the Hub to Stack there is a valley, at the end of the valley is a cliff area that faces towards the Hub. This area has natural tiers giving it a lot of natural defenses, it has copper, iron, water, and fertility so absolutely every resource needed is there. I was able to run the defensive walls between the impassable areas and it only took 74 building materials and a little more than 100 iron plates to enclose the entire ridge and build a gate.

Since i had researched the mounted crossbows i built a bunch to cover the gate and supplied all of my team with hand held crossbows firing standard bolts. I built the gate on the west side of my outpost as the natural terrain forces all attackers into a kill zone for 50 m in front of the gate.

The first raid was able to breach the gate and it was a heck of a fight but we survived. I decided to build a second gate in front of the first one so raids have to breach 2 gates and not one. The entire time the raiders are under fire from hand held and turret mounted crossbows.

After adding the second gate and making sure i pay attention when raiders turn up i haven't had a single bandit party breach my outpost. Even if they did the natural layout of the terrain forces the bandits to run along the lower ridge while under fire and zig zag back and forth up the ridges until they can get to my group but by that time they will have suffered so much damage from turrets and crossbows that it won't be hard to clean up those still standing.

Next i built a small shack a fair distance from the gates (information i found from another persons post), for some reason the AI wants to attack the empty shack almost as much as they want to try to breach the gate, this takes a lot of pressure off of raids as the forces attacking tend to split up to attack what they can.

I have had a couple of visits for "Prayer Day" nothing like a bunch or religious zealots to screw up your day, but i haven't had any taxes collected by them so i think i may be far enough away into the border zone that they don't try. Also they won't help if you are under attack by bandits. They just stand there praying away while bandits try to kill everything and steal your food so don't rely on them to help in your camp.

I was able to build all of the farming areas on the lower tier and the housing and storage on the upper tier. The stone, copper, and iron resources are very good in the spot so it only took a small effort to get things positioned correctly. The size of the base also helped to train up strength and endurance for my team as they carried loads of ore to the storage containers.

Once i was set up the big thing is producing enough food to feed my company, I've not had a single goat or bull herd wander by my outpost so i need to make bread and a lot of it to feed everyone. So on that lower tier i built 3XL wheat straw farms, 2 XL cactus farms and 1XL hemp farm. I'm not done building farms yet but this allows me to produce cloth, rum, and bread and since the holy nation doesn't seem interested in me i will start hashish production as soon as i get the books and complete the research.

My method may be slow, meticulous, and cautious, but I've been able to hold the outpost with only 8-9 people against raids of 20+ bandits due to the layered and tiered defenses i set up and training the squad at my house in the Hub. I don't think i could have set this type of outpost up with so few people without the natural terrain helping so much; and that is my key point of advice. When you set up an outpost you have to consider how the natural terrain helps or hurts your defensive plans and adjust to them. The position i chose leaves only one real avenue to approach my outpost and that avenue is a very large kill zone for the turrets and crossbows allowing my group to literally decimate attacking forces long before they can close to melee distance.

*Disclaimer: I have downloaded some few mods to assist me. I have added the moisture evaporator mod which i am using and the automated copper mining mod which i haven't researched completely yet so it is not in use yet but will be soon. I've also added the crucifixion mod which is just a prisoner cage in another form; it won't dissuade any attackers but it does fit well with the game and its canon style. No slaver groups have visited my outpost, so i may as well hang the prisoners up for viewing as i can't sell them.

I hope this helps you some, i love Kenshi and i wish the dev's were going to put some more effort into it but it seems from current posts that this is it as far as the dev's go except for bug fixes so don't be afraid to download those two mods i mentioned as they probably should have been in the base game to start with. I hope this helps some.

[Spectre]

I would go with what everyone here who says "start out in a city first" maybe even use a mod like https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=1420652119 and do some in-city farming with this mod, otherwise when you get maybe up to 10-20 people all able and ready for combat and what not, then take them all down over to "The Swamp" biome and make friends with the hounds, do the mission for them, comeback and pay the cats to the boss and then make a base in the swamp, preferably closest to The Hounds village "Rot" (if im not mistaken) this is where their people will spawn from, and should you ever have a raid coming for your base then they will send reinforcements to you, as long as you pay a weekly 2,000 cats to them they will be on your good side and even help heal some of your troops. keep in mind though, it is a swamp area and raptors roam this biome, they WILL eat your crops, so make sure you have defenses set up for just incase they start hitting your buildings or start eating the crops. Oh and dont forget the mod for the blood spiders the one where it gets rid of the ridiculous range of 70 for them to hit your people. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1641129855&searchtext=



https://kenshi.fandom.com/wiki/The_Swamp

That is where I built my first small town. and it is a great town because if you have it researched, you can make hashish from the territory easily, then just journey back to the UC territories (mainly sho battai) and sell your hashish to the shinobi thieves, make a lot of cats from your runs.

EDIT: atleast in the swamp you dont have to worry about watering the crops, because its practically almost always raining there. xD
Also that mod, the city farming mod, it contains a moisture production tank where in areas such as the desert would be best used for since it aint easy to grow crops in the desert will automatically build up water and then start producing the water barrels you can use for water your crops if you are city farming in the desert towns.

[Germania516]

People don't seem to understand about why not every faction steals your food,and the best way to explain this is certain bandits such as the hungry bandits,dust bandits,and the Black Dragon Ninjas came to rob you because they are either starving or they are criminals. Now the Band of Bones and Shek Challengers just came to raise hell,and show who rules because they are just a violent gang that enjoys seeing others suffer

I wouldn't expect the HN or the UC to rob me because they pretty much have everything due to being an aristocratic govt,,and also the Holy Nation is a religious guild that doesn't believe in stealing or sinning but they won't shy away from beating someone up that doesn't respect their religion,and they justify that in "you are sinning and going against my god which should be yours also".

[Morkonan]

Originally posted by Germania516:

People don't seem to understand about why not every faction steals your food...

Yeah. Each faction has their own sorts of demands, from food to cash to attending "Prayer Day." :)

Subfactions and general ne'er-do-wells and bandiits just come to raise heck and stomp on stuff. Though, it has been reported that the Shek toughs who come to pick a fight don't seem to want to actually murder you and, IRRC, you don't get a big negative faction hit from fighting them.

For the OP: One of the more important things I discovered early was that trying to keep your characters from being injured is not a good thing... Even dumping heavy armor on early-game tanks isn't doing them any favor, since they don't build up their toughness as fast. At best, medium armor until they get into the high 20's on toughness, or better if you can stand it.

But, it does depend on what you're leveling up against. Running full bore after Beak Things and wearing only rags with a low toughness... the limbs will be flying. (Good robot arms are good, though.)

[Schlonz]

outside Stack is pretty much the most easy place to start i know of. but even there you will get at least 8-10 raiders in a ninja raid on lowest settings.
but once you will get into it, you will find ways beside bruteforce defence. at least i hope so.
i also liked and tried the idea of a small outpost that should not drive any attention at all.
because stack is a nice start area but that houses you may buy there are the downside of it (to me at least). so i build a small outpost and it survived. and stopped a raid of ninjas with ONE char that had no combat stat above 10.
fly a kite, bee-sting the raidleader. maybe you get out of that without beeing turned to sushi. my raid failed 20 meters before my gate. leader bled out after laying there crippled for a while.
that was priceless . but don´t consider that as standart.
usually you can also lure them into Stack and guards should hammer down these folks.
or train an assassin, knock them out. strip them naked. woops where are my weapons, and my pants..

that all is no longterm solution but may buy you some time to get strong enough. building a base is basically the turning point at which the game suddenly cares for you. they all want what you have, even if its almost nothing. try to stay homed in town until you are ready for the things out there(means: a full troop of dust bandits should be no real challenge for your troop....at least for the okran area).

[Crawdad Man]

A pretty easy place for a base is south of Blister Hill, the hardest things that will come after you is basically like starving bandits, although when you start farming, you will eventually get attacked by like hoards of river raptors. Holy nation guys don't bother you too much. One thing you could do is make a big wall around you base with a gate that is concaved by walls where you can put turrets on top of, which should be able to kill most early stuff for a while. You can also buy a packbeast and bag for it at a near by holy nation farm for easy item delivery to both near by towns.

[wolfey321]

Just do what I do. When raiders come, you run. You run and you hide in a building. Close and lock the door. Turn out the lights. Go into sneak mode. Silence your cell phones. Don't eat potato chips. The crunching will draw the ire of the bandits.