Which skill is best to master at the beginning?

[PoeticBuccaneer]

I start the game with the default beginning. I begin to begin the strength training first. Mine iron and copper ore, running around, sell them, buy wooden backpack, mine more ore, keep running around until my character reach 60 strength. Then I proceed to the shek kingdom to buy refitted blade Plank because I thought with such strength it is good to use heavy weapons. I set my character to block only, then keep running around to find hungry bandit. keep my character in block only mode. Until I reach 15 melee defense. Then I decide to deactivate the block mode so that my character would start to attack. Until i was strong enough to fight against hungry bandits, I go look for dust bandits. and fight them. but now my characters level is stuck at 35 melee attack, 38 melee defense. 60 strength, 24 dex. 40 toughness. I want to use falling sun but my dexterity is too low (I guess). i switch my weapon to wakizashi to train dexterity, but the progress is too slow. Can anyone give me suggestions or any trick to train my dexterity? is it a good thing to begin the game by training strength first then proceed to train other skills? or can anyone suggest me other training method?

[Toki]

I'd start with strength so you can carry more and equip heavier armor and weapons.
I'd improve str to 60 and then begin doing dex or toughness.
You'll get toughness naturally while doing stuff, though. (Through fights even if you're not doing leviathans.)

Trick for dex training: Fight with nodachi / katana vs Bugmaster or Mad Cat-lon. (After kidnapping them and putting them in an enclosure.)

[PoeticBuccaneer]

so i guess i'm on the right track. thank you for the tips

[mcb0ny]

If you want a really easy game start with stealth, assassination, lockpicking and thievery ;] All of them relatively easy to train, and they trivialize many things.

It's also a quick way to get tons of cats that you can spend on some silly things like allying the Gutters for example ;]

[Limdood]

For sheer survival, athletics is the way to go. If they can't catch you, they can't kill you.

You won't get much good at anything else though, with only running away.

[Helios]

Originally posted by PoeticBuccaneer:

I start the game with the default beginning. I begin to begin the strength training first. Mine iron and copper ore, running around, sell them, buy wooden backpack, mine more ore, keep running around until my character reach 60 strength. Then I proceed to the shek kingdom to buy refitted blade Plank because I thought with such strength it is good to use heavy weapons. I set my character to block only, then keep running around to find hungry bandit. keep my character in block only mode. Until I reach 15 melee defense. Then I decide to deactivate the block mode so that my character would start to attack. Until i was strong enough to fight against hungry bandits, I go look for dust bandits. and fight them. but now my characters level is stuck at 35 melee attack, 38 melee defense. 60 strength, 24 dex. 40 toughness. I want to use falling sun but my dexterity is too low (I guess). i switch my weapon to wakizashi to train dexterity, but the progress is too slow. Can anyone give me suggestions or any trick to train my dexterity? is it a good thing to begin the game by training strength first then proceed to train other skills? or can anyone suggest me other training method?

Its in my base with prisoner cages but i allways train strength and sneaking together following someone who is working on something like a farm and cooking stove dunno if you get trouble if you do it in a city like hub if you have farms outside or mine copper/iron hauling to a storage inside.

[GrandTickler]

Originally posted by Limdood:

For sheer survival, athletics is the way to go. If they can't catch you, they can't kill you.

You won't get much good at anything else though, with only running away.

have to go with this answer lol. with enough run speed u can make others do the fighting job for you and then u reap the rewards. like pulling a pack of garu to town bars

[kaiyl_kariashi]

going for strength first is always a mistake as it's not a SOL skill and can be trained passively while you're doing other stuff at any time you feel like. (it's fine to do passive strength training via encumbrance, but melee strength training can screw you over as good strength training weapons are awful for dex training AND affect your ability to get good Dex SOL gains).

Dex IS an SOL skill albeit one with a weird rule for how it calculates SOL.

Dex uses your melee attack skill for determining it's SOL bonus while armed. It uses your martial arts while unarmed (MA though is an awful dex weapon because it's a 50/50 split, though if you've royally screwed up your dex progression, MA can help try to fix it or at least close the gap between your Dex and Melee Attack so you can start training it properly)


once you've got your ideal training weapon (rusted junk horse-chopper/holed sabre/foreign sabre), you just stack as much -melee attack as you can (large backpack, samurai armor, tin-can helmet (or samurai helmet), Samurai legplates, wooden sandels (or slave shackles) whatever shirt you want (I prefer leather turtleneck as they're cheaper, more common, and don't add any non-useful penalties though the difference isn't that big no matter what you do with).

(Crab armor is slightly better than samurai for training purposes but harder to get (especially at higher qualities) and the overall difference is minuscule as you can easily have a near maxed out character before you even get close to Crab territory. It's an option if you happen to be able to craft it and want to train a new batch of recruits fast, but otherwise not really worth seeking out just for that purpose).

fill your back-pack full of fragment axes (hub starts can get a bunch of fragment axes for free from shek ruins that will handle your strength training needs fine for the early game) or whatever else heavy stuff you can get and carry a team-mate or body when moving to new training locations. (once you're no longer at 70% encumbrance, consider getting a 2nd back-pack so you can put the one with all the weight in your main-inventory (or steal one of the rare remaining Shopkeeper's Goods bags which weigh a ton by default and have no weight reduction for their contents (there's only like 3 or 4 still in the game)).


my usual training kit trains pretty much everything at once so you can get a character with 60-80 stats across in the board in most things after about 5-7 in-game days (your toughness gains on day 1 heavily affect your training speed).

slave shackles can be used in place of wooden sandels if your opponents don't capture or eat you to improve early toughness gain by giving you more consistent mid-battle recoveries.

After that it's just making sure you fight enemies worth your time.

As a fresh character (and assuming you've cobbled your training set together out of shoddy/standard quality armor) you want something in the 25-30 stat range to get started with, after which you just train on those until you start winning consistently and easily. And then move on to something else about 15-20 points higher. And repeat. (if you're training recruits later once you've got access to better quality gear, Specialist and Masterwork quality can go straight for 35-45 stat enemies (going higher than that is somewhat counter-productive as you'll already be at the SOL cap and simply losing faster which impacts your gains vs being close or at the cap just barely which at least ensures you're getting maximum value from the hits you're taking).

(due to the way the minimum damage on combat works, there's no real difference between a 5 skill enemy and a 30-ish skill enemy in terms of how much damage they're gonna deal to you, it's only once you got above that that damage starts creeping up enough to affect the training efficiency. However in terms of SOL xp gains, there's a massive one as assuming a 1 stat fresh character a 5 stat enemy will give 48% increased xp while a 30 stat enemy will give 348% increased xp, and for every point you gain, that bonus will drop by 12% and eventually turn into a penalty your modified skill is higher than there is. By wearing a penalty suit (-28 to -30), you can push that 30 skill enemy to the cap of 600% with an ~18 point buffer (giving you a little bit of extra time at max penalty before it starts falling off), while a 5 stat enemy would only be about as much XP as the 30 stat was without the penalty gear. But damage wise the fight is going to be pretty much the same.

You'll lose the first 2-3 fights (roughly day 1 of training assuming recovery in a bed) but gain massive amounts of melee defense and a highly variable amount of toughness, at which point your character hits a point where he can actually defend himself and fight for awhile which causes everything else to start jumping massively on Day 2 and beyond.

Hub starts have it easiest as you can simply go from Band of Bones to Kral's Chosen to Berserkers and have stats in the high 70's to low 80's in a few in-game days, and without having to hunt down wandering packs to do so since they have set spawn locations you can go set up camp near and train pretty easily at your leisure.

(Eastern Locations aren't quite as good but you can also afford to buy higher quality gear, so you train on what would normally be much less efficient enemies sooner which can somewhat make up for it, as Sand Ninja tower and the Rebel Swordsman that guard Simion can give decent gains, and Blood Raiders are similar stats to Dust Bandits, which while not quite as good as Band of Bones are still ok starter fodder for training, they just won't last quite as long before you need to move on to Ninjas to keep your gains up).

Make sure to bandage them up after doing so and don't try to train more than about 4 guys at a time or you'll potentially kill off the camps.


once you've got 4-5 guys trained up, the rest you can just suit up in training gear and train on whatever you come across as your strong guys can ensure the rest survive their fights while you travel around the world, and while not quite as efficient as min-maxing your SOL gains with careful enemy selection, you'll still make decent progress as even hungry bandits or starving vagrants will give ok-ish gains for little while in a full training set (but they aren't at SOL bonus cap and drop off sharply with every point you gain, so I wouldn't go out of my way to train on them, but if they attack you and running away would be annoying, they're not a complete waste of time to slaughter).

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Depending on where you are, setting up a base can also be a decent way to get training, as then the enemies will come to you. But you need to consider what factions you'll attract and make sure it's not anything that will eat or enslave you. And unless you've pissed off a major faction, base raids cap out at around Kral's Chosen level which in fairness, can get you to around 50-60 stats before the gains drop off a lot, which is plenty to crush base raiders, especially if you move your training gear to newer recruits and smashing them with your full stats. (though I normally never take the training gear off as it ensures you're getting the maximum possible value of anything you fight, even if it's just countering negative SOL (with a full penalty set even hungry bandits don't the maximum sol penalty until around ~55 or so stats

But is an option if you want to jump straight into base-building instead of training up first. Most raids are Dust-bandit level which is enough to jump start your training, and once you've got some cages set up you can take captives and switch to the Dojo method to help even out characters or catch new recruits up to speed quickly between raids.

[Fryskar]

Originally posted by kaiyl_kariashi:

Training strenght first isn't a mistake. It allows you to use any weapons w.o. speed penalty as well as use heavier armor and carry loot. Not benefiting from SoL doesn't matter for this.

You won't make a 60-80 accross all stats char in 5-7 ingame days w.o. using mods that boost xp gain massively.

[Bandy]

Running...

[kaiyl_kariashi]

Originally posted by Fryskar:

Originally posted by kaiyl_kariashi:

Training strenght first isn't a mistake. It allows you to use any weapons w.o. speed penalty as well as use heavier armor and carry loot. Not benefiting from SoL doesn't matter for this.

You won't make a 60-80 accross all stats char in 5-7 ingame days w.o. using mods that boost xp gain massively.

Default vanilla settings, no gameplay affecting mods.

That is the power of properly using the mechanics.



Strength and athletics are WORTHLESS to focus on actively because they will train passively while you're training everything else. So it's not worth even paying attention to vs stuff that actually matters.

Strength can't win fights. Athletics can't win fights.

Everything else you could be training WHILE training those passively, CAN win fights.

I.e. it's a mistake because it's a of waste of time that delays getting real tangible power ASAP.

It's why people think it takes forever to do anything in Kenshi, commonly citing 20-40 days before "the game begins" where as you can have a 4-6 man squad battle ready to explore the world and dominate all commonly available regional threats in 3-4 in-game days. (~2 more if in the East).

People will spend their whole first in-game week just trying to train athletics and strength and junk like Mining, when they could've had a battle hardened squad that could depose major factions in the same amount of time.

[Fryskar]

Originally posted by kaiyl_kariashi:

Originally posted by Fryskar:

Training strenght first isn't a mistake. It allows you to use any weapons w.o. speed penalty as well as use heavier armor and carry loot. Not benefiting from SoL doesn't matter for this.

You won't make a 60-80 accross all stats char in 5-7 ingame days w.o. using mods that boost xp gain massively.

Default vanilla settings, no gameplay affecting mods.

That is the power of properly using the mechanics.



Strength and athletics are WORTHLESS to focus on actively because they will train passively while you're training everything else. So it's not worth even paying attention to vs stuff that actually matters.

Strength can't win fights. Athletics can't win fights.

Everything else you could be training WHILE training those passively, CAN win fights.

I.e. it's a mistake because it's a of waste of time that delays getting real tangible power ASAP.

It's why people think it takes forever to do anything in Kenshi, commonly citing 20-40 days before "the game begins" where as you can have a 4-6 man squad battle ready to explore the world and dominate all commonly available regional threats in 3-4 in-game days. (~2 more if in the East).

People will spend their whole first in-game week just trying to train athletics and strength and junk like Mining, when they could've had a battle hardened squad that could depose major factions in the same amount of time.

You can claim whatever you want to, i'll claim its BS.

On a fresh start, you might hit 30-40 accross some combat stats in 5-7 day.
If you got a fully set up base with armor-, weapon- and roboticcrafting as well as a large varity of prisoners, you might hit 50 ish stats on 1 set of combat stats (=MA, MD, STR, DEX, TGH, 1 weaponskill).

Unless you heavily modded xp gain, you won't even bring 1/4 of the stats to 70-80 in 5-7day.

[Nhika]

Originally posted by Fryskar:

Originally posted by kaiyl_kariashi:

Default vanilla settings, no gameplay affecting mods.

That is the power of properly using the mechanics.



Strength and athletics are WORTHLESS to focus on actively because they will train passively while you're training everything else. So it's not worth even paying attention to vs stuff that actually matters.

Strength can't win fights. Athletics can't win fights.

Everything else you could be training WHILE training those passively, CAN win fights.

I.e. it's a mistake because it's a of waste of time that delays getting real tangible power ASAP.

It's why people think it takes forever to do anything in Kenshi, commonly citing 20-40 days before "the game begins" where as you can have a 4-6 man squad battle ready to explore the world and dominate all commonly available regional threats in 3-4 in-game days. (~2 more if in the East).

People will spend their whole first in-game week just trying to train athletics and strength and junk like Mining, when they could've had a battle hardened squad that could depose major factions in the same amount of time.

You can claim whatever you want to, i'll claim its BS.

On a fresh start, you might hit 30-40 accross some combat stats in 5-7 day.
If you got a fully set up base with armor-, weapon- and roboticcrafting as well as a large varity of prisoners, you might hit 50 ish stats on 1 set of combat stats (=MA, MD, STR, DEX, TGH, 1 weaponskill).

Unless you heavily modded xp gain, you won't even bring 1/4 of the stats to 70-80 in 5-7day.

Agreed.
Only possible way to "power level" to 70-80 is abusing mechanics like kidnapping Cat Lon or Bugmaster and glitching them into beds etc.
But even that you need to rip off a few arms for assassination boosts lol

[Nhika]

But to stay on topic... just train for what you need. No point training strength to 100 if you really only need 30-40 to wield a weapon that weights 8.

It's balancing act in Kenshi. Like if you want Samurai Armor.. you'll want athletics and strength up to make up for the negative traits. But in the beginning it's probably quicker to get equip everyone with assassin robes for +8 attack.

Then when they have high toughness.. it'll make the armor or weapon even better.
Min maxers will say just use mixed damage types like Fallen Sun to dominate endgame with some guys running Polearms for the range.. kick all the hivers for shek/skeletons etc lol.

But best ways to train is beating on targets, I recommend Gorillos and Beakthings, then move on to the UC or Holy Nation Mines.. pull some paladins out at a time and bonk them. (Dex with weak katanas for low damage)

Once you clear all of the mines etc you should have a group around 50-60+ you can kill the roaming paladins. Then it's just gearing up in high grade / yellow stuff and you're on the way to Tin Fist, Bugmaster, or Cat Lon... Kidnap one and train on them and you beat the game I guess lol

[Bedelguese]

Honestly, best way to start the game is to grind armor smithing at the beginning by setting up in town by buying a house and making headbands at your clothing station. At first you'll be making them at a small loss but once you get from shoddy to standard grade you'll start making a large profit and all it takes to make them is fabric which is a pretty cheap investment compared to the amount you'll be able to sell your headbands for later on. Once you have money to hire more goons you can kit them out easily at the stores in town and send them out into the wilds to get beat up knowing your craftsman is safe in town to potentially carry them back to your safehouse. Best part is clothing and actual armor fall under the same skill so your guy making masterwork headbands can easily swap to making masterwork armors when you get to that point

[Derek Withers]

I think you just need to find some harder opponents. With your stats Dust bandits arent going to give you many stat gains. With your stats I would start fighting Holy Nation patrols not to far North of the Hub. If you get the s**t kicked out of you retreat to the Hub to heal up and keep doing it.