How to Build Your First Base From Nothing!

In Kenshi, you start as a nobody, and building a base in the massive and brutal word from nothing can be daunting! This guide is not simply about building a base, but about all the preparations you'll need to make before laying the first brick. From earning enough money for construction materials to defending from your first raid - all you need is in this guide!

GET RICH

The more cats you have, the more secure you can make your base right from the get go. My preferred way of making cats is to buy a large building in a town and set up some sort of profitable crafting operation inside. There are many options, but I usually go for hashish and alcohol production. As you start making cats, expand your production and hired more people to operate the equipment. Once you get to the point where you're producing more than you can easily sell, your money problems will be just about over.

This guide is not focused on making money, but you can check out other guides for details on how to set up a steady revenue stream.

PREPARE

Invest your profits into everything you'll need to set up a base:

• Research everything you want to build in the beginning. My order of importance is 1) defenses (walls and turrets), 2) building shells, 3) mining and processing, 4) storage, 5) farms, 6) crafting stations, 7) everything else. Higher research tiers will require venturing out into ruins to find AI cores and Engineering Research, so hold off on those until you either have a good squad of fighters, a good thief or can afford to hire 2-3 mercenary squads to clear any enemies.
  
  
• Buy and stockpile enough food to feed the people that will be building and working in your base for at least a week. You don't wanna worry about starvation while busy with construction and base defense.
  
  
• Buy and stockpile construction materials in order of importance: 1) Building Materials, 2) Iron Plates, 3) Fabric, 4) Electrical Components, 5) Steel Bars, 6) Copper Alloy Plates (the first two are key for almost anything).
  
  
• Recruit more people to build, defend and work in the base. Ideally, you want to go with some specialists, if you can find them, especially engineers, turret gunners, farmers and fighters.
  
  
• Buy pack animals to transport your materials to the construction site. I also use them to store the food for my whole squad.
  
  
• [OPTIONAL] If I don't have 6-8 good fighters by the time I get everything else ready, what I like to do is buy another building in town and set it up as a training area with a bunch of training dummies. You can also train by imprisoning NPCs, giving them low-quality weapons and attacking them (imprison>fight>heal>repeat).
  
  If you want to make this easier, there are mods that introduce more training items and better training dummies that allow you to get key combat skills up to 30. There's even a training weapons mod for the prisoner sparring tactic I mentioned above. They do 0 damage and you can pretty much spar with those until you get tired (it makes things a bit too easy tho). Of course, you can also just train by sending your people to fight some low level NPCs, like Starving Bandits. Just make sure you have enough medical supplies to heal them up and a couple of buddies nearby to rescue them if they all end up unconscious after the fight.

SCOUT

Send your fastest and/or sneakiest character to scout out a good building location (use the prospecting button and common sense). The ideal location depends on your objectives, but this is what people generally look for:

• Nearby stone, iron and copper. You need stone for building materials, iron for iron plates and steel bars and copper for copper alloy plates and electrical components.
  
  
• Good fertility and water availability. If you can't get these, you can compensate by building more farms and wells, but your per building efficiency will be limited.
  
  
• Defensible location. To save on walls, find a place that has a few natural choke-points to funnel raiders towards your turret kill zone. Some people also build their gates behind pools of water that force raiders to swim or walk slowly, making them easy targets (Shem is the perfect area for this and also has good resources).
  
  
• Central location. If you want to use your base as a safe haven for general exploration, you don't want to put it at the end of the world.
  
  
• Low threat raids. If you really want to play is safe, build in areas that don't have tough raids, such as the Border Zone or Shem.
  
  
• Proximity to towns/waystations. From time to time, you'll need to restock on supplies you're not producing in your base. Ideally, you want to have some shops not too far from your base for supply runs.

TO THE CONSTRUCTION SITE!

At this point, you know exactly where you'll be building and have all the resources ready. If you have some extra cats, tour nearby bars and hire 2-3 mercenary squads to guard your caravan, then rally your squad and get going. Avoid traveling through dangerous areas, if possible. Better to take the long way around than to risk losing all your hard-earned resources.

Make sure your main group is traveling at the same speed. If possible, send a scout ahead of the main caravan to draw away any large groups of enemies you don't want to deal with.

START BUILDING

Start by building a gate, walls and turrets. This will prepare you for any early raids. Even the best gate doesn't have a lot of hit points, so you don't wanna rely only on a gate for protection. You should use turrets to gun down most of a raid squad before it reaches your gate. If they do reach your gate, have 2-3 people at hand to repair it (requires no materials). You can also have x-bows shooting through the gate. The "best practice" gate defense is to have a long corridor of walls on both sides of the gate, enough to fit 5-6 turrets on each side. By the time a raid squad makes it through this corridor of death, they are usually not much of a threat.

After you have your defenses up, you can relax a little bit and start building everything else. I like to start with power supply and storage, then mining and processing so I can produce my own construction materials, then I set up farms and cooking, then crafting stations. Of course, build building shells as needed to house everything. Don't forget to build light so your people don't suffer skill penalties for working in darkness.

DEFEND!

You'll get a few minutes warning before a raid arrives. Use this time to make sure the gate is locked, that your people are manning the turrets and that you have your engineers ready to repair the gate. Any melee warriors should be placed as close to the gate as possible, but out of the firing line of x-bows. You'll only need them if the gate is breached, but if you feel like you've thinned the raiding party enough with your ranged fire, you can open the gate and throw the melee fighters a bit of a training bone so they can up their skills.

If you have time and need extra fighters, you can go to a bar, hire mercenaries and send them to defend your outpost. You can hire as many merc squads as you need. If you're close to an allied faction, they may also send forces to help defend your outpost.

But what if a huge army of powerful NPCs attacks and I can't take them?! As with everything in Kenshi, running is always an option. Evacuate the base and send your squad to the nearest safe town or waystation. The raiding party will likely occupy your base for a few days, then leave. Send a scout to check when it's safe to return.

MARVEL AT YOUR CREATION!

At this point, you've set up all the basics, automated all production and can look down on your base from above as a proud god! From this point on, expanding your base will be much easier than it was to build it from scratch. Just remember to be careful - this is still Kenshi and the world can sucker punch you when you feel most comfortable!

[kENSHIfAN]

Don't forget that all good settlements begin with a prayer and the erection of a mighty statue of our teacher and protector, Holy Lord Phoenix, blessed be his name.

[Celestial Fox]

this looks spawned from debug menu also this palm trees and boulders near your base will be deleted if you save/load

[Kinzuko]

i didnt follow any of this other than the bit that said to research everything. i have taken to locking raiders in the only building in my base killing any stragglers and waiting for them to want to leave before unlocking the door and running away again. so far this has worked quite well... also im in a swamp so i cant produce food yet lol.

[LostHydra]

Iceberg. I believe it is okrans pride. The heart of holy territory

[Adamantor]

I've set up base in cannibal plains, for a long time i was hermit with bonedog, as i expanded base (territorial and manpower means), ive got noticed, but- I managed. Now I don't even care about the gate- cuz its only one way in and it gets closed ONLY if there is some counter attack going towards my base.
Started from nothing, towards bakery, then smith, now I'm selling almost everything x)

[Ivo]

Looking at the screenshot tho, I think it's somewhere in Okran's Pride.

[Ivo]

That's just some random screenshot I found online since I didn't have one from my base on hand while writing this. My primary base is actually in Shem, which is also prime fucken real estate.

[Iceberg Slim]

Yo where the fuck did you set up your base that shit is some prime fucken real estate