Kitten's Kenshi Guide for Beginners (Secrets & Strategies)

Hello, my name is Kittentheboss and today i would like to share with you a guide to help newcomers really enjoy kenshi and it's vanilla gameplay. Aside from UI and map mods.

INTRO

BEFORE YOU READ THERE ARE SPOILERS BELOW. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED
Well you just bought kenshi and booted it up and you don't know what to do. Your squad keeps getting downed or killed and you're sick of it! Well what if i told you that was the point of kenshi. Your squad is supposed to go down in order to level up. The first thing to address is the toughness stat. It is tied to the KO point stat. You will go down when your; Head, Chest, or Stomach goes in the negative at a certain point. Example; KO Point is at -39 so once one of those parts goes below you will be in a recovery coma until that part(s) heals above 0. Medkits only keep humans/shek/hive from dying. You can use sleeping bags to heal 400% faster OR rent/make a bed for a nice 800%. Ok so i just wanna kill stuff and get Meitou grade weapons. Well in order to train attack to reck the HN or UC you need to land a hit to gain exp. In order to land a hit you need a high toughness. Well this information is important. You may also want to toggle stealth the entire time playing to help level it up. Screw training dummies because the world is your training dummy. This guide will help you understand kenshi in a better way. This guide focuses on this sector of the map.


You should also figure out if you want skeletons or humans/shek as that can make a huge difference in terms of speeding the training process up. This is because skeletons do not need to eat and are healed completely using skeleton repair kits. The only downside is wear damage but you take so little that it doesn't really matter and can be healed at a repair bed at Iron HQ. If you are doing a skeleton only play-through I'd suggest choosing The Freedom Seekers Start. This is because skeleton recruits are rare and having 6 at start helps out in the long run. I also have a mod that allows vanilla skeletons to spawn at Black Dessert City default stats and all. I'm not here to plug my mod or anything and this guide is intended to be used without xp boosting or anything that affects the base game experience (Which my mod does). Not linking it here anymore so if you want it, look for it.

STARTING RACE

So what do i mean about races? Well, there are 4 to choose from. Each have their pros and cons. The holy nation hates all non-human races and they don't like women (They see them as having less rights e.g). They also hate prosthetic limbs.

Humans: Depending on the start you should be fine in any big territory like UC and HN and gender being male, you can choose some females but not a whole lot.

Shek: great at combat, used for fun, or role play. [HN hates them.]

Hive: Very weak, No good at combat and only certain subtypes are built for it. Used for; fun, challenge, or role play. There are mods to increase the immersion of playing this race.

Skeletons; Very durable (Higher than human health points), Don't need to eat, and they can use repair kits to FULLY heal their parts without using a repair bed, the downside is their max parts health lowers/degrades you will have to heal at a skeleton repair bed to fix the wear damage. It's only noticeable when it gets lower than 100, I highly recommend this as your starting race as this helped me find these mechanics myself. (Props to Kage for adding this -->) They also cannot heal blunt damage, it is their weakness.

START [Money Problems]

When you load into a game for the first time we need to fix our money problem. Instead of mining for minerals. The quickest way (for me) is to sell some drugs. literally. We need to head to the Secret Drug Farm. Here there will be 6 storm houses with one destroyed. There are 2 storm houses that are safe and once in find the hashish storage and take as much as you can carry. Next head over to Flats Lagoon and Sell them and buy a backpack to carry more. I prefer the thieves backpack later on but one of those stackable wooden backpacks will speed things up here. If you have enough hire another party member, do it, If you haven't already done so at The Hub. The 3 houses on the sides have 1 security spider inside. This is a matter of choice. You can rush in and steal as much hashish and rush out or you can lure out the spider to attack Landbats, Gorillos or any other enemy. Once you have a large sum of money and the hashish has been sold we can move on to the next step. Later on you should go to the Crumbling Labs and loot all the robotics and sell them at Flats. You can lure out the spiders to attack the King Gorrilo, allowing you to take your time looting the place. I got around 120k cats just from that place as well as some Ancient Science Books.

TRAINING

Once you have your cats we can now train. For this, your race matters. Be sure to assign medic/robotics as jobs with sneak enabled so once they regain consciousness they start to sneak heal with out you telling them to do so.

If it's a skeleton, pack up a few skeleton repair kits and go to the Ashlands and find a dome of your choice to harass. I'd recommend Ashland Dome 1 as it wont kill you as much or break off limbs. Keep getting downed until you fight it off and move to the second one. If you think you need to repair your skeleton(s). Take them to Iron HQ owned by the skeleton bandits and heal them there. The repair beds are free. This training is trail and error but it is the quickest way i know of for skeletons.

If it's a human/shek, Pack up some medkits and ration packs then go to Spring. Around there are creatures called Landbats and Gorillos. The reason why we go here to train is because of those animals in specific. They DO NOT eat you while you are downed. This makes them perfect for training. Pick fights with them and when your squad is all knocked out get back up and keep picking fights with them. If you are too low then go up to Spring and rent beds for your squad. Keep doing it and you will see results. If you are ballsy enough and think you are up to it go get a Fog Mask from a swamper or buy it from the Shinobi Thieves towers and go to the Ashlands. Then train at the domes.

ASSASSINATION TRAINING

Once you're at a desired attack level and toughness level. If you wanna get the Meitou weapons. You have to either A) over power them with your attack. or B) Assassinate them to steal their weapons. In most cases you will have to chose B. This is good if you want to keep faction relations but you also want the weapon their leader holds. Instead of training with dummies. We will train our stealth up. It would be more useful if you did this at the start by always making sure it was toggled. But once its at a reasonable level. We can train our assassination. For this i always go to Cat-Lon's Exile and go around the domes to go directly to Mad Cat-Lon and sneak in directly to the side of him and spam click assassination on him. You will see your assassination skill skyrocket. As well as Failed text in red. Feel free to get it to 80 or 90. The max is 100. Be careful spam clicking because you may loot his AI Core or Cpu Unit by mistake doing so will kill him. Once his dialog starts this is your grace time. Half way though his speech high tail it outta there or deliberately get downed by a weaker skeleton outside, You don't want Mad Cat-Lon to hit you because it's either going to be fatal or chop off a limb. This only works if you have a squad on stand buy with their positions set to hold to heal the one you want to train.

Assassination Training at work


Healer backup unit location on a hill

THIEVERY TRAINING

This one is a bit weird but the only location i know of to cheese this stat is at one of those cannibal houses.

Map location------------------------------------------------------------ Example house


Keep slapping that meat back and forth hover over the chest to make it easier for spam clicking!
Find some meat to slap in and out of chests and bam. You'll get lvl 80 Thievery in like a second.

WORLD STATES

This section talks about world states. This is Kenshi's bread and butter and why people like myself are drawn to it. You know how the HN doesn't like females and non-human characters? Well forget all that because if there is something wrong with the world you actually have the power to change it so long as you attain this power. You may have seen people with "Diplomatic Status" above their stats. (There are some exceptions to this like the Dust King) This is because that person is an important character in the world of Kenshi. For example; "High Inquisitor Seta" located in the town "Stack". Taking him out will cause a chain reaction. (You either have to kill, or imprison them to make the change happen). Kidnapping him and taking him to the Shek in Admag for increased faction relations with the shek as well as a bounty, This will cause the Holy nation's hold on 2 towns to be overridden by the control of the shek kingdom. (Stack and Bad Teeth) This stuff happens all over the world of Kenshi. Choosing the faction for you is the most important because it's your play-through. Also be careful changing the world like this. Your actions have consequences after all.

MEITOU/GG

What is Meitou? Its the highest grade weapon which means for that specific weapon. It's the best of that weapon. Feel free to target these and collect them but also be wary that they can still be stolen or taken off of you by other factions that intend to imprison you.

Here's more info on them if you want to check them out.
https://kenshi.fandom.com/wiki/Meitou

Here is a cheat sheet i made for dedicated players.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_cGefWehjYiec-c2C9zgG3MDsVb1ORpzp8It4igmcb4/edit?usp=sharing

BASE

Base locations come later.
I'm more fond of the Fog Islands as its spacious although you have to ward off the fogmen but thats also a plus for raid protection.
The main thing about base building is, it's your choice. So long as the base you have has near-by resources like; Copper, Iron, and Water. You don't need these things at 100% but it helps. Using the Prospect button also shows the near-by resources.
If you don't care then check out this base list https://www.gameskinny.com/kqjii/kenshis-best-base-locations-detailed

MODS

We all saw this coming eventually, but these mods not only increase immersion but are essential.

Slopeless: Allows you to build like everyone else
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1740462542

Bouncing Boobs: This is 100% essential.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1599736449

256 Recruitment Limit: Optional, though i recommend enabling this on certain playthroughs.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=705119823

Nice Map [Zones + Zone names + Roads]: This is the one i use and i highly recommend it.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1613829988

Compressed Textures Project: Helps load new terrain faster. Great for exploring!
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1649794243

Dark UI: Optional but also looks better.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1200632417

Impossible Start: Those that want more of a challenge. I've played it and it's awesome.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1365194526

Race Blood: Increases immersion. All blood is the same which doesn't make sense.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1434857344

[Kage]

Small correction regarding Skeletons and those with Skeleton limbs, they cannot heal Blunt damage with Repair Kits, they have to heal that normally, which makes armor with high Blunt resist gold.

[Fel]

Base location guides are copy pasted crap. There are even better locations with two or more biomes and every resource.

Basically choose your biome and then run around the biome's border until you found another biome or third biome in one place and until you found all of resource in the same spot.

For example I've settled on Swamp / Arid border biome with every resource behind my walls.
Only down-side is NO wind, so best approach is to buy building in the one of the desert city, do some slave trading and research everything for making biofuel and generators and other important things.

https://imgur.com/a/dknAbZ0

[marcelodumau]

thks buddy, helped me a lot

[Björn]

Good guide

[Cash]

Thank you for your hard work in putting all this together!