I realize there are options to start with a dog or with multiple characters. I highly recommend playing whatever you feel like is the most fun and obviously roleplaying is fun and all that, so again, choose your own style, but for this section I'm assuming you started with 1 character and I'll talk about how to efficiently develop a solo character to the point where that character can start recruiting other characters and possibly starting a town.

Pro tips (things that this section will cover and help you master):
1. As a solo character don't build your own town, it's going to take a lot of man power to make a town, you are better off training the skills on your starting character first.
2. The biggest problem in the beginning is food and to a smaller extent, money.
3. You start off really weak, basically with no training or very little training and not properly equiped for a fight, so don't go fighting right away.

These early problems are easily fixed and here's how:

1. Learn to Run by Running between 2 safe towns. Being able to outrun danger is very important and this skill is the first thing you should learn by simply running around a town or between 2 towns when you have a new character/recruit. Until you reach step 8 you should always run away from combat. Make it a goal to get your Athletics to 30. (30 is a soft cap that is harder to level beyond without spending ages. You will get Athletics much higher later, trust me, just get to 30 first so you can outrun bandits while you are unencumbered).

2. Mine copper and run around with your inventory filled with copper to gain strength. Copper is more valuable than iron so don't waste time mining iron. When you get hungry, go to town and sell the copper for dried meat and other food items that have nutrition. Then go back and mine more copper and then run around while overloaded. It is very important to level up strength to 30 before continuing to the next step. When you are running around overloaded, try doing that right outside a town with guards at the gate for protection.

3. By repeating steps 1 and 2 you should have a strong character who can run fast. Next, sneak around by walking through a town back and forth to level up stealth. Do this until you have 30+ stealth. Repeat step 2 for money and food. Do not buy gear, you don't need it, just focus on your training and save cats (money) for the future steps.

4. Once you have 10,000 or ten thousand cats go to Hub (find a wiki with a map of the game if you don't know where Hub is), and pay to join the Shinobi Thieves. This is so you can have early access to their advanced training dummies and other things like beds. It is cheaper than making it all yourself.

5. Train assassination to level 19 on the training dummy and pick the locked chests that are level 80+ to quickly level up your thievery skill as high as you like. Thievery is useful even if you don't plan on stealing since it helps you unlock shackles if you ever become enslaved. Stealth also lets you escape slavery. Stealth + Assasination lets you kidnap bandits for using them as training/sparring partners and that is why this is important.

6. Either find some hungry bandits or dust bandits and sneak up on one of them from behind to knock them out. Run away if you are unsuccessful, but if you are, pick up the unconscious victim and sneak away with him/her. As long as you carry the victim they can't escape. Don't worry about being affected by the weight, your strength will increase until the weight doesn't slow you.

7. Keep this captive fed, heal him/her, and take care of this captive like an expensive shiny weapon, and DO NOT let him or her escape! This captive will level up skills along with you from fighting you and by repeating this process you level up your skills extremely efficiently.

8. Loot everything from this unconscious victim. Both you and the captive should be naked and unarmed before you set him/her down. Then initiate a fight. By fist fighting you level up Martial Arts (in case you're interested), but more importantly you level up your toughness faster by taking multiple hits that don't kill you. Get your toughness to 30 by doing this. Repeat step 2 for money to buy food and medical supplies. Save before each fight so you don't end up losing the fight and thereby losing the sparring partner. (Later you can build cages and such, but right now you are relying on winning to keep this going and then you heal the captive and pick them back up). It is best to find an area a reasonable distance away from town so guards won't attack but still close enough for you to go back to town if you need safety once the fight is over.

9. Eventually, once your toughness is 30 or more switch over to using a club/staff. These should be easy since all hungry bandits and dust bandits carry clubs. Start training using clubs to increase your attack and defense to 30 each (your dexterity should be going up as well but very slowly, don't worry about it, we will do that next). Be sure to equip a club for your captive as well or the fight will be over too quickly and you won't get much training done.

10. Save up some money to buy some cheap katanas, or simply steal them from the shinobi thieves tower in Hub by sneaking in and looting from their locked chests and weapons racks (Even if you do this they don't get mad at you, as long as you're not stupid enough to try to fence or sell back what you stole to them). Equip a Katana (or any katana class weapon) on yourself and also your captive and fight with these weapons until you reach 30 on dexterity.

At this point you should feel fairly safe to fight and defend yourself against small groups of hungry bandits. You can go up against a small group of dust bandits too at this point and last quite a while, but you likely won't survive. You can choose to continue training or you can go to the next section of this guide to look into recruitment and possibly starting a small town.

11. If you want to continue training, the next step is to switch over to heavy weapons like the plank. Get strength to 50 with planks and also get dexterity to 50 with katanas. At this point it is important to invest in some armor for both yourself and your sparring partner/captive, because the damage both of you can do at this point can be quite deadly.

12. Once you have 50 dexterity and 50 strength, and likely 50 on both defense and attack, you are ready to wield the Falling Sun. This weapon is a very strong late game weapon that can dominate any foe and can also do devastating damage to groups of enemies. This is because it uses both dexterity and strength to do damage and most armors specialize in defending against one or the other but not both. You can buy a Falling Star in Squinn or any Shek city. Another similarly good weapon type is the Saber class of weapons that have things that also do both types of damage. Definitely look into those as well. But why not start with Sabers you might ask? Katanas and Planks focus on one stat and in doing so they help you level Strength or Dexterity more efficiently. Yes, this way you will have to level the weapon skill from scratch, but the stats that support the use of the weapon is already there so you can still be very effective and once you level up the weapon skill you will get more out of the weapon than if you only leveled that same weapon from the start, because your raw stats will be better. You can still level using planks and katanas to beyond 50 but that's really up to you where you want to take your training. Keep in mind that above and beyond 50 base stats, you will want to invest in better quality weapons and armors since they apply a modifier to your stats to calculate damage (it's not a big deal in the beginning since you don't have stats to speak of so those modifiers don't matter a whole lot, but once you have monster stats, getting a better quality weapon can make a huge difference in your damage).

I think the biggest mistake is spreading yourself too thin by trying to do too many things at once and running into problems. In real life it might not be that bad, but in Kenshi your mistakes can get you killed so it's important to be very well prepared and to take proper steps.

Pro tips:
1. Recruiting too many characters at the start will be very inefficient because then you are stuck with repeating the process I talked about in the previous section for ALL your recruits because you won't have the food production needed to feed all of them.
2. Even though you will be recruiting more characters, they won't have the training your main character already has so you still can't take on a group of bandits and expect to win without a lot of injuries. Because of this and because once you start a town you need to be able to defend it, getting proper equipment for your characters is a very important goal to have.
3. Depending on what your goals are, it is important to recruit the right races and specialize them for the right jobs.

This section will help account for all the considerations listed above.

1. Before you even think about recruiting, you need to get your main character a backpack. I found that personally I like the thief backpack and you can get one from the Shinobi Thieves after you join them for 10,000 cats like I mentioned in the previous section. The reason for this is you need to allow your main character to be your "trader" and be able to carry large amounts of copper to the towns nearest your new settlement location to sell for cats (money), and then use it to buy food to feed your new recruits and also to buy things like Building Materials, Iron bars, books, and crops such as Wheat/Rice/Cactus/etc. The reason you want to use your main character for this is simply because you've already invested the time into making a character strong enough to carry all this weight and still be able to run decently fast, and have decent combat stats. This makes your main character highly efficient at being your trader character in the beginning.

2. Now that you have a backpack, go mine copper in vast amounts, filling up all your inventory AND your backpack and make trips back to the city fully loaded with copper so you can sell for money (cats). You want to accumulate some money to recruit with, and this also allows your character to get any additional strength necessary to carry this much weight without being slowed down by it too much. With enough strength your character should be able to run at a decent jogging pace while fully loaded, and even though this sounds ridiculous, it's actually quite doable.

3. Planning on who to recruit:
- You want to aim to recruit until you have about 6-9 characters. Too many and you will mostly just be feeding them with your profits... so don't over recruit! Too few and you don't have enough labor to quickly set up your first settlement.
- Use the following spreadsheet to look up info on in depth racial traits. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9KRZgauOzscN2FIVzhWUjJlRkE/view
- Note particluarly food consumption. Hive worker, prince, and soldier eat a lot less than other races(45%, 50%, and 60% respectively). Scorchlanders also only eat 90% food) making them also a good early pick. You can recruit Hive Characters at Clownsteady (be careful running through the swamp with your main character, save lots!) and Scorchlanders in Fishing Village (dead cats) north of Worlds End. If you start with multiple characters instead of 1 character, it's ideal to start with harder to recruit types like Skeletons, Scorchlanders, and Hive Princes/workers as these are the most efficient and valuable early on.
- While it isn't particularly important right now to have everything figured out, try to have at least 1 or 2 characters that you recruit be good at farming. The best is the Hive Worker and then Greenlander which is fairly common and easy to recruit.
- While it is nice to have more farmers, don't just recruit 6-9 farmers... each race or type of character has a different role and they are all good at something down the road. Also, every character is good at combat in their own way so don't worry about combat when recruiting, even the hive worker can become deadly at combat, I will cover combat specialization in a later section of this guide.

4. Saving up money and materials comes next and what I mean is, once you spend the money you have saved up to recruit these characters, the next part is saving up money to buy the "start up materials" you need to get yourself started. The best way is to find a cluster of copper veins and set all your characters to mine copper. Use your main character to merchant the copper that you mine, with each trip being a fully loaded trip with backpack. Save up enough money to buy exactly 12 iron plates and 6 building materials. Also, although not required, it is nice to equip all your characters with cheap katanas. (unlike your main character who trained toughness through martial arts, your new recruits won't have that luxury, so set your main character to taunt, and if there's a group of bandits or any fight, use your main character to tank and let your other characters do damage with katanas to defend your future base, but katanas aren't required for this).

5. Once you have exactly 12 iron plates and 3 building materials (your other characters can help carry) you are ready to begin a new town/city. So now it is time to scout a location.
- The location that you decide to settle ultimately doesn't matter in the long run since eventually you will want to relocate for a more permanent location, but in the short run you need a smallish noob settlement to help you with:
a. producing food
b. teching up
c. setting up training dojos
- When looking for this initial location look for these things:
a. access to water (try to build a well without actually building it by pressing confirm, you can check for water percentage, try to find a location with 60% or better water for your wells)
b. access to mineral resources (stone/iron/copper), ideally you want to find a location with both iron and copper right next to each other and check the ground around it for stone percentage.
c. You want flat land, doesn't matter what type of land as long as it has water and you have easy access to minerals to mine, the only other thing you want is a sizable area of flat land to place buildings and farms on.
d. One minor consideration is to find a location that isn't going to get taxed. At the time of writing this guide only Empire collects taxes so don't sette in Empire territory for your first base, since paying 3000 cats every 2 weeks is a major drain that you can't really afford.
- One other consideration is if you want traffic to come to your town (bandits, traders, merchants, wild animals, etc.) it nice to build your city so that a road runs through the middle of it and two gates.

6. Once you find a location that meets the criteria above, build these three things and only these three things:
- Build a stone mine
- Build a stone refinery
- Build an iron refinery

With these made you have your own supply of iron plates and building materials and don't need to buy them anymore.

7. Once you have those built, start mining and refining with your recruits to get building materials and iron plates made for the next things you need to be built. I recommend having 2-3 settlers set on mining copper constantly so you can sell them at the nearest towns with your main character to buy the next things you need as well as buy food for your people.

By having your own supply of Stone/Building Materials and Iron/Iron Plates you should be able to make the next things fairly quickly and easily:
- Build a well
- Build a small shack
- Build a research bench inside the small shack

Please remeber to KEEP FEEDING THE CAPTIVE on your main character's back if you did the first part of my guide and actually trained your first character!

In the late game once every stat and every skill gets leveled up your characters can do very fun and interesting combinations of epicness, but early on and especially when just starting from scratch, these characters should be given what their racial traits are good at, since there aren't any stats or skills leveled up, the only real difference they have between each other are the base stats so based on those base stats and racial traits that is what that character is good at in the beginning and if you want to start a town then these are the roles given by the game. You can change them later through training but we'll talk more on that later.

1. If you take a look at this spreadsheet (someone else made it but I find it very useful so I'm posting it here) you will see that each race has different combat attributes such as bleed rate, combat speed, limb HP, heal rate, and move speed (this spreadsheet was not made by me but I found it on one of the guides for Kenshi and it is very useful):
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9KRZgauOzscN2FIVzhWUjJlRkE/view

2. By looking at this spreadsheet you can tell that the sturdiest characters are Skeletons (personally I've never used skeletons because of how expensive they are since they have to be repaired using repair kits... and also since they don't require food like my other settlers it doesn't really fit in with my play style, but I may make a guide/section about them later specifically dedicated to skeletons) and Sheks. Then there's the Hive Soldiers, Scorchlanders, and Greenlanders who tie with each other, and the most fragile characters are the Hive Workers and Hive Princes. I'm basing this off of the Limb HP stat, which is the key stat to consider when deciding who will be your "tanks". Since it is early on in the game your characters don't have enough stats and skills to offset their weaknesses, so these basic stats by race are the stats that will impact combat most heavily early on. Set any Sheks you have to use Taunt (unless you have a shek doctor), and if you followed my guide, then also set your main character with all the combat training we've invested into him/her to also have taunt on. This is key to your group's early survival in a group fight. Also if you like to micro manage the fight by pausing repeatedly, you can "juggle HP" by bringing anyone who is low hp on their limbs back and putting more healthy characters in front of them to protect the weakened ones from going down.

3. Next lets look at weapon damage and figure out how damage works and what we're weak to (I say early on, because later when you put enough training in, your characters can wield any weapon or wear any gear and be effective, but early on with no or low skills the racial attributes really matter a lot more). There's 2 main damage types... blunt and cutting. Blunt damage comes from Strength stats and Cutting damage comes from. Blunt damage usually hits you for limb damage that is instant damage, it also applies a bleed but it is usually a bit less than cutting weapons. Cutting weapons like katanas have a much higher bleed factor. While both weapon types give instant damage, let's say for now that cutting weapons are the main weapons that deal bleed damage. Looking at the stats for bleed rate we can see that once again the Shek is ideal for tanking with a 90% bleed rate, but what is surprising is that all Hive people have only 20% bleed rate, meaning they resist bleeding quite well. You can then make the next conclusion to say they are more resistant to cutting weapons than the other races. BUT, they still have the least in terms of Limb HP and early on Limb HP is what matters most because regardless of the weapons you are up against, you will be taking base damage (cutting/blunt) + bleed damage. It does mean that late game, the Hive characters are better capable of tanking against cutting weapons like katanas (once they have their toughness leveled up). While bleed rate doesn't tell us which weapons to use, we have a solid understanding of potential damage to be taken at this stage.

4. The stat to look at next to really give a good picture of how you want to equip your characters early on is Combat Speed. Hive Princes and Hive Workers are the fastest fighters, Hive Soldiers are second, Scorchlanders and Greenlanders are tied for third and both Sheks and Skeletons are slowest. This stat, combat speed, is a base stat. I think you can improve it with higher dexterity, but even so the base Combat speed dictates how fast you attack and defend as you level dexterity. Since Hive Prince and Hive Worker not only tie for fastest Combat speed, but also have the highest Dexterity leveling rate, they seem destined to be very good for specializing in Katana class weapons to really exploit their speed since katanas are a fast weapon. Another good option is Pole Arms as they are also a fast weapon class. This also means that Sheks are good at Heavy weapons since they attack slow anyway and they also level up attack stat quickly. Soldiers and Scorchlanders and Greenlanders are flexible, but I would give them either cheap katanas or sabers at this stage of the game. All very typical and "stereotypical" at the start, but you really want to play into the "stereotypical" when you have no training.

5. There is also a role that is a bit dangerous but useful and that is a combat medic who is on passive and who is constantly running around in the fight trying to heal your characters who are fighting. I say dangerous because you don't want to lose your doctor since that will slow down the healing after the fight, but this is a nice way to add some survivability to your group during a group fight.

6. So a quick summary:
-Sheks are slowish tanks who tend to resist every kind of damage in the game but they move and hit a bit slower, they are suited for using heavy weapons right off the bat but their main role is tanking so giving them taunt helps your team out.
-Scorchlanders/Greenlanders don't really have much in terms of specialization from the start, so giving them a variety can help early game wise... sabers, katanas, hackers are all ok choices but honestly it can all change later once you start your serious training with them.
-Hive Worker/Prince/Soldiers are all very fragile in the early game, their one bonus is that they can move faster and attack/defend faster through their faster combat speed. Katanas make a lot of sense for them early game and so does Polearms that some of them start with.

While Workers and Princes can be deadly late game, right now in this early stage of the game they're the weakest. Greenlanders seem to just be bad at everything in terms of fighting, Sheks are tanks, and Hive soldiers are decent fighters early on, with Scorthlanders being the most OP late game.

So from reading the previous section you now know how to find some recruits, how to get started with access to water, iron, copper, stone, and flat land, and how to very efficiently get access to your own source of building materials and iron plates for further development.

While it is also important to talk about defending your town from wandering groups of hungry bandits and dust bandits, I will save that for the next section and focus this section entirely on the building and planning of your first town/city.

Pro Tips:
- I know it may be tempting to build a lot of buildings and trying to plan out the layout of your great city, but honestly just like you don't want to recruit too many settlers and not have food to feed them early on, don't rush to build too many buildings, I will tell you what buildings you will need to plan for early on to save you time and give you better efficiency. (that said you can do what you like on your play through, this guide is only focused on efficiency)

- While it is also nice to think about the future of what you want, keep in mind what is realistic and what your most present needs are for your town. Take care of the basics first and the rest will follow. The basics of what you need and the main purpose for this first town are:
a. To farm and have a steady food supply for your people
b. To create a steady supply of medkits for your people
c. To create a safe place to train and improve the skills of your people (especially combat).

- So with those goals in mind, what you need to accomplish the following are simply Books and starting supplies of things like Wheat, Cactus, Hemp, Cotton, etc.

1. The first things to make as mentioned above in the previous section are a well to help with farming as soon as possible, a shack with a research bench (since you have to build the research bench indoors). Once you have built these things, go with your first character with as much copper as he/she can carry and go to the nearest town with a general store that sells books and farming supply. You can loot the captive and fill his/her inventory with copper, in addition to your own inventory, AND the backpack!!

You will want to spend some of the money you get from selling your copper to buy dried meat and dried fish as they are the cheapest foods to feed your people with while being also quite filling. Also load up on books on your first trip along with as much wheat/cactus/greenfruit/riceweed as yuo can carry. The food that is available for sale depends on the area you are in, it is nice that the city or town closest to your settlement will likely have the type of food crops you can grow in the area, since different crops are better suited for different types of terrain, you will easily find the ones that are the best for your area. Here's a link to a guide on how this works: http://gtm.steamproxy.vip/app/233860/discussions/0/365163686059866699/

2. Initial Research: After you return with books, research the food type you would like to grow along with storage tech. It is also nice to research all the tech that you can get without having to pay for them with books. In the beginning it is better to be efficient with your books on getting farming started and medkit production started. You will have time later for more books, but if your group of people get wiped out by bandits or starve to death, it's going to be a much bigger problem.

3. Setting up automation: To help with the process of buying books and crops, as well as selling copper, build a storage for Building materials next to your stone processer and stone mine. Build an iron storage for your iron plates next to the iron processor and iron node. Finally build a copper storage. Next, you want to automate the process of producing these things by assigning jobs. To assign a job hold down shift while right clicking on the thing you want done, such as clicking on the stone processor while holding down shift with a settler selected, it will give that settler a job to go do that task. For now, assign 2 people for Stone Processor, then give them a second task of working on harvesting stone. This will make them want to use the stone processor when there is stone, and once there isn't enough stone they will switch over to mining stone. Finally give them a third task to haul to building material storage so that once the stone processor is full they will automatically transfer the building materials. The same can be said for iron and copper. Now you have automated the process and you should start racking up these materials nonstop.

4. Feeding your people and preparing for farming: it is a good idea once you have researched storage to build a water tank next to your well and have someone be set on operating that well and filling up the water tank. This will prepare you ahead of time for farming as you will be needing water in large quantities soon. That said, the first batches of crop will not be used to feed your people but instead are to be reseeded so that you can make multiple patches of crops. For this reason, and to save yourself time (and many trips to the city), the first patch for each crop type should be the smallest you can build. Build it near the water source. It doesn't matter too much at this point the layout, because later you can take this down. The idea is to buy the minimal amount of crops from the store to get yourself started, then once that first patch grows, you can immediately invest what you have grown to making larger and larger patches of the same crop until you have multiple patches of it of the largest size. It is best to have 2-3 smallest patches first, then use those to seed the largest size patches once they start growing. You will want your best farmer set to only farming for all your crops since they have the highest chance of getting yield out of your crops when harvesting. Feed your people with the dried meat you buy from the city while this is going on, you can use your main character to trade with each and every one of your other characters individually to feed them.

5. Setting up the Belly of your City: Remember how we automated our mining and production so we don't have to bother with micromanaging it? Now it is time to do the same with farming and food production. I presume you understand that you will be making more trips to the nearest city to buy more crops to fill up that first patch, and more books to unlock new tech. Don't waste time on tier 1 tech things that you don't need as it is fairly easy to reach tech 2 using books. First is the layout:
- Build a storm building or any larger bulidng you like (I prefer the storm building for this purpose) in the dead center of where you would like your city to be, or dead center of where you want to grow crops to minimize the distance between the crops and the kitchen as this building will be your food production and storage building. This kitchen is a building you will want to keep the doors open at all time and is one of the most important and valuable buildings you want to defend from bandits and raids of any kind. Open door policy is because you need people going in and out with food items constantly and therefore it is very vulnerable to attack and theft so you want it to be the center of your city and the most protected. Your belly.

- Build wells on the corners of this building. And then build a water storage on either side. In the back of the building, build 1-2 grain silos, and 1-2 ovens. At the front of the building build wheat storage and bread basket inside. (I am assuming you are making a city either on a green terrian or Arid terrain since Swamp is not a good place to start a first city, and based on that assumption you will always want to have wheat as your first food source to make bread).

- Now since you already have your first patches growing, build the largest possible patches of wheat on one side of the building, ideally on the side with storage.

(more pg 2)

(continued...)
- Now you can automate this by setting first your farmer to only farming crops/patches. Then another settler should be set on hauling duties. This hauler should be set to haul crops to their appropriate storage, as well as hauling water to the water storage, and finally to haul the bread from the ovens to the food storage. The hauler is a great job to give a new settler or recruit to level up his/her athletics. Ideally you want a Hive Worker or Greenlander to be your designated farmer as they gain the most experience for farming and will be much better at it faster.

- Later, once you have Greenfruit (if you are in green terrain) or Cactus (if you are in Arid Terrain) you will be able to combine them with bread to make a much more nutritious and filling food in either Food Cubes (greenfruit + bread) or Dustwich (cactus + bread) by building a stove. I suggest building the stove inside the kitchen building at the furthest inside wall and then placing the vegetable(greenfruit) or cactus storage bins near the stove near the center of the building. This makes things more efficient in terms of movement for your people. The reason for getting access to the higher level food and combining bread with vegetables is due to the fact that these higher tier foods can feed your people far more efficiently, instead of being eaten completely in one go, a dustwich for example will be used slowly over time like a medkit, giving you more efficiency at feeding your people for less crop cost. In this way you can also accumulate food, which is very GOOD because eventually you will want to go on an adventure with your people to explore labs and artifact locations to get higher tier tech. Storing food is always good and by having the higher tech foods you can start to store up a lot of them :) Set someone to be your main cook and set the stove to repeat queue on either the dustwich or the Food cube. (it's funny to read the descriptions because I think I'd much rather eat a dustwich than starve or having to eat regular cactus or bread all day and in fact, from the sheer amount of work to produce the dustwich, I'm quite proud to eat those). The stove does require power to operate, and I will cover power in the section dealing with defense.

- When you can make dustwichs or food cubes make a food bin or two right outside the door of your kitchen to allow easy access for your hungry settlers, they will automatically run to the food bin to grab something to eat. Before you have that, they will run to your bread baskets to eat bread.

Next we will go into talking about medkit production, base defense, and general healthcare.

As mentioned previously, we also want Medkit production and later on, a dojo for training combat skills. Since we will require a lot of medkits for training in combat skills and since keeping your people alive after a fight requires medkits, you can see why after farming and food supply is set up, the next concern is medical supplies.

1. Cotton/Hemp Production: Based on your location there will be different yields for either Cotton or Hemp. Cotton is best for green, and Hemp is best for arid. I've been leaving out the swamp for now because honestly you shouldn't start your first base in the swamp... it's too dangerous. Cotton and Hemp are the "crops" that you grow in order to make fabric and fabric is what you use to make medkits. SO, the first thing to do to get started on the healthcare system of your noob town is to go get either cotton or hemp and start growing them near your farm area. They can be further away from the kitchen because they aren't meant to go into the food prep area but you still want them close to the food crops so that your farmer can have easy access.

2. With greater yields of cotton and hemp, you can start accumulating them in a storage while you prepare what I would call the HQ/Hospital. I like to make a Bughouse or any one of those really large tier 2 buildings for this purpose. Ideally you want to place it near where you grow your hemp and where you place this building should be also where your gates are if you plan on walling off your town. By keeping this building close to the gates you keep your medical supplies and beds closer to where fights occur and it improves the odds of survival and also makes it more convenient to haul your injured fighters. Inside this HQ at the furthest back part of the building I like to place my tier 2 research bench. Again this need power, just like the stove, so clearly that will be our next step.

3. Sell some copper in town with your first character once again and this time buy electrical components. It takes 4 for each battery and you will need a few. Obviously buy more books since you need some books to unlock further research. What you will be aiming to research are the ability to make windmills (Or if you prefer, the ability to make biofuel to burn wheat for fuel, but I recommend wind energy for less work required). Upon returning to your town you can now research the battery tech. Build some windmills (Wind generators) on hills or mountains near your town, or if you are only near flat ground, anywhere inside your town is fine. Then build a few batteries near your tier 2 research bench inside the HQ. The power generated by the wind generators will charge the batteries up and give you electricity to power your stove and your tier 2 research bench, which unlocks lots of new possibiilties for you such as the ability to produce basic first aid kits (I've been calling them medkits).

4. Once you have that set up, you can research what you need to get fabric loom and medical bench and once you build those inside your HQ you can set someone who is your medic to produce first aid kits (medkits) nonstop along with fabrics nonstop using the cotton or hemp you've been saving up while getting all this set up. Make the appropriate storage bins for fabric and medkits close by inside the HQ and your HQ will start producing this very important resource for your people.

5. Next comes beds. You can research beds and then place them inside your HQ or if you prefer, you can make a big building specially for healing the injured by building a building and filling it with beds nearby. It is also a nice idea to have a bed or two inside every building including the kitchen so that in cases of emergencies you can move your wounded to the closest bed on site. The HQ or Hospital where you put most of your beds should be closest to the gate where the fighting will occur.

6. Field Medic: So now that you have medkits and beds to heal your people on, it is important to talk about actually using the basic first aid kits... Personally I think you should do both methods:
a. You should have one main doctor and when there isn't a fight going on, set that doctor's first job (highest on his job list) to Medic, followed by Rescue, and then produce medical supplies next such as medkits and fabrics. I would keep this main doctor on passive to prevent him/her from joining the fighting so he/she won't get unconscious, since an unconscious doctor won't do you any good.
b. You should also give a medkit to every single person in your town. Then give them the Medic job but keep that job at the bottom of their list. Whenever there is a fight or when there's a group of bandits, they will join the fight and all you have to do is select all your people and turn off jobs. Once you turn off jobs the medic job will still be active (on) so they will heal each other with medkits after a group fight and it makes the whole process a lot faster and can save your people from bleeding out while waiting for the doctor to heal them. When you have a lot of injured people, having one doctor to heal them each limb by limb is going to take too long and some of them might end up dying so group healing is best for that situation. I will go into greater detail in the defense section on how to use your doctor and how to use your medkits with the rest of your people.

This concludes what I have to say about Healthcare and next I will make a guide on defenses for your new town and also how to properly defend yourself when there's a fight with a group of bandits.

You have 6-9 settlers with one of them being your super hero main character that you've spent time training up and now you have a smallish town with a few buildings, a farm up and running, and some basic research at level 2 along with medical supplies being made. Congrats you've just cleared your survival portion of township, but wait, the bad guys will want a piece of the action... they want what you have... hungry bandits and dust bandits will come to try to ruin your day... so here's what we do. We defend what we have worked so hard to build.

Protips:
1. While it is not required to have a wall around your building it is good to have it made to control traffic. If you have a wall with a gate it helps you funnel incoming enemies into one small area and you can control that chokepoint easier.
2. The reason why you don't make the tier 1 walls is they are bad and don't give you the option to mount things on them. Tier 2 is when it becomes worthwhile to even build walls. That's when gunners come in and we will talk about them.
3. A key thing to recognize is efficiently training a large group of people to fight takes time. And if they are also working and farming and building things it takes even more time. You will need a "safe way" to train a larger group and this is where prisons come into play.

Here's what we do:

1. In terms of building a wall, if you took my personal advice to heart about building your town on a road (riskier but it has it's own rewards) you are guaranteeing yourself that you will get traffic through your town. In this case you can build a tier 2 wall all around your town with 2 gates, one at each side of the road, for the most part I would keep these gates open, but when there is an attack incoming, I would close one of the gates to direct traffic towards the gate you want the attack to come in from. That's really the main function of the wall, they don't really keep the bad guys out, since they will break the gates down if you close your town off. Now if you plan on building turrets like harpoons or for now just mounted crossbows, then you don't need crossbows at every part of the wall, just the portion closest to the gates on either side of the gates. If you want mounted crossbows at this stage (not required but nice to have), you should build the walls next to the gates in a U shape so that the bottom of the U points towards the middle of your city. It might look awkward but this way you have a firing arc with your mounted crossbows, and for bandits to come in and attack you at your gates, they will walk into a crossfire from your crossbows on the walls. In this case, you would want more fragile characters such as your doctor, your farmers, and any weak characters who don't have combat skills yet to operate those crossbows and place your strong fighters at the gate or right outside the gate so that any fight that occurs happen within range of your crossbow fire.

2. In terms of actually building the wall, it's simple, you just stop all the characters who were set to mine stone and iron and copper and tell them all to Engineer by putting Engineer at the top of their jobs list by clicking on the blueprint of what you want made as soon as you hit the confirm button. With those 4-6 characters all suddenly directed to building this wall, you can first design the wall exactly the way you want it with the layout I described and once you press the confirm button that wall will go up very quickly since you have been accumulating lots of building materials. Personally I don't like turrets as they are static defenses and I train even my farmers to fight like mean soldiers, so I'll go a little into weapon builds and set ups later. Also, once you are done with the walls, those guys will immediately return to mining again since their construction/engineering job is done. In the future these will be your engineers. You could specialize... but honestly with engineering you just want numbers... the more labor the faster the job gets done.

3. It's best then to understand what to do when you are under attack. Turn off all jobs (remember to give them all first aid kits and keep medic as the last job on their list), and group up your characters in a line (phalanx) so that they aren't going to get flanked and attacked on multiple sides. Put your tankier characters up at the gate (and at the center of the phalanx with taunt on), and your weaker characters behind them or on mounted crossbows (whichever you prefer). And let them come to you. Use the gate to your advantage as a way to limit the fight. You don't need to kill all the raiders. You don't even need to capture them at this point, and until you build the dojo with the prisons you really don't have a place to put them anyway. You COULD be silly and take all of them prisoner and have one prisoner on the shoulder of every character to level up all the characters in your group in terms of their strength, but the problem with that is having to feed these captives manually. Your main character should be the only one that still has a prisoner and that prisoner is still on your main character this whole time... oh yes, don't let that captive go, he/she is extremely valuable as a high level training dummy, and you have to keep that captive well fed. Not to mention he/she is a useful backpack in addition to the backpack your main character has. By now your main character should have ridiculous strength.

4. One fine way to deal with bandits during a long fight is to loot them as soon as they get unconscious and take away their weapons. This is the best way to deal with Dust bandits since they often get back up and attack again (there isn't an option to murder someone while they are on the ground unfortunately). Also, before any fight you should put all the things (including food) in your inventories away aside from 1 medkit and save before the fight.

5. After the fight heal all the wounded; this should already be automated if you put medic as everyone's last job. Then turn on their jobs once more and they should get right back to work. Just make sure you really looted all the bandits at least once or killed most of them. They will come back which is fine, more training for you right?

Next I'll talk about Combat roles more in depth as well as weapons for each character in the beginning.

In case you are wondering why I'm spending time talking about combat roles and weapons for an efficiency based guide, this game is basically a sandbox combat simulator with survival elements and with that in mind, being efficient with "building up your character" is very important. After looking into base stats and briefly talking about combat roles and weapons, it IS interesting and efficient to talk about late game potential and late game builds for your characters.

Protip:
1. After we talk about all this we can make a training plan for each character in terms of how we want them to train. For the short run we want to find their primary weapon, but since we will want them to train in a dojo that we will set up next, many interesting possibilities open up for us.
2. Don't assume that the best build for a character late game is automatically the stereotype we assign them at the start. Honestly late game characters can have some seriously interesting play styles.
3. Only by looking at the possibilities do we have an idea in our head what we really want for each character and that is how we plan to build them. There will be a short term training plan, and a long term training plan, once we set up our dojo in our first town the short term training plan is all we have time to really do before we move on to the adventuring section of our development. But in the long term and after we make more towns/cities, some of these characters will have very interesting builds.

First let's look at weapons and what they do:
1. Weapons:
a. Here's a list of the weapon classes and the wiki description: http://kenshi.wikia.com/wiki/Weapons
b. Every weapon behaves a bit differently late game than it does in the early game due to having stats that you learn such as combat stats and attributes.
c. Again, based on the weapons classes we can distinctively group them into three groups... weapons that do damage based on your Dexterity, weapons that do damage based on your Strength, and Weapons that do both:
i. Cutting damage > Katanas > Sabers > Hackers > Heavy Weapons > Blunt > Blunt damage
ii. Crossbows do harpoon damage
iii. Polearms have a variety within their class that do different damage types.

2. Weapons when it comes to early game defense:
a. Katanas for cutting and Heavy Weapons for Blunt damage. Use only these two types when bandits fight you early on for efficient stat training... katanas to train dexterity and Heavy Weapons for Strength. That said bandit attacks aren't really where you will get most of your actual legit training as you will see in the next section when I go over setting up training dojo's.
b. In some cases such as Hive Workers/Princes or your Doctor, if you are going to involve them in the fights, you could try giving them polearms for the extra reach so they can fight while standing behind your tanks.
c. Again like I've said go for the stereotypes early.

3. In the late game you should view weapons in the following way:
a. Katanas late game are great against lightly armored targets. That is their main use and as such they are not really that useful late game unless in the hands of a true specialist... and as such they really need to have the high combat speed to attack very fast to reach max potential... late game only Hive Workers/Princes should still be using Katanas. Using Katanas with other characters is just not great due to damage being reduced by armor.
b. Sabers mid/late game are the best go to weapons for characters who are fast like Hive Workers/Princes as well as Hive Soldiers. They are still quite fast and do use the Dexterity stat for cutting damage but having a bit of blunt damage mixed in helps against armor.
c. Hackers are the true late game weapons that shine since they do both blunt and cutting damage and use both strength and dexterity to calculate damage. In the very late game, these weapons are best for EVERY type of character because of their ability to dish out consistent damage to every type of enemy and by having high stats in everything, your highly trained characters will be a threat to every type of enemy regardless of what armor they are wearing and what race they are. However, they really truly shine in the hands of someone with maxed out stats and so they are in my opinion only good for the late game when you have the raw stats to brute force through every type of fight you encounter.
d. Heavy Weapons are great throughout the game. In the beginning they help train your strength stats, and late game you can switch from planks to using Falling Sun for that mixed damage. I think Falling Sun is best in the hands of Sheks and Hive Worker/Princes. In the case of Sheks, they really truly shine with raw damage from the Falling Sun and being able to deal mixed damage from it helps. In the case of Hive Worker/Princes they are great as well because their higher base combat speed really overcome the weapon's built in weakness. Swinging a Falling Sun FAST is scary.
e. Blunt Weapons are great throughout the game for capturing bounties, captives, and giving these weapons to your captives in your dojo to use against your higher skilled characters to level up their toughness even more, because fist fighting is only good for toughness training when toughness traning is low... but when fighting unarmed against an armed opponent wielding a blunt weapon like a club, your toughness can increase quite quickly especially if that character is strong and skilled at using the club. Only use this training method in the dojo (I will go into greater detail in that section).
f. Pole Arms are situational, they are supposed to be good against animals so I suppose you would use them against the Leviathan at the end game... or if you wanted to hunt Beak Things for fun mid to late game. (personally I have a huge hatred for beak things and I like to see them die in interesting ways due to how many times they ate my characters alive on previous playthroughs).
g. I can't wait for them to add crossbows that you can use as a mobile weapon into the game. For now I can't say much about them.

4. Since some weapons are better in the late game and require certain stats to unlock their maximum potential, we can already see where this is going. Also another reason for building a dojo, is the fact that you need higher fighting skills for all your characters if you ever want to move to better locations to make a higher tech base, because those locations will be far more dangerous to live in.

5. Finally let's go over each character race and talk about their late game potential. Since I've run out of space... I'll continue this section...

(to be continued).

5. (Continued)

a. Skeletons (I don't know about these much as I never used them, but I will likely update this guide later once I use skeletons, but for now I don't think I am eligible to comment on them).

b. Shek are tanks through and through, they have higher limb HP AND they bleed 10% less. On top of that they gain Toughness 20% faster and Attack 20% faster. They do attack 10% slower, but on the whole their overall tankiness and durability makes them best suited for getting geared up heavily late game and having taunt turned on. This actually doesn't really change late game with maxed out stats. Tankiness is tankiness in the traditional sense of having HP and being able to handle a beating with Toughness eventually giving you damage resistance. However with all of that said, it can be interesting to give them a more glass cannon build for the fun of it. Especially a totally naked Shek with nothing equipted. With all the stats tuned up to the max a naked Shek is one to be feared. A truly skilled martial artist without any armor to slow him or her down and lots of dodge AND toughness makes this naked Shek surprisingly effective. Just don't expect a naked Shek to tank the Leviathan.

c. I want to lump all the Hivers into one category and explain them as "late bloomers". Early on they kind of suck with lower limb Hp. Late game Hive Soldiers have the least potential out of all Hivers in terms of late game potential but they kind of mitigate their early game weakness with decent/normal limb HP. For late game builds, all stats being maxed out, Hive Soldiers are worse due to not being able to wear hats on top of not being able to wear boots/shoes and no shirts. Because Hive Workers/Princes can wear hats, it makes them a lot better late game than the Hive Soldiers due to having more protection and specifically their face needs that protection since head damage can really wreck you. Since Hive Workers/Princes are the fastest combat speed units in the game when they max out all their stats they can shine with any weapon. Katanas to really go super fast, Hackers for that even mix of damage types, or Falling Suns for that beautiful fast lawnmower action as opposed to Sheks making them into a slow "Falling Sun"... a faster falling sun is just ... my obsession? They are never going to be truly tanky, but with enough toughness and with enough armor they can offset that weakness. You can also go without armor and use katanas for the lightning fast attacks but I would not recommend using any other weapons aside from katanas if you are going to fight late game without heavy amounts of armor since you are relying purely on your blocking speed to help protect you from taking damage in the first place. One or two hits and you can go down or be dead... you just won't likely get hit at all.

d. Scorchlanders are kind of your "good at everything" generalist because they bleed 10% less and you can specialize them into anything you want. They will never be as tanky as Shek or as fast as your Hivers but Scorchlanders are never really bad at anything.

e. Greenlanders are honestly the worst because everything they can do a scorchlander can do better because a scorchlander will learn faster or bleed less, etc. Greenlanders are just inferior to Scorchlanders and are exactly the same thing except without any of the combat bonuses that Scorchlanders have. They cook better and they are better at farming and science.. which all sadly has nothing to do with combat. Even the Hive Worker outshines a Greenlander late game in my book due to the Worker simply being faster and again, everything a Greenlander can do in terms of combat, a Scorchlander will do it a bit better at the exact same thing due to having combat related racial traits.


Now... let's move on finally to the Dojo, and the final function of your first town.

The idea of a "training dojo" for Kenshi isn't originally my idea but it's been around in the community for a while now and it is in a few guides that are already up, and I think one of the better ones is this one here: https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=249308043

With that said they don't have a full training regimen and I want to introduce the concept of a Training Gauntlet instead of just a Dojo. Also, before you start this training (especially strength training) you have to have plenty of food stored up.

Protip:
- When training a character, while it isn't essential to train every skill in the game like cooking for all your characters, all combat related stats help in some way and training a character lobsided with only one or two skills/stats trained is not going to unlock their true potential
- In order to unlock a character's true potential we want to create the perfect stage by stage training style and system such that every step builds on the one before it and upon completing all the training steps, everything important to combat should be maxed out (200 I think is the cap but anything between 100-200 is maxed out in my book)
- This means that regardless of race and gender the character going through the training will have the same training system as all the other characters and will come out at the end a super hero.

Instead of telling you what to build I want you to go through this training system in your head with me and see it from the perspective of the character going through the training. If you look back at the first training steps of training our first character you will remember already what type of things I've done to wholistically make that first character into somewhat of a god, but now that we have a food source and an ever increasing medical supply we can really ramp up the training AND AUTOMATE most of it.

1. Athletics: Most of your characters in your town already are automated to do jobs and they are already running around and that levels up their Athletics. Even though you don't consider this training, it is still doing that for them. I've also mentioned to take special note of the job of a hauler, if you set someone up as a hauler and give only jobs that require hauling things into different storage bins, they will be doing a LOT of running and their athletics will increase over time while doing something useful for your whole faction.

2. Strength Training: The reason we do strength training after Athletics and right before we go into Martial Arts is twofold: any reasonable amount of automation for strength training requires carrying a heavy load and moving with that heavy load... clicking around and managing it yourself is not very automated, moving a heavy load over a very long distance such as moving it between towns is very efficient in terms of your attention spent on the action (APM efficiency, and yes I'm a starcraft II player or I used to be). By leveling up Athletics first, you can likely move a lot faster with heavy loads than if you have no athletics training, and moving across the map will take much longer and be more dangerous. Also by leveling up strength first before you go into combat training you will deal more damage with Martial Arts (unarmed) and blunted weapons will do more damage. Since you want to be able to take out the bandits inside the dojo quickly when you want to put them back inside the cage, if your entire band of people all have insane strength, a few of them going into the dojo with clubs will pacify those bandits quickly and put them back into their cages. Now... here's how we do strength training efficiently:

a. You should buy more and more backpacks. Shopkeeper backpacks are the biggest and the best for weight training because they don't have an encumbrance reduction. Large Backpacks are the second best and have a 50% weight reduction. Thief Backpacks are also great but they have a 60% weight reduction. You want to carry as heavy a load as possible between towns and sell. Might as well sell loads and loads of copper right?

b. To maximize efficiency for this, just fill backpacks with copper completely and only with copper and then put the backpack in your inventory and fill another backpack the same way and then carry as many of those backpacks as you can fit on your character. On top of that you can also carry another character such as a bandit that you captured (since you want your own characters to be doing work and leveling up their athletics). Another option is to pick up an animal if you can get an animal to become unconscious and make that a heavy animal. So now while carrying a heavy animal or bandit and as many backpacks as you can fit on you filled with copper you are ready to begin strength training by running to the nearest town. You might want to wait before you sell the copper, and instead of selling, just run between the towns back and forth because it takes a long time to replenish the amount of coppers you will need to fill those backpacks again. These are your training weights, so think of them like weight training equipment and you need more of them to train more than one character at a time.

c. What better way to maximize your weight training efficiency than to make sure all your characters can do it at the same time? You got it! Automation to the max! What I mean is, your character that you make carry that bull around with several backpacks filled with Copper (Iron weighs more but it is hard to make it work since there isn't an iron storage, but only iron plates which are lighter so you can't find stacks and stacks of raw iron... but you can do it if you're motivated)? Well, he/she is a fashion trend setter and all your other characters are going to want to jump on the bandwagon and be cool like he/she is. So what you need to do to accommodate this latest trend is go buy more backpacks. As many backpacks as you can buy and then some, and keep filling them with copper. Sell copper to buy backpacks, fill them with copper, buy more backpacks, by the time you have enough backpacks to fill all your characters inventories with nothing but backpacks (including their backpack slots) you want to go find bandits or bulls to carry around. I think bandits are easier even though they are not ideal, they can be fed food easier... Feeding animals in this game is super weird and confusing and I'm still not 100% sure how to do it so if you know how to feed animals then go for animal weights, but humans as weights work just fine for me. You will then need to go and get some bandits, one for each character in your faction, plus give them all the weighted backpacks filled with copper. Since they will need inventory to do work at their jobs so that you can automate this training process, you just have to make sure that you leave some space in the backpack they are wearing for other items so that they can use that space to work, but while they work they will be carrying a body + weighted backpacks.

d. It might slow you down too much in the beginning so it is ok to simply give each character 1 backpack and leave their inventory space open for work in the beginning and upgrade the intensity of the training by slowly approaching this maximum weight limit of carrying copper weighted backpacks + a body. You will know you have completed this training exercise and reached mastery when your character can run at full speed while carrying a body and weighted backpacks like they were totally not weighed down at all. In Chinese Shaolin Martial Arts they actually have a name for this type of training (Light Step Kung Fu) and supposedly if you can run with a ton of weights on you at sprinting speed while being able to do it on a balancing beam or going up stairs, and other ridiculous training gauntlet style obstacles, you can eventually run on water or run over snow without leaving footprints (hence the Light Step).

Next we go on to actually building a dojo. (continued)

(continued).
3. Stealth/Thievery/Assassination Training: Like I mentioned before, it is important to train stealth and thievery so that you can escape from slavery. Stealth and assassination helps you kidnap bandits and build your dojo so, go to Hub and find the Shinobi Thieves again, if you followed what I said with your first character you should already have joined them for 10000 gold. Now that gold investment is going to pay off in a major way. Every character that have already completed their strength training can be sent here to train on stealth, thievery, and assassination. Unfortunately you can only train assassination to 19 here, but that's good enough for kidnapping bandits so that's all you need and you can level assassination from kidnapping real bandits. (if you ever get lazy with feeding the bandits on your shoulders for weight training you can just let them die... they just become deadweights :P ... yeah if you are in the same Kenshi world as I am, you really don't want to be a bandit... now imagine what I have in store for Beak Things...) For stealth, it's amazing because you don't even have to move, you just go to the 2nd floor and stealth in the shadow, the ninjas walking up and down the stairs do all the work for you and your stealth will go up just from sitting there. I would sit there while stealthed until stealth is 30+ before you start picking the lock on that level 100 chest. The reason for this is actually because you don't want to succeed at unlocking the chest too soon and get caught doing it. If you are caught you will lose faction standing with the thieves and might eventually lose access to this nice training spot. Of course you can build your own dojo as well but you won't be able to make a level 100 chest to train on and you won't have ninjas there leveling up your stealth. You can easily get a character's stealth and thievery stats up to above 50 in a day of stealthing in that tower on the 2nd floor and picking that level 100 chest nonstop. The only limitation is once you unlock the chest you have to leave the area and wait for it to reset.

4. Dodge/Toughness Training: This next part requires a dojo... or several. It is actually a good idea to build more dojos than just one so that you don't run out of bandits to train on or have to wait too long for them to heal up. Dust bandits are ideal since they spawn in such large numbers and you can always go get more if you need more. Use your main character's stealth + assassinate ability to go kidnap them one by one for a better guarantee. I suppose you could go and get bodies for weight training as well at this point, stealth did come after weight training as a training step, but that's why you have your main character who already did all this training, so you can obtain bodies for your characters to weight train with! With Toughness training it's actually ideal to start off by having a room full of bandits that you have locked in cages and have all the bandits be unarmed. This is your "low level toughness training" dojo. What you do is you enter the dojo with your character. Turn all characters not training to passive. Lock and close the door behind your character and then set all the bandits free and attack all of them to start a fight. Instead of actually fighting, turn on Block/Dodge mode for your character so they will only block/dodge. Ideally you want to be weaponless so you are leveling up Dodge first. They will all be punching your character and you will be trying to dodge or get hit. This levels up both Dodge and Toughness and it is a win win. Once your character goes down, you take a few of your characters, equip them with blunt weapons like iron clubs and come in to pacify the bandits and put them back in the cages. It is important to do this with iron clubs so you don't accidentally kill them! When your character gets Dodge and toughness so highly trained that he/she no longer really feel the fists anymore, it is a good idea to use a second dojo to step up the training. Fill a second dojo up with bandits armed with iron clubs (the same that you used to pacify them with) and let them once again beat up your character endlessly as a group while your character is on block/dodge mode. To go even further with this training, although you don't have to max out toughness to the extreme, you can then give your character some armor to wear, then have him/her get beat up in a room filled with bandits using more advanced weapons. Eventually your character will get so good at dodging and so tough at taking hits that a katana hit will do minimal damage and feel like a fist hitting you. Shaolin Monks do this type of training by gently bumping their head against a wall or a stone pillar or a tree every day with their head wrapped up in cloth. Then they step it up to eventually head bumping harder and harder or removing the cloth wrap around their head until one day they can smash the tree or wall so hard with their head that the tree falls over or the wall breaks. Same thing happens with fist training. Muay Thai fighters train their shins by kicking bamboo trees until their shins can break other people's legs from their kicks. This is kind of what we're doing here in Kenshi with our characters.

5. Block/Toughness Training: Now switch over to a katana (katanas are faster so you will get more blocks in) and use it to train block by doing the exact same thing that we did for dodging. Start with unarmed opponents, then opponents with blunt weapons, and finally weapon wielding opponents. The reason why we want block, dodge, and toughness trained up first so much is in order to maximize the efficiency of our offense training. When training offensively to attack, you won't want to have to start and stop too much and by having a more "perfect defense" you can make the fights last longer simply by not going down easily. The longer the fight the longer you are actually training your attacking skills and the greater the efficiency.

6. Optional Martial Arts Training: You might consider doing martial arts training by actually having 1 on 1 fights by being unarmed and turning Block/dodge off. It is optional because you may not care if you ever want to fight using Martial arts for a particular character. Dodge will help you because even if you are holding a weapon sometimes if you get staggered you can't block and the game will use your dodge skill to determine if you get stun locked by chain hits. But Martial Arts is about attacking while unarmed and is not really a skill that is needed unless you specifically want to play with a character who does martial arts.

6. Attack/Dexterity Training: Training Attack/Dexterity is very expensive in terms of medical supplies. It is more expensive than the defensive training so far because of the way we have to do this to maximize the training time. Instead of fighting an entire room of bandits, this time you want to fight one on one, because you want your character to spend more time landing hits on the bandit as that is how Attack gets leveled up so you don't want a room filled with bandits all trying to hit you forcing you to block/dodge. This means you should fight 1v1 against a single bandit using a Katana to get more hits in. The Katana is a cutting only weapon so it gives you the best Dexterity training. Dexterity helps you attack faster and block faster while multiplying it with your racial base combat speed. This training will really make your Hive Worker/Princes shine and give them lightning speed. The problem here is you have to heal your bandits AND your character after each fight instead of healing your character and ALL the bandits all at once (after knocking them out with clubs once your toughness training character goes down)... So you are almost doubling the cost of medical supplies by having to heal your own character that much more frequently, BUT since you did all that toughness training, it offsets this cost ;)

7. Weapons Training: You have Athletics, Strength, Toughness, Dodge, Block, and Attack all at high levels.... now to complete your training and receive your blackbelt, you want to choose your weapon, the weapon you will become known for.... a legend... a master... a crazy guru... you want to use this weapon type on this character the most because it will train your weapon skill up and unlock cooler moves. That said... as you progress, depending on what weapon you chose, you will still want to return to using a Katana once in a while to sharpen your dexterity or something like a Plank to increase your strength more... but this weapon, whatever you choose, will be your main weapon and you want to train up this weapon specifically for the weapon skill by using it a LOT and you would go into combat with it against opponents you face in the "real world" of kenshi. At this point you actually have the stats to wield Hackers and Heavy Weapons such as the Falling Sun effectively to brute force against any opponent since you are doing all the different damage types so their armor can't stop all your damage. For truly legendary stats that go all the way to max cap, you would want to use a combination of two weapons, one for strength stat and one for dex stat, OR Martial Arts and Katana. But this is really how you get to epic stats and to do it very efficiently and in a timely fashion.

8. Training Tips:
- Make sure before you train a character you set everyone else on passive. Also make sure all Medics have their Medic job moved to the bottom of the list... it is always annoying when the other characters unlock the door of the dojo to come in to help fight or heal because the prisoner will run straight out the door.
- It is possible to fight with weights on for extra strength training/growth but don't do this at the start when you have low combat stats because it lowers your stats when you are encumbered. (This actually is great later for toughness once your character has too much dodge or block to get hit... putting weights on him/her lets him get hit more often by lowering the ability to dodge or block so there will be more hits being landed.
- Save before every fight. Bandits can come and ruin your day.
- It's ok to have multiple dojos and multiple fights going at the same time, but you will have to pause the game to micro manage, so it ends up being about the same in terms of real world time you are spending. Personally what I do to save time is to have two characters training by staggering them, one heals up by sleeping upstairs on the roof and the other goes downstairs to fight/train with the bandits and they switch off.


Next up we will go into Preparing for Adventure and what you could unlock next with your godly group of badasses... ideally you did not recruit more than 6-9 characters because again, it takes a long time for each character to train through all of this and the more characters you recruit the longer it will take to get all of them trained into Godlike status.

You can see each of these characters as a seed character or the leader for their own respective towns... you could even out and split each of them up to recruit their own followers like we did with the first character we made and make many more of these noob towns and train up an even bigger army... and lag out your computer... OR you can start adventuring :P

There are many possibiilties with what you can do within Kenshi once you have characters who can fight and hold their own and be badasses. Most of these things that can be unlocked will require some technology to unlock and higher tier tech unlocks with ancient books and engineering tech that are accessible if you go adventuring to look for them.

Since you have unlocked the ability to fight, bringing a group of your badasses or even all your characters if you want to. You should have enough tier 2 food saved up by this time to feed your people for quite a while and enough backpacks to carry loads and loads of food, medkits, equipment and potential loot you encounter. All your characters have enough strength at this time to carry several backpacks and can switch them around inside their inventory to the backpack slot for access to different goods.

That is what you have going for you. What you don't have access to yet is the super high tech gear and weapons so you are not invincible and you can still get overwhelmed by large groups of cannibals or other dangers so don't be too suicidal.

What I highly recommend is having a "forward scout" someone who can stealth really well and have high thievery/assassination to back it up. You want to have your group follow your scout at a distance while your scout can help spot danger ahead of time and allow you to avoid large groups that can be a problem.

Adventure prep let's go!
1. Clearly you need to clear up space so the first thing is to walk around the map with all your characters together with the loaded backpacks filled with copper or iron and basically clean up those towns of their money (cats... cats just sound soooo odd as currency). You can also buy some higher level gear like weapons that do better damage, and some armor of various types, you should have plenty of money from selling all those coppers/raw irons from your loaded backpacks that you had stacked inside the inventories of your characters to train them with.

2. It is helpful to assign squads based on combat roles. I like to make my Hive Worker/Princes farmers to be secondary combat medics. I will either have a Scorchlander or Hive Prince be my forward scout. Then the bulk of my people go into the combat squad, so I'll end up with "scout, combat, and medic" as my three squads when I'm about to go out to adventure. I know a lot of people have different preferences for squads, for me I make and remake squads all the times depending on what I am doing, like when I train I have a squad for the two characters I'm rotating for training in a "training squad".

3. It is useful to have a goal and plan ahead. Look up a map on where locations are and what you'd like to do there. Personally I have not done a lot of adventuring yet myself and I don't know the whole map (I am still newish to Kenshi since I've been mostly waiting for full release but lately this game seems almost complete so I've started playing more seriously). I think also not being too greedy is a good idea ;) Just focus on where or what you plan on doing, know what you have to do, prepare for it, and then get it done.

4. Bring materials for building beds or sleeping bags for some on location healing. It isn't required but it helps speed up any healing you'll need to be doing. You could always just carry your wounded on the shoulders on those who aren't wounded, they shouldn't slow them down too much since we're already strong badasses.

5. Once you come home with all the loot you can tech up to greater and better things! You can stay in your current base location or you can go make a bigger base at a more interesting location that wasn't safe to go to before...

Before you relocate... I will include a discussion next on considerations for high end locations as well as higher end tech and weapon tech and such. (Work in progress... remember I'm still learning the game and playing my own playthroughs :P)