I am writing this guide because I keep seeing new players pick up this game, and we just had that sale, and there's a lot of frustration going around from people who probably LOVE what this game promises but they can't quite get past that earlygame hump where your guys just die when poked, and making money (which you need for food for all your guys) is boring as heck.

I want to help, and give out some strategies. More particular, focused, specific strategies, that ought to help YOU, dear reader, get started and progress through the earlygame smoothly.

This guide will not contain wishy-washy 'could' or 'maybe' or 'you have plenty of options available' because I'm going to save that for the end of the guide.

However, if you are looking up a guide on 'how do I start tho' I assume you don't care about any of that stuff, you just want to get situated with some good gear. You want a little bit of direction in a game that gives you none. That is what this guide is about.

This also means, I will be directing you around the world a bit, just to give you some basic ideas to get you started. For a game like Kenshi where exploration is one of the primary foundations of the game, there will be some light spoilers. Don't worry, I deliberately will not give away any of the more 'exciting' secrets. I won't even show screenshots of some of the more exciting locations we're going.

I know there are some people who want to play the game without 'exploits' of any kind, and don't worry! Technically there are no exploits contained within this guide. There's no stealing, stealth abuse, assassination abuse, or otherwise.

Also, I apologize for this guide being long. I just wanted to be as thorough as possible, so there's no confusion. That also means this guide is unfortunately a little over 10,000 words.

Anyway, let's do it!

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3484581776
Now that I've finished writing it, I want to recommend people try the sequel to this guide first.

BUT! There are some pros and cons. Let me lay them out.

- You get around 350,000 to 400,000 money from exploring the world
- It's an extremely short, consistent, easy journey with minimal danger
- You get Allied faction relations with The Holy Nation
- You can still return after reading 2.0, and come back here to follow this guide from the beginning

- It relies on the Holy Nation Citizen start instead of the Wanderer start
- 2.0 has limited race selection at the start, only Greenlander or Scorchlander
- You get Hostile faction relations with the Flotsam Ninjas

Overall, I think it's worth it since I personally don't mind picking Greenlander or Scorchlander for my first character. You can always find generic recruits for your favorite race later!

Anyway, I was considering changing this guide and replacing the start with the Holy Nation Citizen start just so you can follow both guides whenever you want. I don't want to stop people playing their favorite races though, so I'm just going to put this notice here now and leave this guide unchanged.

And hey, if you were going to choose Greenlander or Scorchlander anyway...
why not just select Holy Nation Citizen? You spawn slightly to the north of The Hub but it just brings us closer to where we want to go anyway.

Whatever you decide, good luck!

Click New Game, advanced options, click off 'bandits loot the player'. I don't even know if this option does anything anymore, in the old version of Kenshi before 'new world' patch bandits could steal your stuff, they can't anymore, only your food. But anyway, maybe just turn it off.

So, you can probably figure out on your own what type of character you want to play, but first let's talk about starts.

In vanilla Kenshi, there's Wanderer, Wandering Trader, Holy Sword, Cannibal Hunters, Hive Exile, Son of a Captain, The Slaves, Rock Bottom, Empire Citizen, Holy Nation Citizen, Guy With A Dog, Freedom Seekers, Nobodies.

If you want a really easy time of it, you could pick either Freedom Seekers, and just immediately sell all of the random stuff they start with, like building materials and crops, so you can then focus on exploring the world - you don't HAVE to immediately start building a base if you pick that one, after all, and they have a ton of food and so on to start with which will save you a lot of cats early on.

Or, you could pick 'nobodies', and have basically the same start, but your guys have almost nothing, which is not as problematic as you might think since, most importantly, you have some extra guys.

However, both Freedom Seekers and Nobodies spawn in a couple of random locations and some of them are outside of the Border Zone, and we really want to start there for the purposes of this guide.

I will not bother discussing the rest of them since for the most part they start you off somewhere weird, or give you troublesome faction relations.

Honestly, if you really want to pick something that isn't Wanderer, I'd recommend starting Freedom Seekers or Nobodies because having multiple characters means you have a bigger safety net, but Wanderer is the most basic Kenshi experience and it's probably also the most balanced in its difficulty, because you only have to worry about one character to begin with, and it's what I wrote this guide in mind with.

So let's pick Wanderer.

This is not the most important decision you'll ever make in Kenshi, but it is important. So let's talk options.

An important note, BEFORE I start overloading your brain with numbers and multipliers and stuff, keep in mind, ALL of these bonuses and maluses to your skills, only affect training speed. This can be troublesome later if you truly want to max out your stats, but you can still do it. So don't worry about it if you've only got a Scorchlander and you need someone on farming.

FEEL FREE TO SKIP THIS SECTION IF YOU ALREADY KNOW WHO YOU WANNA PLAY AS.
But I'm gonna explain stuff anyway.

(I did not bother making any of these characters look pretty, you're gonna be looking at probably the same thing if you hit randomize a couple times.)


Obligatory 'basic race' note. Both flavours very good for your initial character.

Greenlander

+20% Farming
+20% Cooking
+20% Science

No weaknesses is always nice. However, don't underestimate Greenlanders since they have 100 HP on every body part, which in the world of Kenshi, a world of fighting and ruination, is actually not bad at all.

While you won't ever be specially excited to recruit one, later on Greenlanders make perfectly competent recruits that won't let you down.









Scorchlander

+10% Dexterity
+20% Athletics
+20% Stealth
+20% Armour Smithing
+20% Weapon Smithing
+20% Dodging
-20% Farming
-20% Cooking
-20% Labouring
-10% Strength

I tend to prefer picking up Scorchlanders later on in my playthrough as opposed to at character creation, in order to take advantage of their Smithing skills. Armour and Weapon Smithing both take forever to raise, and if you can get there +20% faster all the better. Bonuses to Athletics and Stealth IS really nice though, and their maluses aren't a problem. However, if you're doing Freedom Seekers or Nobodies, yeah why not allocate one Scorchlander?

Like Greenlanders, 100HP per body part.

+20% Heavy Weapons
+20% Robotics
+20% Turrets
-20% Stealth
-20% Thievery
-20% Dodging

Skeletons in my opinion are the best newbie-friendly earlygame race, because they have a whopping 200HP on every body part, therefore they are a bit tougher to put down, and you can repair them back up to full REAL fast, because cutting damage can be simply patched up with a repair kit.

Later on when you have more Robotics skill (for repairs) you can sometimes zip your health bar back up during an elongated engagement and get right back into it. Skeleton parties can basically fight a relay battle, fighting until their health is low, backing off, repairing back up to full while their friends keep pressing the enemy!

The only problem is those repair kits are expensive in the VERY early game (4k each), and if you don't have one you are in big trouble.

You know what else too? Skeletons do not even require food. This cuts down significantly on your earlygame expenses, because where other characters would be struggling for the cats to purchase a rice bowl, Skeletons only need their precious repair kit to maintain perfect health.

However. The Holy Nation attacks Skeletons on sight, which cuts down on a big chunk of newbie-friendly zone you could otherwise hang around safely, it's not too important but it's something to note.

TIP: You can pick up skeletons in your squad, and Holy Nation guards won't take notice of them while they're being carried around!


An important thing to note is Hivers have greatly reduced chance of being hit in the stomach, but this also means they're going to get hit elsewhere more frequently. Hivers in general make notably poor fighters, including and especially the Soldier Drone!

However, one nice thing about Hivers in general is Workers and Princes have 0.5 hunger rate, which means they eat 50% less food than your typical Human! Soldiers, being the worst race in the game, eat only 40% less instead at 0.6 hunger rate.

I recommend against any new player starting as a Worker or Soldier, because getting over the initial stat hump where you're trying to simply survive your first fight with a group of bandits while accruing some toughness XP, some melee attack/defense XP, will be more challenging.

Prince

+20% Lockpicking
+20% Perception
+20% Toughness
+20% Dexterity
+20% Athletics
+20% Stealth
+20% Thievery
+20% First Aid
+20% Science
-20% Labouring
-20% Strength

Princes are probably the most generally effective Hivers since they have a nice even spread of 80HP on all body parts, they have a ridiculous amount of skill bonuses to everything good, and though -20% Strength really does hurt... they're not so bad.

Still, 80HP means they are 20% squishier than any Human, so you'll probably want to be more careful in what you choose to fight early on because like Workers they can die real fast if you don't babysit their health bars.

And if this is your first character, and there's nobody to look after them, you're gonna have a bad time.


Worker Drone

+20% Toughness
+20% Dexterity
+20% Athletics
+20% Stealth
+20% Farming
+20% Thievery
+20% Labouring
+20% Turrets
+20% Engineering
-20% Cooking
-20% Science
-20% Strength

Like Princes, a massive list of modifiers. However, unlike Princes, they are significantly squishier at 75HP on all body parts, except the head, which has 125HP. This is not very useful given their chest has a significantly higher chance of being hit, over every other part of their body.

Workers are therefore the most easily slain race in the game. This means they are very bad for combat, tragically awful for earlygame, and you'll probably find it very frustrating playing as one initially.

Soldier Drone

+20% Toughness
+20% Attack
-20% Perception
-20% Farming
-20% First Aid
-20% Armour Smithing
-20% Weapon Smithing
-20% Robotics
-20% Cooking
-20% Science
-20% Engineering

I'm only showing you the Soldier so you can know what NOT to pick. It should be plain from their massive list of maluses that they are not worth it. They have the highest HP amongst Hivers at 100HP per body part, except in the head, where they have 200HP.

Unfortunately, if you look at their 'chance of hitting', their chest is the most likely place for them to be attacked. Even if they DO get hit in the head, that's not a good thing, because Soldier Drones cannot wear helmets of any kind. That 200 HP will melt much faster than you'd expect.

Moving on.



+20% Toughness
+20% Attack
+10% Strength
-20% Dexterity
-20% Athletics
-20% Stealth
-20% Farming
-20% Thievery
-20% Robotics
-20% Science
-20% Labouring
-20% Dodging

The mightiest warrior race this side of the Klingon Empire. Also, they have 125HP per body part! All over too! This makes them much more durable than you might think. However, they have a hunger rate of 1.25, which means they eat 25% more food than a basic Human. This can be troublesome earlygame, but also in general, because you'll find the Shek members of your squad much hungrier than everyone else, so you'll need to stop for food more often when travelling and it leads to all sorts of problems.

So let's cut the chaff from the wheat immediately. While later on in larger groups, you can pretty much hire any guy you want, early you probably want the best solo capable character you can get.

Rule out Hive Workers, Soldiers. Pick between Greenlander, Scorchlander, Skeleton, Hive Prince or Shek.

I would narrow this further because I prefer to start with someone who can do basically anything, so I'd probably pick Skeleton or Greenlander.

I'm going to assume you are just going to pick whatever you feel like, even Soldier or Worker, so this section is a little bit moot.

Let's pick Greenlander though, because then I can assume you're as vulnerable to the dangers of the world as possible.

This section will probably make up the bulk of the guide, and will explain how to get your first guy started, pick up some basic gear, and get to the point where you can take on groups of bandits in The Hub solo.

Feel free to follow along with me here, but hopefully you can extrapolate from wherever you start and use information I provide to your own benefit and success.

So if you consult the image above you should probably be seeing something similar on your screen. Hello, it's The Hub, the friendliest little newbie town you ever did see - and it's comprised almost completely of ruins

The first thing you ought to do is press M and check out the map, and realize that Squin exists. It's not going to be useful for this guide, but it'll teach you what a town looks like, and that they have strange names.

That down there, is a REAL town. It's not huge or anything, but it's right nearby, it's in the Border Zone. It's also a Shek town, which means they mostly sell heavy weapons, and some crappy armour.

Let's close the map for now.










If you check out this particular small shack in The Hub you'll find it's full of loot that you can freely take, it doesn't even count as stealing because none of it is marked stolen. If you're lucky, you can find a grog, but I reset a couple times just to check consistency of loot and found it also can spawn sake and other stuff. I reset a few times to make sure and you'll probably find around ~1k cats in loot in here. There's also a chest with a low level lock on it you can loot. I found a grog, which is another 1k cats on its own, but you might not be as lucky.

There's also a couple beds, which you can use for free. Beds heal at x8 speed if you're injured! I'd highly recommend using this place to the fullest if you're anywhere near the Hub and hurt. The town guards will protect you if you need to flee here, and you can rest up without paying one of the nearby bars.

Looting this will also give you a little bit of extra starting cash, since you can immediately vendor all the crap you found at the nearby Hub bar.

First piece of real 'gamer advice'. You don't need to keep food in your inventory at all times. The Wanderer start begins with you at full Hunger, 300/300. Your stats only start to decay at 200, and it takes forever for it to tick down. At least in civilized lands, it's very easy to just run to the nearest bar and buy some food, so you don't always need to have a rice bowl or whatever in your inventory.

This is important because most bandits you fight will steal your food! Better to only buy some when you need it, than to hold onto it.

Anyway, speaking of food, let me just break down your best options at this stage.

Dried Meat is just simply the cheapest satiation you can afford, it's not too bad and it's fairly efficient for money. If you find dead or dying animals out in the wild you can sprint up, steal all their meat, then cook it over a campfire and get - Dried Meat! Great stuff.





Rice Bowls are pretty good too. Not too expensive, fill you up a little bit more than meat.




Gohan - only for the hungriest of Shek warriors. You'll basically get two full meals out of them on human characters, so more like three on Hivers, but a bit less on Shek. Good travel food, less good if you intend to start fights.

That about covers it. I wouldn't recommend bothering with Meatwraps, and absolutely not Bread. If you just look at them you'll see you purchase them for obscene amounts of cats for not too much nutrition.

TIP: Some might consider it exploity, but if you're in a fight with some bandits and you feel you might lose, you can pause the game, drop the food out of your inventory, and the bandits in question will pointlessly loot your body, find nothing, and move on. Bandits don't check for food on the ground.

So, before we do anything else let me just explain at you some basic things about some of the maps I'm going to be posting down below.

When you see this circle, it generally means "you should probably make a safety save here".

I tend to be overly cautious, so I like to save a lot, but I'm also giving you advance warning of some kind of Severe Danger, so do try and follow along with me here just in case. Make a save at the beginning and the end of one of these long sprints, because there's going to be a few.

I also usually don't save over the same file over and over, and instead just make saves sequentially even if the name is nonsense, like 'asdf1' 'asdf2' 'asdf3' etc, because it's always nice to be able to go back a few decisions if really necessary, or to simply get extra screenshots for some guide you're making.

Anyway, let's get this show on the road!



We're embarking on this journey simply because we need shoes. There is no good way to obtain wooden sandals except by looting them off 'hungry bandit leaders' specifically. So, instead of that nonsense, we're simply going to buy them, and the town in question noted above has them for sale. There's other stuff we can do there also, like pick up some friends.

Once you've hit the shack as covered in 3.1) Initialization you can immediately sprint up this way. You'll be stepping into Vain, Dreg and maybe Okran's Gulf briefly along the way before... well. As you'll probably note from the image, yeah, I suggest making a safety save before this begin this adventure, and once you arrive at the town we're going to.

So, the key facts about this journey. You should have basically nothing in your inventory, maybe a little food. Basically if you see anything along the way, you should just give it a wide berth. This includes humans, hivers, bandits, animals, whatever you see. Just stay away from it all. It's a bit of a dangerous trip, but you'll rank your Athletics up enough that you'll probably learn on the way to simply outrun most of the dangers we're about to see.

So anyway, once you arrive safely in Mongrel, we've got several things to do.

First, since we picked up a little starter cash and maybe a food or two we probably have at least 2000 cats spare, maybe a bit less. That's okay either way, all we need is enough money to buy three pairs of Wooden Sandals from the boot shop. Yes, exactly three.

Why three? Because we're about to take on some recruits!

Alternatively, if for some reason you would prefer not to recruit anyone, and you'd rather go it alone, you may ignore all of the below characters. The real goal of heading to Mongrel, was to pick up some wooden sandals.

Firstly, you can recruit Beep (who will likely start Beeping at you as soon as you enter town) simply by following his dialogue tree. It's very hard to miss out on Beep. Even if he annoys you, pick him up all the same, since he does have a lot of unique dialogue and he's basically Kenshi's mascot. Beep will also sometimes succumb to a terrible fate if you leave here without recruiting him.

Secondly, Shryke will be moping in one of the bars. There's about 3 bars in Mongrel, she will be in one of them. Not much to say, just recruit her because she's another pair of legs with an inventory attached and like Beep, she is completely free.

Thirdly, lastly, the mighty Crumblejon. Crumblejon will crumble and join your party if you ask him enough questions, and you really want him to be in your squad because his starting stats are quite good, nothing spectacular or broken, but you'll be glad to have him on your side.

Now, immediately vendor ALL of Shryke's trashy heavy gear. Vendor Crumblejon's Fragment Axe which I don't even think he can use properly. Crumblejon already has some nice sandals, keep those, the martial artist bindings are fine, and his pants won't slow him down either. Put sandals on your Wanderer, and Shryke.

You should have one pair of sandals left over. Hold onto them. You should also have around 4-5k cats now from vendoring the gear of your new allies!

I recommend making a safety save here, before sprinting your way back to the Hub. The sandals everyone has now should help a LOT in keeping you out of harms way.

By the way - press ~ (tilde) to select all members of your squad, and cycle through the 'movement type' until it has the two stick figures. This setting will cause your squad members to sync their move speed to the slowest character, and it'll prevent your speedier squad members from zooming off on their own.

We should now be back in the Hub after a long and probably not too dangerous sprint. Pick up a food item or two for everyone in the party if you can, hopefully on the cheap side. Head up slightly north, and hit the Trade Ninja bar if the Hub bar is fresh out of food.



Once your guys have got some stuff to eat for the next little while, we can head out on our next adventure!



First, we can head straight down here for a bunch of cool stuff. I wouldn't blame you for being completely overwhelmed by all of these.



These weapons are just abandoned, laying around, free for the taking. The grey ones are grey quality trash and probably not even worth carrying, even though there's a Waystation nearby we're about to visit. We aren't really on a timer here or anything but for the sake of speed, the only things worth picking up are the ninja blades (even the grey quality one!) and maybe the white flesh cleaver, which you could simply give to one of your new allies.

None of our characters will be fighting in the near future, so don't worry too much about picking out 'the right weapon'.

You know the drill, let's keep things moving.





















There's honestly not much to see here at the Waystation itself, but if you decided to pick up some of the random garbage at the Holy Outpost, you can sell it here. You can also pick up some extra food, which you may want to because we're not going to have the chance to stock up for a little while. 2 food items for each organic character ought to do it, and we're also about to make some money, so don't worry about splurging.


Anyway, moving on, go over here now.
Just north-east of the Waystation is a 'Tiny Settlement' so let's take a look.




Hey check it out, loot!

The loot here was very consistent for me, on each run I made over here, and I made a few just to make sure. Anyway, I recommend grabbing the toppers, those are some decent weapons, and you can simply vendor them for decent money too.

You'll also want to pick up three (3) sets of tools, which are on the ground here, may as well. They're a little heavy, so distribute them across your characters. You may also notice the book! That's a research artifact, pick it up and you can sell it if you like next vendor we meet, books are super common and buy/sell for almost the same price, so it's basically like a promissory note for 300 cats.

As a side note, if you're already getting laden down with loot, Crumblejon's strength will help you carry the heaviest stuff without losing speed.


Now we're going up here. The first leg of this run is probably the most dangerous part, since you can run into some troublesome enemies, but as long as you're keeping your squad lightweight and not encumbered, you'll be able to outrun anything dangerous.

Of note, you really want to enter this next zone around where I indicated the second save point. There's a rock you can straight up walk through, so I'd simply right click the destination on the map, and your units will figure out the right path.

The second leg... well, be glad you remembered to pick up some wooden sandals! Don't worry about any damage you happen to take here. If you follow the route specified you'll pass a U-shaped turtle-shell looking workshop on your left. Avoid it.

Your squad should be fast enough (hovering around 18+ mph at least with sandals) to not really take very much damage if you detour here and there, so don't worry, just keep moving. Additionally, enemies in this zone can only move 11mph, so as long as your characters move 12mph or faster, they'll be quite safe.

Anyway, you've now arrived in a new city. Look for the bar, and take shelter there!

Before you do anything else, go talk to Sadneil at the bar. He'll be around somewhere, drowning his sorrows(?) and you can recruit him for free.

If you chose not to recruit anyone earlier when we stepped into Mongrel, I strongly recommend you recruit Sadneil here. For real. Because we're about to use him to do some stuff.

You can take a moment to check out the singular shop here, turn in any junk you have for money, whatever you need. No food here though, so hope you brought something to munch on!

The beds here cost only 50c, and sleeping greatly slows hunger consumption, so you may want to just put all four of your organic characters into stasis for now, if you forgot to buy food earlier.


Anyway, off we go on another adventure! Only bring Sadneil. Beep, who you may have noticed is immune to acid, may also accompany him if you feel you might need a second pair of hands, but it might just end up being more difficult to do what is coming next, because a bit of micro is involved.

Additionally, if in character creation you made a Skeleton or Hiver, you could simply bring them instead. All we need is someone with acid immunity.

So anyway, head down to the hill overlooking the outpost down here. Watch out for spiders along the way. You may want to make a safety save because we're about to disturb a nest of spiders.

I recommend you play on 1x speed, and once you open the door of the outpost, you take a single step inside the right-hand side of the door, like so...





... and immediately pause the game. As soon as the interior starts to load, PAUSE THE GAME.






















So uh, yeah, you step one toe in there and you'll see the problem. Every single one of these security spiders is powerful enough to outright kill your squad in a single hit, if they get lucky.

As a side note, if you enter too far to the left, and you're really unlucky, and there's a spider right there who immediately notices you, he can sometimes instantly damage Sadneil or whoever you stepped in here with, and if you're having that bad of a day, sometimes it will take out a leg and you're as good as dead. If you're lucky it'll only damage something non-essentially, like an arm or something.

This is also a good reason to go solo here with Sadneil or whoever you chose to bring. If you brought Beep along as well for moral support, he will likely have run straight down from the hill to 'help out' unless you set him on Passive.

Don't worry about it though! Sadneil is not being sent out to die.

You can still tell Sadneil to do stuff while he paused, so I recommend you do as follows.



Sadneil ought to follow the green line. The red dots will be followed by the spiders as they desperately chase him down. An odd kink in their AI prevents them from chasing him too far away. Even if we weren't relying on these dumb robots to simply give up around where I've indicated with a circle, Sadneil is more than fast enough on his own to escape them, since like the other spiders you've seen so far, they can only run at 11mph.


At this point the spiders have probably lost interest, so you can circle all the way around and back to the entrance, because I guarantee you all the spiders have not left yet.

Our goal at this point is to bait all of the spiders away from the ruins, by repeating the previous step over and over again. Step inside, bait a few spiders, run away. You do not need to approach any of them, and I encourage you to maintain your distance. I recommended you pull the first pack towards the south-east, so you have more room to pull the other groups.

If you're lucky it'll only take two pulls, at worst it might be three. Take note, once the first floor is clear you should switch floors with the little doodad on the GUI, because there's often one or two who refuse to budge.











Sometimes, spiders won't aggro on you just as soon as you step inside, and will remain motionless. You can instantly get their attention by pausing the game, right clicking to attack them, then unpausing, to let their AI aggro onto Sadneil, before pausing the game again.

You now have the spider aggro'd, and can pull him out of the building and to somewhere safe.

Anyway, once you're done with luring all of the spiders outside, all you need do is sprint down to the now empty armory, and close the door behind you. Most of the time all of the security spiders you just locked out of the premises will take the hint and wander off aimlessly, and you will never see them again.

This is no great loss, as while security spiders each have a skeleton limb inside them worth something like 3000 cats, it is almost never worth fighting them given how easy it is to lose one of YOUR limbs, or your very lives fighting them. In combat, spiders often will idle on top of your body, once they have knocked you unconscious. They camp you until you inevitably have to stand up again, whereupon they get a free attack. It's not fun or fair and you don't want to ever have to deal with that. So, we simply dodge them, and steal whatever they were guarding.



You can now bring all your squadmates over for a party. A loot party! This is also the primary reason to have picked up Beep, Shryke and Crumblejon earlier, because they will make carrying out all the stuff you just found a LOT easier.

There'll be a few locks that you can pick, I suggest only using one member of the squad to open these, because you only need one character capable of picking locks - for the most part. You need something like level 60 lockpicking to open any lock, so you'll probably be at it for a while.

However, in the case of you stumbling across a lock you cannot pick... remember when I told you to pick up the tools?

If you forgot, you can sometimes find a hacksaw on the first floor, which fulfills the same function and is lighter to carry. It doesn't always spawn though.


Anyway, once you've grabbed the hacksaw, or simply selected the character carrying the tools you want to use, you can click 'use tools' on the appropriately out-of-your-reach locked safe. Tools and hacksaws are one use only, however.

TIP: Tools weaken locks for the purposes of 'Use Strength'! You can actually circumvent the 'one-time use' on tools and hacksaws, by simply waiting until the timer ticks down to a low enough number, and then stop the character 'using tools' on the lock. Once they've disengaged and the timer is no longer counting down, you can use any character to 'Use Strength' on the lock (Crumblejon here at 50 left on the timer should be able to crunch it open). If the timer was low enough, they'll break open the lock, without having used up your tools.

If this feels too much like an 'exploit' you can always just let the tools be used up too.

If you're confused at all about the value of any of the items you find here, you can have a look through this other guide I made:

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2951322558

Now that we have a bunch of loot, it's time to vendor it all. In case you didn't feel like looking at my other guide, you wanna pick up any chainmail sheets you find, steel bars, weapons, and robotic limbs you find. If you like the weapon in question, maybe hold onto it! None of your guys probably had weapons before we looted this place.

The most important stuff you're probably gonna find here though, is some decent shirts, and a katana. You can at this point maybe start thinking about which character will be your 'main guy' or who you want to focus on giving the best gear before anyone else, up to you. While I was putting all this together I ended up giving tankier stuff, like chainmail and such, to Crumblejon along with a nice heavy weapon, but really do whatever you want.

Anyway, before you try and leave, first things first, evenly distribute the weight as much as you can so you're all at least running at 12mph or higher. This might be tricky to do, depending on how much loot you found. Crumblejon no doubt has the highest strength at this point, so give him as much heavy stuff as you can. Steel bars are unsurprisingly very heavy. So are some of the weapons you'll find.

Once you've finished your inventory management nightmare, you can sprint all the way back to Black Desert City, and sell all that stuff you found!

I also strongly recommend you simply sell any robot limbs you get at this stage since they weigh a lot and you shouldn't have any need of them for a good while, and you have no good way to store them yet, and now that you know the location of the skeleton robotics shop (it is in Black Desert City), you can simply buy whatever you need, when you need it.

At this point I had a whole bunch of cats, but there's one more readily accessible location we can raid.

And it's up here.

You may note the red dotted line indicates where the game's pathfinding will automatically send you, if you simply right click on the map and expect it to get you over there. Normally, the game's pathfinding is not too bad, but this is a case where you really need to force it to go the way you want, because you don't want ANYTHING to do with that area over to the right. This area to the left is safer, and it opens out onto a nice plateau where you can clearly see any spiders trying to sneak up on you It might even be a shorter run.

I've also crossed out a ruin you absolutely should NOT go near. You won't really want to touch it until later in the game, trust me, and I don't want to spoil the surprise, so I'm not going to tell you what's in it.

In case you're wondering, there's also no loot to be had anyway, so just forget about it for now.

The actual ruin we'll be visiting, indicated by both the red and black dotted lines, is another armory like the one to the southwest we just visited! This one, also has a couple spiders in it, but only two. Nothing much to worry about.

You can repeat the exact same strategy I laid out above in 3.5) The Loot, I'm not repeating it here.

Once you've lured out the spiders, and then sprinted your own guys inside and looted it all, you can once again retire back to black desert city. The heavy jitte is kind of trash, but it sells well, as for the falling sun, you may want to use that as an actual weapon for your squad, since Sadneil has a bonus to Heavy Weapons, as a skeleton, and Crumblejon already has some strength and could probably do okay with it. The heavy polearm could be used by anyone, since it's just a solid weapon.

If you've already had enough of running across the entire world to pick up loot in dangerous locales, feel free to be done with the guide and skip to chapter 5) for extension advice on where to go from here! Additionally, you can safely vendor the sandals you purchased earlier since you won't be needing them now.

If you aren't done, and you want more loot, feel free to move on to chapter 4) and continue to the 'advanced' section of this guide of 'running across the entire world to find cool things'. Remember those wooden sandals I instructed you to hold onto earlier? Hold onto them, you will need them soon.

Either way, at this stage I'd bought some pants in Mongrel along the way, since Samurai Clothpants in standard quality are not too bad. You can see Sadneil wearing a fallen sun, Beep with a heavy polearm, my Wanderer guy with one of the katanas we found, and Crumblejon with a moon cleaver. Shryke has nothing because I forgot to give her a weapon I think, but oh well.

With 45,000 cats in my pocket by Day 5, I'd like this think this party has met with no small amount of success, and you can check chapter 5) for suggestions on what to do next.

Oh? What's that? You're keen for more loot, more sweet sweet cats, more hard to find weapons and armour and much much more?

Let's do it, then!

So, now that we're committed to a new line of exploration, let's head down south.

The previous exploratory sprints we've done were not too dangerous, Deadlands for instance has no enemies that can chase you down and they don't chase you very far.

This is where things change. Many of the enemies we'll be running past here and in the next couple zones are capable of outrunning you, and if they do, you're probably simply dead, so stealth is the key here. Not that you can use stealth mode - your stealth skills will probably be abysmal at this point. Just do your best to keep out of their line of sight.

If you did at this point give Sadneil the falling sun you might regret it for a little while because he'll be very slow, like 14mph slow. It doesn't matter too much though, since it'll help train his strength up, and as I said before, you won't be outrunning your enemies anyway.

OPTIONAL: Before we continue, we can do one thing to get some more inventory space, which may be useful to carry the enormous amount of loot we're going to be picking up in the next few in-game days.

Head back to the Hub, buy your way into the Shinobi Thieves by talking to the guy out the front of their tower (-10,000c), and pick up as many Thieves Backpacks as they have for sale. Even at 5,000c each, the 'medium' version will give you more than entire's inventoy worth of extra space, and they are wide enough to fit the longest weapons in the game, which your own inventory can't even do. There is no 'large' Thieves Backpack.

As a small side note, this also gives you access to their facilities, beds and vendor in every city in which they have a presence, as well as free use of the cosmetic surgeon, which lets you customize and rename your characters!

I can't recommend buying the 'small' Thieves Backpack, however, since it offers significantly less space. The Thieves Backpack by comparison is so useful, especially given its minimal cost to your stats, that you'll probably continue to use it for the rest of the game.

That's it for the optional step, moving right along.

You have two paths before you, if you already ran back to the Hub you can follow this path from the Waystation, if you're still in Black Desert City, feel free to follow the more linear path. It'll probably be safer too, on the whole. If you are worrying about food and are thinking of running back to the Hub just to pick up some gohan or whatever, don't bother, we're about to find a place to stock up.

As you can probably see here, there's a blue circle marked. The blue circle indicates the Smuggler's Bar, a place you can stop and chill and even buy some food! This means you can forget the Hub for now.

Once you're past the bar, and on the second leg of this journey... you're basically going to be walking an awkward tightrope, where you desperately do NOT want to drift too far right, and dip too far into Shem, where the Beak Things live, and you do NOT want to drift too far left, or you'll step into Venge, which... well, I'm not going to spoil it. Just keep your 'eye' open.

I've also indicated a reasonably accurate (yes Venge juts out that far) representation of the 'danger zone'. It's a region border, so it's a little bit fuzzy, but with some luck you'll be safe.

Anyway, once you reach the next town, you will be rewarded with your first treasure of the route: Chad.

The man costs 9k cats to recruit, but he backs up that investment by just having pretty good starting stats as well as 20 in martial arts, which means you can skip some of the most painful early levels of learning to punch, if you feel like going that route. You don't even need to keep him on martial arts either, but the dustcoat he starts with sure does give him a nice bonus, as well as the bindings he wears.

If you truly want to give him a weapon, he has 15 in all weapon skills. And if you remembered to hold onto that extra pair of wooden sandals I told you to buy way back in Mongrel, you can now hand them off to Chad and it'll beef up his fighting skills as well as his athletics, though he won't have much trouble keeping up anyway.

This should bring you down to somewhere like 35k cats, so you're not hurting too much for money anyway, and you'll really want to have him and his inventory around for the next looting leg of our journey here. If you bought yourself into the Shinobi Thieves and purchased two backpacks, that'll be another 15k spent, and even then you'll have around 20k cats.

Before you head out, you may wanna pick up one or two Wooden Backpacks. The regular Small, Medium, Large backpacks are rubbish, but the Wooden Backpacks have a hidden secret: items can stack inside them. This means, if you, say, picked up nine steel bars, they would stack up to nine times!

This will significantly save on inventory space when we pick up a whole bunch of the same kind of item. These backpacks in question are horrifyingly cheap too, so even though they obliterate your combat skills, well, we're not going to be doing a lot of fighting. Don't worry about buying any food for now either, trust me on that, even if your squad are hovering around 220/300 or even dipping below 200, it won't be a problem for much longer.



You know the drill by now, the first half of this leg is fairly safe, but the second half of this leg is horrifyingly dangerous as we step into what I feel like is one of the most dangerous areas of the game. Mostly just because in my experience, if you ever get downed here, the design of the area, given there's a lot of narrow corridors and such, will lead patrolling squads straight to you.

So, you REALLY do not want to get caught here. If you do and your squad is downed, even if you survive, you can be certain that in a couple minutes, a squad of other enemies will likely be along to finish you off just as you're healing everyone up. However, that was just in my experience, and like everything in Kenshi, sometimes you won't run into a single enemy. It's just pure luck.

The ash here flying by the camera will also do a lot to mask enemies as they get naturally camouflaged against the ground.

Anyway, head right down to the Supply Outpost. I found a spider or two inside, but like earlier, you can simply lure it out and then sneak right into the building. However, a unique feature of the next few buildings we'll be breaking into is, they are actually locked. This is problematic, since you won't have the lockpicking skills to open them yet.

Not to worry!

As you can see here, you can just beat down the door. The door, once broken, will open, and stay open. A troublesome feature then is, wait, if the door is broken, how do we close it again? Well, it turns out you can actually repair them too! Repair the door for even a microsecond, such that it has even half a health point, and you can open and shut the door as normal.

Now that you're inside, you'll find a real treasure trove. There's a stupid amount of nutri-packs in here, which will feed your squad for the next long while. They're compact, too. There's a badass dustcoat in here which you could give to Chad, but it actually offers a fair amount of protection, and if you want to cut down on how many times you reload your safety saves, you could give it to Beep or someone similarly vulnerable.

Chad's toughness stat will on its own give him a better chance of surviving, more so than your currently incredibly weak squadmates. Other items of note include a guardless katana and an oldworld bow.

This location on its own may fill up your inventory if you didn't take the time to pick up any backpacks, and if it did, don't worry about it too much. You can always come back, after all.


Off we go to our next location. Expedition 5 looks fairly ominous, but there's some OK loot to be found here. Skeleton Eyes, Repair Kits, and some other stuff. Don't bother picking over it too thoroughly though, there's a lot of trash. Maybe have a look through the buildings, I found a regular lantern, which is a neat little rare trophy item if you care for such things.

The safety save denoting the second leg of the journey, once again, represents entry into a brand new area, and this place also has a ton of scary squads you may not want to fight. We're only going be here briefly though, fortunately, so run down to the next outpost and loot it!

No spiders to worry about either!

I found that my main lockpick man could simply pick the lock open, which was nice since it gave him some extra XP along the way. On one of my attempts I ran into like five different squads all in this area, all fighting with one another, as well as notably a squad of Drifters. The Drifter faction, you can find them in bars and they're usually recruitable, but in this case they attacked and obliterated me, so I would recommend assuming none of these people are your friends.

You'll find a lot of loot here, an absolute ton. This place may be enough to fill you up, but if there's one thing you really ought to take, it's the armour you find here. I recommend giving it to someone with the strength to wear it, so probably Crumblejon.

Once you're done, I recommend a swift exit from The Crags, before heading back to the last Supply Outpost we visited. It's a much safer location to rest in if needed, than this one right in the heart of dangerous, enemy territory and surrounded by cliffs.

The final leg of our journey.

I basically saved the easiest for last, there's a bunch of loot to be had up here and you have a lot of room to maneuver, if you hug the outer edge of the cliffs out here. The only dangerous part of this run is the canyon we take a right-turn into. Tons of squads stroll through here, and I found plenty of critters wandering along the waterside. Just be careful and you'll be alright.

Like the last Supply Depot, this place also has no security spiders! Break in and loot the place. You should find a whole bunch of great armour here. At this point, all your characters almost should now have like, some fairly good gear.

Part of the reason it's best to loot this place last is the weight, about this point you're probably going to be really full of stuff. Fortunately, we have a relatively easy way back.


After you make it back to Flats Lagoon, that's it, we're done. You can rest now.

I spent the cats I earned selling random loot on some cool armour from the armour shop. You ought to have more than enough cats now to buy whatever you want or need. If you managed to make it through a couple of scraps in Stobe's Gamble, you can pick up some robot limbs here too.

After all this, you are now really equipped to face the world of Kenshi.



... Kind of. Keep in mind all of your characters are still absolutely terrible at whatever it is you've decided they do. We can fix that though, so maybe check out chapter 5-A) if you want more information on making all of your characters better at fighting, surviving, and winning.

In this section, I will be detailing some more general directions for you to take your newly-fashioned squad.

The advice here is going to be infinitely more wishy-washy than the step-by-step guide I've furnished you with up until now because you are truly ready to go out and do stuff within the game at this point on your own!

However, you may not feel ready, so let me tell you what you can do.

You may also note this section is not numbered with sub-chapters. These are labelled with letters, to indicate you can pretty much do any of these in any order, or not at all, if you so choose. It's entirely up to you from here.

Now that we've got some gear, it's time to fight hordes of low level bandits!

But wait, first things first. If you wanna level your strength up, which will take a while to do, you may wanna overload yourself with iron ore before you go anywhere. The strategy for levelling strength quick is simple, fill a Wooden Backpack with as much ore as you need to overload your character, then put it into your inventory so it doesn't even reduce the weight of the ore. Mouse over your 'strength' stat in the character window (press C), and you'll see you're gaining so much % strength XP by walking or fighting.

I suggest loitering around The Hub or Skinner's Roam and finding starving bandits, and get beat up by them. You basically want to lose these fights so you can rank up your toughness, but hey if you get some melee skill gain in and a bit of strength and some dexterity too, all the better.

If you're coming here from chapter 3, you may find even these guys totally thrash you, perhaps still even dangerously so. If you're coming here from chapter 4, you ought to be able to survive the beatdown much more safely. Once you've endured two or three fights like this you should really be in a good place, toughness-wise.

One strategy that can work is keeping one character out of the fight completely in sneak mode, and using them to heal everyone up after the enemy has left. This will allow you in fact to survive a lot of fights you might otherwise have died from, and losing out on XP on one of six characters is not a huge problem, because once the rest of them have gained 20-30 levels in toughness, they'll usually be able to put into 'playing dead' mode after battles instead of recovery coma.

This is a good thing. And in that situation, your lowly field medic will catch up swiftly, since they won't have to hang back any longer.

This is really the best way to go honestly, if you want an active, engaging combat stat grind. Once you're past the initial hump, and you have stats ranging in the 30s, you'll be able to fight a much greater range of enemies, and explore further throughout the world safely.

Base-building is not only totally optional, it can be frustrating, long-winded, and your first base is no doubt going to suffer extreme material shortages as you get set up, simply because you as a player won't know what materials you need yet.

Allow me to spoil that for you: you will need a LOT of Building Material. Same with iron plates!

The best advice I can give is, don't even worry too much about trying to set up an outpost somewhere until you have some pretty strong squad members and you can handle yourself in a fight, you also probably want a nice fat surplus of cats to spend on materials and other things.

Buying at least one pack animal, like a pack beast or pack bull, will help significantly in moving all the materials you will need just to get started on a base, and I recommend you do in fact pre-purchase as many 'Building Materials' as you can, since you need them to make almost every structure.

There is an alternative, that would allow you to get started on things like research and have a nice little place to yourself, and that is to buy up buildings inside of towns and simply live in them!

It can be troublesome to power your house, however, because you sort of share power weirdly with the town, and some of them have absolutely trash tier power generation, and there simply isn't much you can do about it except build a bunch of small wind generators on top of your house(s) inside the city and maybe build a few regular generators and fuel them yourself, somehow. This can be problematic, particularly since getting to and unlocking the technologies for the above strategies involves a fair bit of research, which... requires power.

Since early outpost-building progression is also tied to research, heavily, you also really want a steady supply of books. If you haven't found any, or can't adventure in order to find them, you may have to purchase them, which can quickly get expensive when you're buying 30 books for 10,000 cats a bundle.

10-15 recruits is probably the sweet spot to start a base with, and you probably want at least 50,000c stashed if not a little more just so you can make emergency purchases of books if necessary, as well as buy food for all your characters when you absolutely need it, because it takes a fair while before you can really start producing food in quantity even if you beeline the tech in question.

Crops take time to grow, and then you need to assign people to cook, if you haven't done any farming yet your farmers will need time to gain a few levels before they can efficiently gather up all the crops you planted.

You're also going to have to watch out for the raids. Some factions will simply come up and say hello and demand money. Some will simply want to talk. But others won't even speak to you, they will just run up to your base, storm inside, and start slaughtering left and right without a care! So, being able to muster a quality defense is important too.

I could write an entire guide on this. Maybe I will. If so, I will put it here:

There's plenty of stuff to see out there in the world of Kenshi. Plenty of unspoiled locations to loot, at all corners of the world! If your hunger for loot remains unsatisfied, I can suggest a few more.

North-West of the Lost Armory you found in the Deadlands, there's another Lost Armory, up in the Iron Valleys. There's also a Deadland Workshop closer to the west, not to be confused with the one west of Black Desert City, but I recommend steering clear of both of them for now, since the denizens are truly quite dangerous and will likely take off a limb or two. Be wary of the Iron Valleys, too, since not only iron spiders lurk there...

North-North-East (so about 1 o'clock on an analog clock) of Mongrel, past the Fog Islands is a smaller, yet similarly foggy zone. It's worth checking out, for the forgotten Lab situated there. And North-East of that zone, is another area worth exploring.

If you want recommendations for just a direction to go, well, the north-west corner of the map... isn't the most dangerous quadrant of the game world, though defeat can be quite punishing. Similarly, the north-east is not too challenging to traverse, and it even has some civilization, though there's much less loot to be had.

If you've skimmed through or followed chapter 4 at all you may find yourself agreeing that the south-east corner of the map is basically a terrifying horrible nightmare and you should steer well clear of it until much later in your playthrough. Some of the most dangerous enemies in the game roam down there as well as far to the east.

The south-west... is not much easier than the south-east in terms of difficulty, but the giant green zone right below The Hub is not so bad, and there's even a lab or two worth raiding. I've already taught you the skills necessary to loot these, too, so maybe check that zone out if your computer can handle the awful frame rate.

If you get particularly frustrated by any one faction, well, what the heck, why not destroy them utterly?

All you need do, really, is assassinate all their leaders. Then you'll have significantly less trouble with the faction. You'll make an enemy for life probably (or until you feel like paying a pacifier to restore your reputation in exchange for money) but 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend' is well and true in Kenshi.

If you pick a fight with the Holy Nation for example, you'll find at least a couple other factions will like you a whole heck of a lot for it. It could be troublesome, making a power move like that, if you have a base set up though, since they'll come after you for wronging them.

Smaller factions like the Dust Bandits will almost never trouble you again once you slaughter their king!

This is also usually a great way to find some top quality or even unique (Meitou quality) gear, if you can manage to defeat the enemy on their home turf.

By the way, killing or sometimes just imprisoning extremely important faction leaders will make changes to the world, sometimes good changes, sometimes not so good ones. Be careful!

No, for real.

You'll probably first want to bank your weapons and gear first... the valuable stuff. Things you don't want the slavers completely stripping from you, likely never to be seen again.

However, once you've done that, hey. Why not head your squad up to Holy Nation land up near Blister Hill, which is north of Stack, which you may have already stumbled upon already since it is just north of the Hub, and pick a fight with the Phoenix?

You'll be captured, thrown in a cage, and eventually taken off to Rebirth where you'll get to start a 'new life' as a slave. They don't always enslave you though, so it might take a couple tries.

This might seem like a stupid thing to do, but actually it can be pretty fun, because there's a LOT of mechanics to the slave lifestyle, and if you already have some okay stats (10-20) across the board it can be a much less frustrating place to cause trouble in than if you were starting here with nothing, such as in the 'Slaves' game start, and that in itself is fun. You can also powerlevel lockpicking here.

With a group of 5-6 characters (you may not want to bring Sadneil... skeletons really aren't intended to be there, and repairs will be difficult), you can probably cause a whole lot of trouble, maybe raise your martial arts along the way!

And hey, slaughter enough guards and you can free the slaves and maybe pick up some new recruits. Ex-slaves also tend to have better stats than typical recruits you'll find in a bar - though they won't all choose to follow you.

You could mine copper. Three pieces a minute, 200-ish cats per item, so 600 cats a real-world minute, and it's only going to get better from there baby! That means, after 10 minutes straight of watching your guys hit the rock, you'll have earned 6000 cats.

Heck, get two of your guys on a second copper node, you're making 12,000 cats every 10 minutes!

If you get, against all odds, ANOTHER copper node, you'll be making a whopping 18,000 cats every 10 minutes!



And it'll only cost you your soul microing your guys endlessly as they run back and forth between the vendor and the nearest copper node.

This is just here as a joke I don't recommend you do this at all since it isn't fun and it's a horrible way to play a game like Kenshi.

Okay, it's been quite an adventure, but I think that does it for this guide here.

Hopefully you managed to get something out of all this, hopefully you managed to pick up a bunch of cool loot, some money, and are now ready to take on the world. Maybe you've learned to be bold and explore on your own, or I'd hope so anyway.

Good luck!


V.1.00 27/03/2023 - Guide posted