Kenshi - open-ended sandbox RPG set in a desert world

[Tovias]

My group of 5, the Wanderers (of the Survivors faction) now live in a cozy small shack in Stack. The copper resources are even closer to this exit of Stack, which is nice, but now I have to save up and hopefully get enough muscle to retake my previous outpost, which had a Storm House almost built. I'm just wondering if I head up high in that Border Zone area if the bandits will leave me alone. I'll make sure to try when I have at least enough money to either pay them off or hire muscle.

You need to always assume bandits will be visiting your outpost, it's them or factions after you. I'd just suggest getting stronger and hiring some mercenary groups to protect the outpost from small fry like dust bois

 

[Deleted Member 16721]

Got a good income coming in now, wondering what to do with it though. Have a nice set up in Stack with copper mining and a storage bin, making a lot of nice cats with it. Going to head to another town to try and hire a seasoned warrior so I can at least survive a bit in combat. I did set up training dummies again in Stack but no one really needs them since 2 of my characters are mostly miners. Do you guys find that all your characters end up with combat ability or just some?

 

[toro]

I've installed a mod called Attack Slot x5 and the combat is a fucking nightmare. The companions are taking damage way more than their KO limit which means that most fights are either win or wipe.

I planned an Ironman play-through but there is no way I can do it with this mod (this doesn't mean I did not try for like 10 times).

Spoiler

Spawned in Hub. Recruited Hobbs.

Tried my luck with a small bonedog. Yeah. I had to run to safety

I assembled a party of 5 and I started kitting desert bandits. Honestly I don't like to steal and this is the most profitable shit for me.

Hobbs has some nice dialogue.

Made progress with dust bandits genocide

Tried to kill the Dust King and got rekt but no wipe therefore I went and hired some mercenaries.

He was in front of his tower

Well, I got him

More dialogues from Spike, Hobbs and Bard.

The Holy Nation guards congratulated me

This motherfucker will get fucked someday :\

I got the money but my standing with HN did not improve !?

Next thing I went back to the Dust King tower and practiced some lockpicking

Bard is really a bard !?

Went to the Swamp because I'm retarded.

Got sodomized from both Red Sabres and Blood Spiders.

Ok. Party wipe. Fuck the Ironman play-through ... I reloaded and went to the Shek area.

I need more Strength and Toughness before I venture into the Swamps again.

 

[Tovias]

I wouldn't play Ironman with Kenshi, the game is too unstable. To limit your saves.

 

[toro]

I wouldn't play Ironman with Kenshi, the game is too unstable. To limit your saves.

I agree and I intend to use reload only when I get a party wipe.

 

[Deleted Member 16721]

I'm 20 hours in and still can't kill anything, lol. But I'm upgrading well. Packs of Bonedogs are still too hard, but one at a time might be doable. I have a party of 5 but 2 are strictly miners and the only decent combat dude is Griffin (although my main is slowly, slowly coming along after hitting the training dummies hard)

 

[Major_Blackhart]

I gotta get this game.

 

[Deleted Member 16721]

My only issue is that the game is freaking enormous, but largely empty. Granted, my party can't handle areas with enemies yet, but traveling through the area near Rebirth was a freaking nightmare. Good thing you can click on the world map and your characters will walk there. But even at full speed that's a ton of terrain to cover. I wish there were little treasure chests or things tucked away. I'm having a hard time finding any stuff like that, although I did find an abandoned mine with a bunch of expensive crafting materials...

 

[Deleted Member 16721]

Wow did I just have a story for the ages. So I'm walking to the Hub to try and hire Hobbs and join the Thieves, and I get ambushed by Dust Bandits. I manage to outrun them, get closer to the Hub and what do you know, the Dust Boss himself accosts me and wants 500 cats. I give it to him, and then realize, wait a minute, he's all alone! So the 5 of us including my bull Charlie knock him senseless. Sweet, I bagged the boss himself! I figure I have to get some sort of reward if I take him to a prison in the Holy Nation. So we're walking along, join the thieves, purchase some cool backpacks and other stuff, train a bit, and then head out back to the HN lands. Well whaddya know, ambushed again by hungry bandits. This time we were near the bar near the outskirts of the Hub and everyone there helped us and we won the fight. Go a little further and bam, ambushed again. This time we took a few down but the onslaught was too much. 2 of my characters, Amira (sweet girl with a katana) and Gecko (my all arounder) were dying. I patch them up, have to make a makeshift bedroll for Amira so she can recover, because now I can't carry back both Gecko, Amira and the Dust Boss with my other 2 characters (one of which, Griffin, had a bad arm). So we are sitting ducks in the middle of bandit area waiting for Amira to recover. She jumps up, we grab the Dust Boss and Gecko and make our way back to Stack. And what a freaking tense trip, man. It was an astounding encounter. We made it to Stack alive and have all gotten tougher in the meantime. And we took a few of the bastards to hell to boot, killing several before succumbing to their sheer numbers. Now, I have to take Gecko and have her carry the Dust Boss to Big Splinter (or whatever the northern HN city is called) to try and put the Dust Boss in prison. Hopefully their prison gives me some sort of reward for capturing the leader of a bandit group. Now she's walking alone in the desert because she was most fit to do it while the rest of (minus Charlie) sleep at the bar to try and regain strength. Wow, what a game. And what a memorable time that was, among many others. I just hope the prison up there gives me a reward or something, the one in Stack doesn't do anything for me.

 

[Deleted Member 16721]

Should I take the Dust Boss to Rebirth and say I have a heretic to give them?

 

[toro]

Should I take the Dust Boss to Rebirth and say I have a heretic to give them?

Check his bounty. Just put him in a cage in the police station (either Squin or some HN city).

 

[Ironmonk]

all characters with a bounty have the bounty price revealed once you pass the mouse over it (Or you need to left click on the character and then it's visible).

If I recall correctly, it even shows which faction will pay for the bounty.

 

[Saduj]

The in game interface is confusing as to what the maximum number of people you can have in one squad is. I have 17 people. When I go to the squad management screen, in one place it says 17/30 and in another it says 17/20. Is it that you have a maximum of 30 in your faction and 20 in one squad?

I've googled it but the results all point to old Steam threads from alpha play and most of the discussion is about mods. Just interested in knowing what the limits are in vanilla.

 

[Ironmonk]

I play with this mod https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=705119823

Increases recruitable units to 256
Increases maximum members in squads to 50
Increases maximum squad limit to 20

 

[Beastro]

The codex has convinced me.

From my reading, it looks like basebuilding is mostly a time+money sink, as is crafting - except for armor? If i want to minimize the time and money sink involved with building a base and crafting, while maximizing the usefulness (defined as crafting useful and hard-to-buy & fiind items), is buying a home in a city and focusing on making armor the best route?

Define "best route"? Since, thieving is the most profitable and least hassle way doing things while crafting is a grind.

The bonus of armour crafting, though, is the PC is able to craft the highest tiers while the same can't be said of weapons.

 

[toro]

All updates from release date.

1.0.0
-390 updates later
-1611 occurences of the word "fix"
-Number of years passed unknown
-Thankyou to all the supporters, forum moderators and bug reporters for all your hard work
TRANSLATIONS
-Russian updated (100%, thanks Vlad!)
-French updated

1.0.1
-French updated (99%)

1.0.2
-Fixed again that pesky bridge in Rebirth
-A fix for the AI constantly alternating between self preservation and another task
-Announcement dialogs shouldn't get repeated, but if they do it won't keep snapping the camera to the location anymore, only once per raid
-A fix for characters in crowds sometimes getting pushed through walls
-Buildings town reassigned when new player outpost created (for walls). If you built your town walls before anything else they would be assigned the wrong town and the AI builders would ignore them.
TRANSLATIONS
-Spanish tweaks
-French update

1.0.3
-A small number of people are getting an unexplained random crash, this is an experiment to see if something we did fixes it
-A bug sometimes gives player buildings the wrong town, not sure how but sypmtoms of this will be the AI not getting food or items or building things. With this update you should be able to fix any broken towns by importing.

1.0.4
-Fixed being able to reorder research to skip prequisites
-Fixed multi-line datapanel text overlapping
-AI fix where a crippled character with un-healable legs would still keep trying to heal them
-Fixed some bugs with corpse disposal AI
-Slaves can no longer claim bounties on other slaves in a slave camp
-Fixed an AI bug in Okran's Shield where prisoners were all getting piled up by a bed
TRANSLATIONS
-Japanese, french, german, portugese, spanish updated

1.0.5
-Combat spark effects added
-"Entered new biome" notification sound
-Fixed a crash that could be caused by a bad mod

1.0.6
-Truncated research data panel lines if name is too long
-AI fallback for bad nest locations
-Fixed game crashing if install path has non-ascii characters
TRANSLATIONS
-Changed the launcher saying spanish was incomplete, because it's not, it's finished
-Spanish tweaks for some stat names being too long to fit on their GUI lines

1.0.7
-Fixed the City Hero gang waiting for you by the wrong gate in Heng.
-If you defend yourself from the City Heroes or similar bandits you should no longer get attacked by the guards
-Fixed carpets disappearing from your buildings on re-load
-2 crash fixes, one caused by re-ordering the research list

1.0.8
-A fix that should solve the problem of buildings and walls sometimes getting assigned to the wrong town, which led to bugs like characters not getting food or not building things.
-Nests can no longer spawn in inaccessible locations
-More NPC AI fallback for bad nest locations
-The point at which your health causes you to go into a coma, based on toughness, is now moddable in the FCS: ["max toughness ko point"]
TRANSLATIONS
-German update

1.0.9
-Lots of AI fixes for police, so they shouldn't now forget to heal or release any prisoners
-Fixed animation modding crash
-Fixed gamedata modIndex value for modded animation load order
TRANSLATIONS
-Japanese update

NOTES:
-If you experience random crashing, you are probably running out of video memory. Turn down "Texture quality" in the game options
-You can still access the older 32-bit version through Steam's [kenshi->properties->betas] tab, and also the latest updates if you choose the "Experimental" version.
-Initial loading time is sometimes pretty long on non-SSDs.

 

[Goliath]

I have been carrying around the corpse of this Negress, who I bludgeoned to death, for hours to build up my strength.

Fortunately nobody seems to mind. Despite the fact that the corpse attracted a swarm of flies which follows me everywhere.

This beats even Morrowind's "hopping around like a bunny on speed" approach to character development.

 

[Major_Blackhart]

You can almost see her cooter.

 

[Deleted Member 16721]

So here's been my gameplan so far. Hire 2 cheap workers to mine copper all day outside of Stack and store it in a house I bought there, then occasionally make runs to sell it with said workers. The rest of the party is out exploring and hiring better recruits, so when I come back to Stack I will have the muscle to defend my outpost when/if it gets attacked by Dust Bandits (who I can now wipe out with my wandering squad). Once I get one more veteran warrior recruit, it's back to Stack to build a luxury outpost and research some cool stuff. But I've made most of my money not by thieving, which does help as my main character is a good thief, but by mining copper all day long on auto with 2 miners.

 

[Beastro]

I have been carrying around the corpse of this Negress, who I bludgeoned to death, for hours to build up my strength.

Fortunately nobody seems to mind. Despite the fact that the corpse attracted a swarm of flies which follows me everywhere.

This beats even Morrowind's "hopping around like a bunny on speed" approach to character development.

Load up some backpacks with heavy gear and carry em in your main inventory for added fun.

The shop owners ones you can get are awesome for that. Weight 100 pounds as they are and can carry a ton more. Was getting over 800 pounds on my guys last str work up.

 

[Deleted Member 16721]

If I'm carrying a bandit with a bounty, save the game and exit, will that person still be carrying the bandit when I reload? So far it hasn't but I'm thinking because the bandit I was carrying died...

 

[Deleted Member 16721]

And I finally think I can start an outpost now. We killed two groups of Dust Bandits (at separate times, of course) and did alright. So if I could fend them off at the outpost our outpost can finally grow.

 

[toro]

It look like the best way to train combat skills is to be aggressive and try to kill more dangerous enemies.

That being said: my party can wipe out 15 Dust bandits but cannot kill 3 Beak things (fyi: most of their stats are around 30). Looks like Beak things are like Apex predators in Kenshi's world.

Anyway, my party is now functional with heavy weapons and I'm planing to go after the Bugmaster.

Meanwhile I got super lucky in the Swamp: got 12 Ancient Books from the first 2 ruins I've explored I'm not sure this is normal. In total I've made 100k cats profit from these ruins.

Spoiler

Spike + Hobbs + Bard have a Heavy Weapon (for animals) while Faye + Kiji + Wilzap have Hackers (for robots). The only downsize is that I cannot use crossbows with them.

Maybe I should give each of them a Guardless Katana cause all of them have skills for Katanas ... but it could be pointless atm.

Also I cannot wait for Toro to grow up (in 40 days) and start rocking

Last time the Pack Bull was doing more damage than my guys will stats in like 60-70.

 

[agris]

I started out as a Wanderer and I'm finding it's really slow going to skill up my guys. I've eschewed building a base for buying homes: I've first bought the smallest one in the Hub and began hauling ore and researching Tech2, then bought one in Squin because it's a superior location and I've researched Tech 3 and now am focused on technology that will let me craft armor. My main is a thief who is responsible for bringing in most of the cash, but of my small group (6 now), my "best" combat character only has combat skills in the teens. I'm having trouble finding things I can actually kill. Dust Bandits rove in too large of a group, and my party doesn't get much experience by dragging them to the Squin gate guards. The guards kill them too quickly for my dudes to train much. All my combat people have Attack at 15 from the Squin tower combat dummies, but I 1) Lack non-Shek recruits, and that's with me recruiting most of the 3k people I can find 2) Lack opponents that 5 people with Attack 15, light armor, and Old Refitted Blades can kill. I've bought a lot of maps including the United Territories and Swamp, maybe I just need to get out and explore more. That's a huge chore though because of the amount of food needed by my Shek companions, so I'm considering leaving them all in bed and taking my two best athletics characters out on an expedition.

I really want to avoid playing Kenshi as Farmville the RPG - I want to explore and fight - but I haven't cracked the code yet on how to do it.

 

[Ironmonk]

the best way to get stronger is to be beaten, you just have to make sure that you aren't going to die (or lose limbs, if you dislike cybernetics). Usually, bandits will only loot food inside of your inventory and nothing else, so you just need to leave your food in a container inside a city and go for it.

and about exploration, yes, its very profitable, my main character have 90+ stealth and I can move with certain distance from security spiders and clean the loot in ruins, besides, usually the libraries don't have enemies and you can get lots of maps, books, ancient books, and stuff that can get a moderate amount of cash.