Kenshi: A Tale of Beep and Skeletons #kenshi #doitforbeep #beep

all right everyone give it up for day 74 of lockdown i would like to take this moment to congratulate the network service hulu for finally playing an ad every five minutes that was so obnoxious my wife and i have upgraded to premium because i for one am extremely sick of celebrities staying at their home in outfits likely worth more than what both my wife and i combined pulling in a month telling me that i need to eat out and spend more money much like everything else that is wrong in the north orange county california region i am blaming this on disney you know what has been my one light in this miserable abyss we call a quarantine lately can she lately i've been spending a lot of time playing kenshi kenshi is a game that makes me feel the same way that i felt after a teenage me fished the elder scrolls iv oblivion out of a discount bin and proceeded to get lost in it for a hundred hours at a time let's be real here we've all seen the seth and wilberger videos about kenshi but aside from naruto running drugs and beep what exactly is kenshi well it's a massive open world rpg with a dynamic world faction system economy combat that harms characters limbs and blood pool instead of just doing a number crunch at a total health pool and beep that doesn't really do it justice though so let me tell you about my first experience in kenshi i rolled a lone wanderer type with not much but a rusty metal club to my name and followed the advice of that one video and tried sneaking into the ninja tower to use their training equipment and was like yeah this is really lame i'm not getting the levels i need so let's just go out into the real world so i did after a bit of wandering along the road i found a city where i mistook the local law enforcement headquarters for a public place and got arrested by the sheck people before being tossed out of their tower i'll have to train myself against real world threats i explored some more and found some cool ruins where i got some slightly better gear that people just abandoned for some reason and some stuff to sell to the barkeep for a morsel of food however on my way back to the city i slightly strayed off the path to get back into squin and a single stray dog chased me down beat me unconscious and broke both of my legs a single stray animal had beat me within an inch of my freaking life when i came to and was sure that the bone dog had gotten bored and wandered off i began to drag myself by my arms back into the city gates being careful to avoid anyone around me as my legs were so damn broken that dropping a recently washed butter knife near me would cut them clean off i made to the city where the guards at the gate were like i don't care if you're about to die we're searching your bags right now and of course they didn't find any drugs on me acting as quickly as i could as i was pretty much bleeding out in the store i traded my scavenge supplies for some medical supplies and a backpack and once i banished myself up dragged my broken but now not bleeding legs over the hotel where i learned that i didn't have enough money for a bed so i had to hawk my crossbow for a scrap of food and the ability to sleep in a bed for a couple days until my legs looked like how legs are supposed to look and this had me saying once i finally got out of bed holy crap this game is hardcore i love it within a month of first starting up kenshi i logged over 100 hours to my first major playthrough you can really get lost in this game both figuratively and literally the map is huge and there's no fast travel of any kind and kenshi is not a place that gives you free passes when you mess up there's also so much to explore and discover and without getting too much into the lore since one of the best parts of this game is learning bits and pieces as you travel the ruins kenshi is a world that takes place in a post post-apocalyptic society as in the first societies collapsed in a spectacular fashion they eventually rebuilt but then that society collapsed in a spectacular fashion leaving you where you are now a bit of advice to anyone that wants to pick this up is seek out the unique companion burn the skeleton as soon as you're able to brave the wasteland region he's uh somewhere over here burn was around for most of that happening i definitely recommend picking up kenshi to help pass all those lockdown hours if you haven't already and i'll include a link to the humble store where you can get it and help support the channel through your purchase now i could tell you about all the cool things in kenshi but i think it'll be more interesting if i do that through my own experiences in my own playthrough rather than talk about things in general terms kenshi is all about the experiences you'll have in game and yours will likely be a lot different than mine so there's no need to worry about any major spoilers here so like i mentioned earlier i picked the lone wanderer start since it seemed like the best way to go about things for your first go-round you can pick easier starts like starting with five dudes who are going to go straight to making a city or being a wealthy merchant or you could pick a harder start like rock bottom when you start with missing limbs but i went for the vanilla experience the first time around i got dropped off in the mostly destroyed city of the hub which i have no idea what it's the hub of and i read a guide saying that i should immediately go and start a bar fight by talking trash to this one guy so i could take his gear after the guards beat him up but he wasn't in a fighting mood so i did the next thing the guide said and went to the shinobi thief tower which also we already know how that went discover the city of squin with the czech people got arrested then i went out and did that scavenging got mauled by a random dog and you're caught up i eventually got back on my feet and i managed to recruit my first traveling companion a czech lady named soto we have a good time traveling a bit before a random skin spider wanders into us and teaches me the value of kiting and that exploring is for people that can defend themselves and we are not people that can presently defend ourselves we head back to squin meet ruka the hornless check who joins us for free and i enter the hell hours the hell hours are what i call everything after the 5th hour and before 20 or so hours into the game once the initial exploration and learning about kenshi is done and now you're on the quest to learn the hard way that you are at the bottom of the food chain in your current state literally everyone is better than you and they will be taking advantage of that pretty much every place in kenshi is not a place you should be wandering into at your level but the only way you're ever going to make any progress in this game is if you wander into those places and get your teeth kicked in let me introduce you to all the people that will be ruining your day the first thing that's going to be wiping out your fledgling squad would be the starving bandits faction or the hungry boys as i began to call them they're a faction of roving bandits that have little more than rags on them or no armor whatsoever and are armed with rusted junk clubs at best as their name implies they're almost always starving meaning that they have a pretty heavy debuff on all their stats at all times i first came across them in check territory where a band of five or six of them who rushed me for what little scraps of food i had which my team was barely able to escape with their lives but our food was now in some guy's stomach not even a day later i realized what i had fought was a small splinter group of the main forces of the hungry boys as i found out trying to set myself up in holy nation territory hungry boys tend to travel in packs of 30 and will not stop until they have snacked on everything you own or they are all dead my little squad of three rookies had no hope of fighting them off and we had to regularly run and hide in some holy nation ruins whenever we saw them coming next group of people that you're going to have to deal with are ninjas black dragon ninjas swamp ninjas cloud ninjas float some ninjas depending on your faction allegiance and pretty much anything else that has a katana style weapon i first met the ninjas when i was exploring in the swamplands going to find that after looking away for a moment my whole squad had been wiped out and the swamp ninjas hadn't even bothered to take anything after looting me i'd meet the black dragon ninjas later on when they raided my base and decided that they really liked the place so they just kicked me out and take it they're low level but they swarm like the hungry boys and have passable gear full bellies so that makes them a much larger threat these guys are programmed to take literally all of your food even if they aren't hungry right now so make sure you have a strong gate like it's so bad that one of the more popular mods on kenshi is disabling those guys's hunger stat you can't bargain with these guys and they tend to attack a lot once you have a base built so don't go building a base in their territory unless you're ready for a big boy battle on a weekly basis seriously for a while i didn't even bother to mine iron at my base because so many black dragon ninjas would attack me that i could just use all their scrap gear as a reliable source of iron ore next we have the dust bandits and other bandit types they live along major roads and usually they have the option of allowing you to pay them off if you're rich enough they'll raid your town too but they'll also give you the option to pay them off of the gate to avoid conflict i learned it's cheaper to contract the mercenaries guild though and after a minute you're not gonna be bargaining with these guys the dust bandits made me miserable during my first leg of my adventure as they're pretty much everywhere and where you're safely able to travel and once they have a beat on you they're gonna follow you almost indefinitely lucky for you that means that they'll chase you into towns where the city guard will deal with them a lot of people find that to be a legitimate strategy that you just let them follow you into a city have the guards kill the bandits and then you take all their gear and sell it you'll also have to deal with the holy nation and slavers in the early game if you've got any sort of non-white non-male members of your party they don't like you and they will enslave you on the street if you don't talk to them with your male greenlander party members who happen to be holding their bible they'll carry off all your sheck and hyper party members to be cleansed in prison work camps and they'll regularly raid your base if you're in their territory and they find out that minorities are living in your house slavers are the same business except they'll just enslave all of your party if they deem you to be weak enough for them to take you in a fight and then they'll sell you to the united cities the game doesn't end when you're enslaved by the way the game ends when literally all your party members are dead lastly we've got all of mother nature and unnature i guess too pretty much anything that can survive in the wild is strong enough to make short work of you right now that bone dog that mauls you in early game they travel in packs and they will wipe out your party then we've got the skin spiders which will literally eat you if they come up on you in groups of more than two there's gorillas that just beat the crap out of you and those things in the desert and beak things beat things are everywhere and if there's one beak thing nearby there's probably three or four more that will show up and gang up on you by the time you've managed to get the first one down i first met beak things when i wander too close to the crater and like four or five of them rush me big things are big big things are nasty big things do cutting damage so they can and will remove your limbs beak things will rush you because you look like a snack literally and they're all tougher than you can handle until much later in the game when you've got your squad all geared up they'll just start eating you once they get you down too so have fun with that their nests tend to be pretty large and they have pretty wide territories outside of their nest and on top of the beak things if that wasn't bad enough we've got all the miscellaneous stuff like those weird bug things in the desert the cannibals the fog men skin bandits and mechanical spiders along with listless skeleton people that no longer have their sentience just the best way to sum it up is that basically everywhere is not a safe place for you and you're going to get wrecked here's a nice little diagram of places that you should not go if you are a low-level squad so since i was now well aware that exploring was not a good idea for my little 3-man band i decided to try and make a base for my team to train in to get better at fighting here's a good rule of thumb for putting down roots in kenshi if you are slightly unsure if you're ready to put down roots you are nowhere near ready making my little hovel with some sleeping bags in a research bench put me in the crosshairs of literally everyone in the world now that i had an address all the bandits hungry boys and the holy nation knew where to go if they felt like shaking me down within a day of me setting up my base the bandits were at my door demanding money and that was far more than i had early on you get the option to stab their leader in the throat and they'll all run away from you buying you a day until they come back with twice as many dudes and they're no longer in the mood for negotiation then the hungry boys noticed that there's a new homestead out in the wilderness that maybe the people living in have some food we didn't and then they'll start bum rushing you 50 at a time and just when it didn't seem possible for things to get worse i realized that i had built on the holy nation's territory and that they were coming to enforce prayer day i'm sure you've watched the other videos and know what prayer day is but something i noticed that wasn't covered in those videos aside from the stupid helicopter from the municipal airport is that when the holy nation comes if you answer the door with literally anyone who is not a male greenlander holding one of their bibles they'll consider your settlement heretical and they'll bring the inquisition the next time around to burn your city to the ground at this point we had gotten fairly used to evacuating the city whenever anyone looked like they were coming for us so we tried to build some walls that made a diamond link fence seem like a fortress but even the hungry boys were literally able to knock down our walls instead of going through the gate in search of some snacks that we didn't have we didn't have a chance against the holy nation inquisition eventually after loading a lot of saves i realized that enough was enough and i wasn't ready to put down roots yet so we quickly finished whatever research we were able to do we ran out through a homemade back door leaving the remains of our misguided base to some other fool it was at this point that i realized something very important about kenshi and your place in it you are not the chosen one you're not the dragonborn or a prisoner whose presence was foreseen in the emperor's dreams you're not a courier who's able to cheat jeff you're not a renowned warrior you are nobody and if you want to continue being nobody for long enough to become somebody you'd better keep a low profile you can go places if you really want to but you haven't earned the right to fast forward through long stretches of travel yet because you need to keep an eye out on the road for anyone else who might attack you you'll eventually get to the point where traveling is no longer a dangerous gambit but before that you're gonna have to put in a lot of work and take a lot of beatings in order to get that toughness stat up so at this point i was about 20 hours in and starting to get the hang of things i knew what i shouldn't attempt to do right now and i knew what i should stay away from and most importantly i knew where i needed to go and what i needed to get money friends and science i should focus on that last one later on though nearly every recruit in kenshi costs money save for a few special circumstances and you need a way to reliably procure cash so that you can get people onto your side i realized that some of the other guides were right and i needed to think like a twitchy crackhead vagrant and start stripping things for copper lucky for me there were a pair of seams with copper and iron a short walk away from the city of squin i should mention that mining is one of the easiest ways to get money in the early game because you don't need any special tools or skills to do it and it helps that you can train your squad's strength hauling all the heavy ore to the traders i set myself up a little bitty camp with the fireplace and some sleeping bags right in front of the ore seams and started hauling and mining all the ore i could to get myself a chunk of change lucky for me there were even occasionally herds of goats that wandered right by the ore seams which served as a wonderful source of food between town runs after a good minute of trading my stripped copper for cash i had enough money to get some road provisions and make a few new friends the boys now consisted of me soto ruka reign the giant hot longs oron kang meow and a pack beast also we got a dog don't get too attached to the dog though as he wanders off in search of arms to nibble on and never comes back maybe he found a nice farm upstate in the united cities what matters now is that we've got enough money to hire crew we've got enough money to feed the crew and give them the armor that might actually negate some damage it takes a bit to get the newbies up to the same level of not quite defenseless that myself soto and ruka are at but things are certainly easier now with the packed beefs we can carry a lot more scavenged loot and also that means that we aren't weighed down during fights after a while we start not being everyone's punching bag fights with normal sized mobs of hungry boys are tough but we can win and sometimes we can even take on the dust bandits in smaller groups and we should still stay the hell away from any holy nation patrols as those dudes are tough and they really don't like the idea of me calling sheck my friends we'll deal with them later though for now it's time to explore the safer parts of the world and meet the major players in the world of kenshi over in the starting area is the sheck kingdom with admag as its capital the sheck presently only have two major cities and a lot of ruins four reasons that you can find out as you play but they also have several splinter factions that like to pick fights with you they're okay though even if they outwardly dislike humans they'll still tolerate us so long as we don't try anything stupid and best of all they won't enslave us for being different just east of them is the holy nation they'll be the coolest friendliest group of dudes to you ever so long as you're a greenlander male character if you have anyone in your party that doesn't fit that description they don't like you and they assume that you're the slaves of the greenlander male if i don't say these guys are my slaves and say no these are my friends who i did pay money to recruit who do whatever i tell them to do and okay ruka joined up for free and soto just needed someone to buy out her contract but the point is no one here owns anyone else but holy nation don't care they see that as heresy they'll enslave all of you for heresy by the way they consider all forms of science books and robotics to be completely illegal and you'll be in big trouble if you're carrying any educational heresy into their cities or they'll just attack on site if they see a skeleton or somebody with cybernetics further east and to the south of them is the united cities they're technically a free nation where all people are equal so long as you're not a slave and everything is great in the uc mostly because their economy is propped up by slave labor but hey you can get some good stuff for cheap out here everything is great except for the slave part but me and my new friend tin fist are gonna be doing something about that later on lastly we've got everyone else the hives that mostly keep to themselves but if you come to their territory or mess with their queen you're gonna be screwed fast then we've got the floats of ninjas and holy nation outlaws people who follow okron but dislike the whole holy nation fringe extreme stuff then they've also got the traitor guild the mercenaries guild and the tech hunters who all do as their name implies in other such places such as the free cities of mongrel and shark which is where you go if you don't want to be found or do something illegal mongrel is also where you get the most precious character in the game there's a good deal of minor factions here that we're leaving out but you'll eventually find all of them there's a lot to go over here and we'd be here all day if we list them all our grand tour of everywhere that is reasonably safe to go ended up with a stop back at the old homestead which is now a ruin making it in slightly worse condition than we had left it now that there's enough of us to hold the fort literally we use some science books we found from an earlier trip into the swamp to do a little bit of basic research so that our next base can feel like a real home that isn't just a shack with a big sign over it saying a bunch of weak idiots live here and you can take them in a fight we finish up all the research that we're capable dismantle the last of the base for parts and strike out in search of a better spot to build our home [Music] so it's time to put down roots for real this time we've got enough people to where we can fend off most attacks so long as we don't pick a fight with anyone serious and that also means we have enough people to do some basic industry after a few tries i found this awesome spot that was perfect for building our new home it was in the border zone which meant that none of the major factions picked on you and it was in a fairly secluded spot that bought you an extra bit of time between raids since it takes the ai a while to negotiate the treacherous path in order to get to the mountain we're at the top of so as i mentioned we're now capable of fending off most lesser attacks thanks to our research efforts and greater numbers and we now have walls that were strong enough to withstand people leaning on them for more than five minutes and we could mount crossbows on these walls if we knew how to make them most dust bandit and hungry boy incursions were dealt with reasonably fast but we were a short distance from the black dragon ninja's base of operations so they came to hassle us like every week we got used to their tactics though and eventually their gear became a good source of iron our baby base had power and even some rudimentary industry even if all the stuff we had was so low-tech it didn't even require power but we had a single big issue we couldn't make our own food things get bad real fast if you don't have enough stuff for everyone to snack on and things will get to that point pretty fast now that your squad can no longer be counted on fingers alone thankfully loading up our pack beast with all our excess building materials that we make and heading off to squint to trade was usually enough to where everyone would get enough food for a full belly at least for the next few days there were some real close calls with starvation though and some people did need to be carried to a food source on multiple occasions learning how to farm and then getting the stuff we need to produce our own quickly became a major goal when we weren't fending off hordes of black dragon ninjas and the straight dust bandits or nearly dying in a famine that we brought on ourselves from our lack of agriculture everything was centered on getting some r d in any leftover cash from food runs was spent on books and my main character was almost always at the research bench trying to figure out how to make this little base work how do we grow our food how do we prepare the food can we make better gear on our own what about those cool crossbow mounts we see in all the cities we're going to need some more of those if these ancient science books are worth anything and also we're gonna eventually have to find something called an ai core i wonder when you get those along the way we started learning some hard lessons about building and maintaining a base that all in part to you for one it's tempting to make your base's entry walls flat or in a convex shape so that you'll have more land inside of your walls don't do this especially if you have those mounted crossbows mounted crossbows work off a 180 degree line of sight that will fire an actual projectile to do damage instead of a hit scan the cone of accuracy for said projectiles is based on the mounted crossbow skill of the person who's operating their turret since bad guys will almost always bum rush your gate when attacking that means that if your gate is flush with or sticking out from your outer wall your mounted crossbowmen are going to have to aim in the direction that has all the other gunners very close to or if not completely in the line of sight of the other gunners further closer to the gate even at a low level with a basic mounted crossbow a stray bolt straight through the head is more than enough to accidentally one shot your gunners make sure that your outer walls are in a concave formation where all the mounted crossbow men have a clear line of sight to the gate without getting any of the other gunners in their crosshairs or else you're not going to have any city defenders that make it to a high enough skill level to be of any use in defending your city oh and don't buy any pack animals or other animals that you don't intend to take with you at all times because you can't put food storage outdoors and animal characters can't go indoors so they're just gonna starve to death if you leave them to their own devices for too long all of their humanoid followers so know how to go inside a building and get something to eat my base was now able to defend most attacks with our new crossbows but we were nowhere near self-sufficient yet food was still an issue and we couldn't yet make our own supplies for expanding base operations one solution to this is to be on the hunt whenever possible our fledgling trade route often have packs of goats and even garu running around in them and even if the garu might be a pretty tough fight it saves you a ton of money trying to take down their packs and grabbing their meat instead of spending all your hard-earned cats and credits from making all those building materials on food just to keep you alive the whole point of building a base was to start thriving instead of just barely surviving and as far as i can tell packs of wild animals just keep respawning so as long as you don't wipe out the nest this is sustainable for the time being now that we have figured out where to get the food without breaking the bank we started having a good chunk of change left over from merchant runs to start bringing in more people to take care of the base and now the original squad was mostly reformed and we have people who are designated to stay at home and work on industry those farms aren't going to get themselves up and running they can even afford to fend off most attacks without our main squad being there so we don't have to worry about wandering too far from home and can now go get more stuff you can also check the faction tab on your menu to see when people are gonna come to your base and try to fight you because apparently the black dragon ninja clan is very good at calendaring their raids having designated people to do jobs and also go out to trade or explore also meant that these things get done faster as my away team doesn't need to help out with basic chores around the homestead and they can go run out farther and we don't have to worry about workers back home now that we've got the means to go further out the squad is really starting to learn the rules of the wilderness for instance always loot animals even if they don't have anything you want just leave the stuff on the ground if you've got no use for it looting non-humanoids such as beak things or mechanical spiders of any of their parts say leather or compressors or meat will kill them instantly meaning you won't have to fight them again in a few minutes when they come too as it's kind of hard to get back up after being knocked down when somebody looted you of your organs it's also very smart to have everyone follow whoever has the lowest athletic skill as otherwise your team forms a large unorganized train of stragglers that get further and further spread apart it's also good to pack more food than you think you're going to need as it eventually will disappear freeing up your bags face and it's likely that you'll find new things to investigate while you're out exploring meaning that you're going to be out for longer than you thought oh and don't go near anything that has the word ash or dead in it so the farms at home are starting to look like they might actually be able to feed us and the away group no longer has to run and hide whenever literally anyone else is on the road there's a lot of stuff that we still can't do yet like make good weapons and armor or build defenses that can kill someone before they break down our gate and half the time we can't even make the resources we would need to make those things in the first place so we have to go out and spend our money on materials instead of i don't know nicer gear it all keeps coming back to us needing those ancient science books engineering documents and ai cores you can't really get too far in kenshi without doing some serious expeditions into abandoned science facilities and while agent libraries will have a few ancient science books and maybe won't be too dangerous for you to go to depending on which one you choose to loot you're going to need to get the engineering workshops and science towers that are crawling with security drones if you ever want to make anything nicer than a thin wall with some low grade weapons on it this means mounting serious expeditions that involve bringing a small bases worth of camping supplies hiring mercenaries and brushing off those vanilla wow dungeon pulling skills because there's no way you're going to be taking on more than one security spider at a time it's time to explore the wild wild wasteland so at this point the base is now totally okay to be left alone and conveniently there is a full squadron of mercs a short walk away from our home that are posted up in the hub's bar that we can hire for eight days at a time to watch over our farms which means that even the black dragon boys aren't something we need to worry about for a good minute it's time to bulk up the main squad and start heading out to places that don't even have towns to restock in so we can get the good science the first thing you gotta do for these expeditions to not be a total crap shoot is start buying up all the ancient maps you can find they're usually sold at travel goods stores where you buy your backpacks and stuff and when you use an ancient military document or a tech hunter map it'll highlight a newly discovered location with a green box that's enough to get a start and moving in the direction that's gonna be fruitful it's good to buy as many of these as you can since it's likely that there's going to be at least two maps on offer that reveal locations that are close to one another and there are likely other maps that you might find at these locations that will either tell you of more places to get the science you need or at least you can sell them for a pretty decent price and make your investment on the maps back you'll also start going to new places where you can make new friends so you'll have additional bodies to carry things or at least some new workers to send home so that each person only has to have one job these ancient science labs are tough they take a long time to get to they're often in territory that was already dangerous to begin with and the security spiders are some of the toughest enemies in the game and they can very easily remove several people's limbs at once if you aren't careful since their main attack is an area of effect cutting attack there's no shame in leaving a science tower and coming back later if you discover upon approaching it but there are too many defensive spiders on the first floor or too many grouped together to safely pull them i know i did working your way up to the top of these towers is hard even with a full squad of mercenaries backing you up and a sizable squad of my own we often had to stop and rest on sleeping bags between fights since even one or two mechanical spiders was more than enough to the bulk of our party sometimes it would take in-game days to get all the way to the top floor and by then the mercenaries contracts were up so we were on our own but there was no point in trying to rehire these guys immediately after it expired since either a number of them were outright dead or they were crippled beyond the point of being useful but once we finally got to the top of those towers whoa mama there's a ton of science up there and enough loot to finance at least two more expeditions like this one base security included we also got our hands on a couple of those ai cores which means we can start doing some serious research now things are starting to get better thanks to the science we found on the first couple runs we can now make our own cloth through a hydroponic hemp farm and between that our ample iron supplies from all those black dragon ninjas and us having more animal highs than we know what to do with we have all the things we need to start manufacturing our own gear of course it's crap right now though but i'll leave the craftsmen to their own devices and come back when they can make something better than shoddy grade we also have enough farmland to make enough food for everyone to eat and then maybe have some wheat left over to make booze maybe we can sell that what really was a big score though were the maps that have all the locations of all the other science facilities and the know-how for taking them on thanks to all the loot we found we have enough cash to recruit some more people for expeditions and maybe bring some more veterans along that were normally just work in the farm and send the newbies we find to replace their jobs back at home science labs are now much easier to take there was this one where it might have been impossible otherwise seeing as it was in the middle of a lake of acid and there was a gigantic gorilla sitting right next to it but knowing that security spiders could be effectively kited we all took turns swimming through the acid past the gorilla who luckily didn't follow us into the acid and then we would kite the security spiders out to the gorillas island the big guy would fight the security spiders and it didn't matter if they weren't being stripped for parts as soon as they were down because our new big dummy friend was strong enough to one-shot them once they got back up in their crippled state as soon as one spider got kited whoever did the kiting got some much-needed medical attention and got to take a nap in our little mobile base to recover while the next person braved the acid lake to kite another spider drone until the whole place was empty out we now took out the very weak king gorilla because we didn't want to get wrecked by him on the way out and his hides are worth a lot of money after our success we hit a few more science towers on the way back and we used some of that grog that the townies had made with the extra wheat straw to finance the entire trip so now instead of just breaking even with the science we now made a profit on our expedition and money is starting to not become a problem anymore heck we can take our new recruits we hire in bars and kit them out with the nicest gear their city has to offer so they'll be slightly less useless when we go and fight things along the way we've come across all sorts of other non-science-related ruins like little military bases and places that tell a story about what the world was like before whatever the heck happened this time around like this one time we got lost in an area where these giant death lasers were firing off at random onto the ground which is probably the worst place you could possibly get lost at we also met a skeleton named byrne who was there to see most of the world before it went into its most recent state of armageddon burns an odd skeleton fellow but he's decent in a fight and knows a lot about everything around us we even dropped off some of the science at home and picked up new sets of gear that let us brave the acid rain of the dead lands and made some more skeleton friends while we were out hunting for tech there we've just about cleaned out all the science from towers and ruins now and we can't get any more tech without starting a serious fight but that's okay we've moved up considerably in the world since first building some crappy walls in holy nation territory and for the time being we have enough science just to get by and focus on building the base up and now it's time to take a moment to recognize our anti-sponsor or in this case our anti-anti-sponsor this video is brought to you today by the supreme benevolence of beep the little hiver that could beep is a hive drone that lives in the city of mongrel who i personally have no idea how he got there as when you encounter him he has no stats to speak of and it's quite the dangerous trip to get into the city at the center of the fog lands after hanging out for a bit in mongrel you'll eventually be approached by beef who will follow you around until you agree to accept him into your party you should definitely take him in as beep is the most determined little hiver in all of kenji and will stop at nothing to become the strongest warrior in all of the land not even catlon or the bug master can compare to a fully powered up cyber beep once he inevitably loses all of his frail little limbs in the midst of combat with low level enemies this doesn't slow him down though as he'll just accept his new cybernetic limbs as the next evolution of himself and refer to himself exclusively as cyber beep beep also has a ton of unique dialogue while you're traveling and nothing i mean nothing can bring him down even if beep dies in combat you'll be overwhelmingly compelled to load to an earlier save no matter how much you went on about anti-safe scumming bushido or whatever stupid excuse you use to not have fun you should always cherish beep and have him in your party help him learn how to use a sword that's much too big for his little hiver arms and then just give him a set of masterwear great klr combat arms so he can lift a fragment axe over his head and through half a dozen sheck or just give him an eagles cross crossbow so we can no scope holy nation paladins from 100 yards out that works too beep wants to be the strongest warrior so that there will be changes he wants treasure and to meet beautiful women beautiful human women which he didn't even know were traveling with him all along and some big check ladies too beep is possibly the only optimist in the world of kenshi and through training him we can maybe make the world a better place beep and other perfect little cinnamon rolls of sentient beings are brought to you by patreon.com charlatanwonder where you can help me make these videos in these trying times now that i have nothing better to do thanks to the mass shutdown causing me to be laid off from my job let's get back to the rest of the world of kenshi now that we've introduced the best thing about it [Music] so now we're at the point where we have the marshall skill the tech and the resources to really start building up the base everyone back at home has their own standardized set of gear now and if it's anything less than specialist grade we chuck it into the parts recycler because we know we're better than that we've also graduated from crossbows on our walls to having these sweet double barrel harpoon guns now they even come with spotlight so that our guards don't take an accuracy penalty when we get rated at night by the way that's a thing in kenshi all skills take a penalty in the dark from harvesting crops to manning the guns it's a good thing we have a crapload of windmills battery banks and backup generators to make sure that we have the juice at all times we also had so much extra hemp from the cloth production that we started refining it into biofuel which now we have more of that than we know what to do with two the black dragon ninjas and dust bandits have also been reduced to a relative annoyance now as most of them can't even break down the gates before the poons get them we've had a couple close call lately though so i think it's time we did something about them once and for all i round up a posse of extra swords from the base camp hire some mercenaries and we head out to start cleaning up the border zone the first to go were the black dragon ninjas who for a rather nasty bunch of raiders hardly lasted five minutes against us when we stormed their own tower i guess they're like dragon types in pokemon where their type of attack is super effective against themselves whatever we bagged their leader begrudgingly turning them into the holy nation for a bounty since they don't have a bounty anywhere else and i haven't seen a single black dragon genon anywhere since next to go were the dust bandits who i have to admit were slightly better at defending themselves but they get marks off for having literally no one manning their guns despite their tower being able to clearly spot us from way out on our approach we bagged the dust king and hand them over to the sheck kingdom but unfortunately this won't be the end of dust bandits as they'll start splintering off into smaller factions and still attack us but in much smaller numbers that leaves the splintered dust bandits faction and the hungry boys who have been nothing more but a trail of bloody puddles leading up to a few yards short of my gate for a while now i don't even stop to fight these guys when i'm traveling through the desert now except for that one time when i just wanted to annihilate one of those 30 man herds of them as revenge for all the times they swarmed me when we were just starting out with most of my enemies crushed and having nearly all the tech in the game it was time for some serious expansion but there was a problem i had already hit my in-game limit of 30 characters per save how was i supposed to have a dozen people manning the guns at all times another dozen in the away team plus their pack animals and 20 to 30 people needed to run my economy back at the base mods that's how i choose to run only a few mods for quality of life and to keep the content coming and i opt out for stuff that gives you an edge or better gear because well it just doesn't feel right here's what i'm running in this playthrough first order of business 256 character limit mod i'm pretty sure this is the most downloaded mod on the steam page right now the name says it all and it's integral to making any big moves in the later game and while i'm usually not into mods that make the game easier and i'm sure that evz intended for you only to have 30 characters but i'm gonna personally chalk this up to maybe this was more of an optimization thing since while kenshi isn't exactly a super graphically rich game there's a whole lot of graphics to process and everything is always happening even when you aren't viewing it so to speak like it certainly doesn't render it all out at once and you'll frequently find yourself loading in chunks even if you're running on ssd but things are still being calculated in real time like where people are what they're doing and so on unique characters can die in attacks on the city they live in before you even get around to meeting them if you take too long i've got a pretty good gpu and a whole lot of ram on my pc but it still chugs loading in new areas but whatever i want more dudes i want a literal army the next big thing that you're gonna want is a more reactive world mod which allows for factions to make bigger moves once you're ready to make some moves yourself while factions can and will take over cities of other factions with the right help and if the world state is correct more reactive world creates a few more world states and contingency events such as when you capture or kill the dust king rather than just ceasing to exist the dust bandits will splinter off into smaller factions with the word dust in their name that are weaker and the prime faction of cannibals will be divided into 12 tribes i really like the part about the dustband it's because on top of splintering into new factions they'll start living in all the ruins that used to be scattered around the shack kingdom in the holy nation and you can now siege those bases the sheck kingdom can and will repopulate the hub too if you start crippling the holy nation's economy in addition to their conquest of other cities you help them ransack also the holy nation will form a resistance after you take down blister hill and will start using gorilla tactics on your squad there's a lot of other stuff in the world state and a special character that spawns so that you can keep track of it all and i'd recommend this as a nice stop gap between taking down lesser factions and going for the big boys like the phoenix or catlon other than that i grabbed a few quality of life things such as a fix for the blood spiders melee range or an automated copper mine which for some reason isn't in the base game compressed textures are nice too a better map and ui and a mod that allows characters to repeat their unique dialogue after a while because later in the game things will start getting really quiet unless you have it there are also a few nice mods that just generally expand all the things that characters can say which really livens up your squad traveling after the hundredth hour or so okay we've got all the mods installed and we've built our squad up so let's do something big something that's a real test to see if we're ready for end game aggression let's go fight that guy called the bug master that everyone in the world seems to have a bounty on i brought all my best dudes and then i brought every mercenary i can find or hire because money was not an object here the very approach to the bug master's lair is a huge test of your team's fortitude there are squads of like 20 or 30 skin spiders just wandering around and there's enough of those squads to where if you time things poorly the squads will intersect one another as you're fighting them and you might have to deal with like so many of them that it crashes your game the mercs didn't last long even with me having my own squad give them medical attention between fights but they didn't make for a nice distraction early on with all those skin spiders so that my own guys didn't get too badly crippled so we finally get to what looks like it used to be an old science tower where the bug master is posted up and jim any christmas this guy is an absolute unit even with my entire squad and what's left of the mercenaries dog piling the guy we just barely got him down for long enough to stabilize his wounds so he wouldn't die on us on the way back to claim a reward and take that legendary tear weapon off his hands and we still have to get out of the bug master's domain in one piece now that all of his minions have gone aimless the bug master's treasure was really something else though by the way while all this was going on my base was under siege by the holy nation who is now at war with me this whole thing was some sort of season finale type stuff as everything was popping off all at once all around the world and nowhere was safe from bloodshed so why were the holy nations sending all these dudes after me you might ask as i normally keep a low profile well it might have had something to do with me raiding a secret black site they have in order to acquire the last couple ai cores i needed to install these babies six-barrel rotating harpoon cannons despite the holy nation's dogmatic view on anything involving science advancements in quality of life or the rights of people other than greenland or men they keep a secret base at the edge of the dead lands called narcos trap which guards the evil tower they say this is because they don't want anyone to commit heresy by learning about the sciences but i think they just want this stuff for themselves well i decided i could probably do better with those ai cores in their tower since i was further along the tech tree than they are so i stormed their barracks and incapacitated all the soldiers stationed there i say incapacitated because i'd like to believe that maybe one or two of them were able to survive my raid and i even left some of them in their own cages where the wild animals wouldn't be able to eat their remains now as a quick little sidebar here this is the first time an entire playthrough that i attacked a settlement that wasn't entirely evil or abandoned then one of the things that i really really like about kenshi is that while it doesn't beat you over the head with it or make it obvious when it's happening kenji has a lot of moral choices in it and for once in a video game it's hard and not instantly rewarding to be the good guy sure i love the bioshock series but in spite of the outset of oh it's going to be so hard out there and you need all the atom you can get you objectively get more adam from saving little sisters instead of harvesting the slug because they'll give you a ton of atom after every three girls in kenshi it's hard to be the good guy from the outset recruiting team members of their own free will is always going to be far more expensive than just buying slaves in the slave markets selling contraband like hash or even selling people you incapacitate into slavery is a quick way to get really rich as opposed to making honest trade goods and while i didn't make quite a bit money off of grog in the mid game that stuff is illegal in all of kenshi as compared to hashes being very illegal in most of civilization when i could i chose to help people like the mercs i hired even if that meant less medical supplies for my own guys and on top of that helping out guys doesn't really give you a major boost with the faction's reputation although it will help get it back to zero if you're in the negatives with them i think it's that much rewarding to be the good guy in a game when it was actually hard to be the good guy and not just a binary choice that gives you a big bonus no matter what you do so it's at this point that you might have noticed that while your base initially started out as a little x on the map which eventually became a storm house and then a little tower like it's an outpost now your base has the same icon as a major city-state in the map and let's be honest here the base is now bigger than most of the major cities in the game and we've got more industry than all of them do we stop bothering to produce grog or any other trade goods because our surplus weapons cost less resources to make and are worth far more than grog or any other trade good we have to go through the entire sheck kingdom and then through three or four high villages just to offload our reject pile of anything less than edgewalker type 2 grade weapons and there's no point of doing this because i already have a million cat and credits on hand not to mention that the base is now likely a net worth of the tens of millions of cats because of the property value all the high grade armor i've got all my boys equipped with on top of everything else we make the crap loads of food and high-end materials that i've just got laying around now and i'm pretty sure at this point i am richer than the merchants guild or the united cities some people still try to raid me but not even the holy nation's kill squads make it past the gate well they did this one time when the ai glitched out and didn't open fire on the paladins trying to kick down our door while the bug master was attacking but upon reloading a save the guys went down in less than 30 seconds now most of the time i learned about my base getting assaulted by getting a notification that the raid has been defeated and then seeing a pile of bodies in front of my gates enemy attacks have started going so poorly for the other guys that i had to build a new corpse furnace right outside my front gate in one part as a warning to attackers that they aren't going to get very far but mainly because now i have not one but two people on corpse disposal duty but even then they can't keep up with the amount of bodies hitting the floor and by the time they're done with the last few guys of the first raid another raid is already starting you would think that the perpetual trail of blood leading up to my base that stops just short of the literal corpse grinder would be enough of a warning that the 12 dudes stationed at my walls each manning six barrel rotating harpoon cannons are going to make very short work of any invaders that try anything on me those things can easily pierce armor and the first volley does enough damage to wipe out most invasion forces nothing has ever completely depleted all of my cannons requiring my guys to reload but the challengers of the undefeated have came close it's at this point that you're likely going to become a fully fledged ally to a nation of your choosing likely when you turn in the bounty on the bug master as it will instantly max your relations with whatever faction you give him up to i went with the check kingdom as they were always cool to me save for the occasional trash truck and the empress assad of the stone golem literally gave me her firstborn seda she's a bit of a slowpoke but she'll be fine after a bit a side effect of giving up the bug master to the faction of your choice is that any faction that doesn't like them is now on not so friendly terms with you or outright hostile if you've already pissed them off i thought whatever you know what the holy nation was always sending goons after me anyway after our little incident narcos trap so i may as well align myself with to float some ninjas too and start dismantling their empire so here i am having a great time raiding all the holy nation mines and farms incapacitating or outright killing all the guards and putting the survivors in cages that the slaves usually go into while freeing the slaves some slaves were too scared to taste the freedom but others were with it and got out of there and a few of those even joined up with me they're sitting now on training dummies at my base waiting for something to happen because my kill squad is pretty full as it is nothing was really happening to the holy nation as a whole though so maybe it takes a little time for that crippled economy to set in or perhaps i need to take out more farms screw that let's go sack a city i load up my pack beasts with extra ammo and medicine and we head right out to the city of stack lucky for me it would seem that their mounted crossbow men at the gates aren't very skilled at using those things because my guys with sniper crossbows can take them out well outside of their range that they can shoot back at me effectively softening up their defenses before we charge in we basically flatten most of the guards that are still at the gate and start clearing out buildings there's a few things that we can't quite take yet though we took a little break and came back and now we take out the boss the high inquisitor which seems to be a magic switch now as once we grabbed him and took him in for a bounty the city had gone from red to green and now was owned by the sheck kingdom so i guess the a were conquesting the sheck had also officially claimed the hub thanks to that mod i installed so now there's an actual police force in societal order in the starting town the shinobi are still there but they never really did anything unless one of their own guys got attacked i decide that just for the heck of it i'm gonna buy literally every building in the hub and then use my massive amount of unused resources and money to repair every building in the city i leave them open to the public because what the heck am i gonna do with 20 new buildings that are about two miles away from my base proper so i have effectively given everyone in the hub free and safe housing maybe i'll build some shops or something in one of them to help get rid of all this extra food and materials i have laying around since i'm now at the point where i make more food than i'm able to eat or even store i'll do that later though there's countries to dismantle so believe it or not after 120 hours in this play through i'm nowhere near done with all the things i can do and this isn't even counting the entirely different paths i could have taken early on for instance starting as a merchant would have likely been an entirely different game since i'd be aligned to the merchant guild and that would have made me much more likely to start exploring the united cities instead of the sheck kingdom or if i had taken the rock bottom path making the holy nation a no-go zone from the very start because it's highly likely that i'd eventually scrounge up enough money to afford a cybernetic limb replacement which makes you attack on sight for them not a good thing for early game people i could have chosen to intentionally keep my squad small or even tried being a true lone wanderer just to see how far i could have gotten i've presently had to stop myself from playing more because there's other games i need to play in order to get ready for this year's halloween and july event which is gonna be a big one this year i have no idea if i'm gonna be putting out anything in june but stay tuned i'll figure out something and i'm nowhere done with this playthrough either i'm still systematically taking out the heads of the holy nation so that i can move on blister hill when there's little chance of reorganization once the phoenix is put in a cell then when i'm done with that i'm gonna go back to those anti-slaver guys i met before who were like you're not cool enough to hang out with us because no slave owning nations hate you and i'm gonna be like yo i completely dismantle a slave holding nation get behind me tin fist and then we'll go dismantle the slave trade in the united cities and maybe the united cities themselves if they don't want to get along with the new free world i'm making after that i think i'll leave the hives alone as they never really did anything to me so long as i stayed out of the southern hives territory and they seemed to be okay then when i'm sure that all the men women and hivers are free and kenchi and my army is strong enough for anything there's one last place i need to go and one last wrong to right who knows how long that's gonna take me though if you haven't gotten the idea already the world of kenshi is huge and there's a ton of things to explore and experience we haven't even really touched on things like encountering the skin bandits all the various little cult factions exploring the fringes of the world like the iron tail or anywhere where the leviathans live seriously this video could probably go on for another hour and i hear you can even make yourself an army of crabs can you imagine being some bandit camp that's harassing travelers and suddenly in the dead of night you hear the skitter skitter of a hundred crabs the size of horses charging down your camp this current playthrough is just over a year old in in-game time and there's more i can do even before i start adding in new story mods and odds are if you decide to pick up kenshi for yourself after this your experience is going to be entirely different from mine seriously though it's worth every penny alrighty everyone that's gonna do it for this video okra knows it could have gone on for a whole lot longer but at this point you just gotta go out and experience the brutality and adventure and kenshi for yourself special shout outs ten dollar patrons alisonera denegator karlski chili moonbuns omg ponies mcfluffers and french toast and a last minute hello and welcome to new 10 patron jacob maria thanks for joining i'd love for all of you to at least swing by my patreon where i've got updates about video progress outlines of videos to come in the future and for all the patrons exclusive videos and sneak peeks at the upcoming events even a dollar gives you access to all the good stuff also feel free to come and say hi on the discord we're we're all trying to find new and interesting ways to distract ourselves and i think i'm gonna start up doing community game night on sundays so that ought to be good for a bit of entertainment i honestly don't know when the next video is gonna be since i'm already in full swing for preparing the halloween and july event which i intend to be bigger and better than the last one like i previously said but i might find time to make sure you all know i'm alive in june let me know in the comments if there are any games you'd like to see me talk about and i might just look into them because hell i've got the time so in the meantime remember to stay inside wash your hands stay safe and enjoy this cat video oh frisk frisk what is this what is this what is this there's an intruder it's orange boy oh he's already gone did you stare at him enough did you make him go away oh yeah i think he's left the premises a little backstory on this orange boy seems to be the tom in the neighborhood he runs around screaming to mark his territory and also spraying demarcus territory by other means and frustrates frisk because he can't go outside yet we got him where is it frisk hold still the harness and it even fits him but because his animal hospital is currently not doing uh flea treatments and vaccination updates because essential services only frisk can't go outside he can't defend his territory from orange boy no let's be real here orange boy would kick your butt you've never been in a fight in your life you can't hide from the truth

Channel: Charlatan Wonder

Views: 494,967

Keywords: Kenshi, kenshi beep, Kenshi beep meme, kenshi lets play, kenshi gameplay, kenshi game, Kenshi gameplay, kenshi review, kenshi 2, charlatan wonder, charlatan wonder kenshi, kenshi guide, kenshi mods, kenshi lore, kenshi skeleton, kenshi hive, kenshi shek, kenshi skin bandits, kenshi fogmen, kenshi mongrel, kenshi holy nation, kenshi tinfist, kenshi ancient tech lab, kenshi ancient science books, kenshi ai core, kenshi united cities, kenshi unique recruits, kenshi meitou

Id: ZioyoHku0Ps

Length: 55min 41sec (3341 seconds)

Published: Sat May 30 2020