Kenshi Base Tutorial/Guide!

hi everyone grant stratagem here and today I am doing a kin cheat video on base building it's gonna be a bit of a tutorial and also just giving everyone who is fairly new with base building a general idea of what their initial challenges may be and what to look out for so with any great base we kind of need to talk about a little bit of the backstory like what is our goal with this space right and so a little minor spoilers here but nothing too crazy I actually started this game as the escaped slaves start with our team in Kumo down here and we started off in the tyrannical slave pits of rebirth which are owned by the faction known as the holy nation and so we very quickly have our reason to hold a grudge against this great quote unquote holy nation and as we escaped we decided to make it our personal mission to bring down this tyrannical regime and liberate all the downtrodden people and so we decided to take their God's name in vain and name our base Akron's thorn so now that we have that established our goal is to essentially raid the nearby towns and bring it into this this enemy that we've created for ourselves and yeah I think it works pretty thumb Attica Lee however if we're gonna make a base like this we need to think about the first thing that one should think about before even laying down their foundation and that is location when it comes to a base so let's go ahead and click on Sophie who is our designated science person and if we look at it she has 53 science points and if you're curious on how to level that up make sure that the person researching all your research is the same person and that will increase her science skill or his sky and skill greatly and we just can go ahead and run a prospect and this will give you all the information that you need to know for is this a good location for building a base or not ideally you want to have a hundred and every single resource but this is kimchi scarcity is in the is basically the name of the game here so it's very rare that you're gonna find a place with everything and also be in a defensible spot now if you notice our water is pretty effective like I think we're good on water you're gonna need water for farming and crops our environments actually pretty good too we're in between the border of two different bio zones essentially and that means we have access to both green and arid zone climates and while they both have their advantages and disadvantages sometimes being a part of both can give you the advantages and disadvantages of both so it can actually be helpful if you have the right combination and I think green and arid is a good combination so we have our fertility and we immediately have a problem as you can tell the river valleys in the back here are very fertile for obvious reasons but we are up on a rocky plateau and it is completely black here zero fertility so we're not able to grow stuff very well but except if you've noticed we actually do have some crops up here miraculously so sometimes you just get lucky and yeah but you would ideally want to be in a fertile region and so would everyone else in this game and that's where it gets interesting you're gonna run into a lot of enemies and fertile regions whereas if you build in a very desolate zone you'll probably won't run into much difficulty except for the fact that you can't grow a lot of food so then we're gonna need Stone iron and copper stone is usually very easy to come across you shouldn't have too much difficulty with that iron if you notice this is a node resource so you need to make sure that your base was is near a node with within a reasonable distance and also copper if you'll notice there are actually red dots here if you can barely make that out that means they're very low yield nodes I'm lucky because this plateau has both and has a decent yield copper node of 70 percent or actually 80 percent yeah it's actually even better than I expected and an iron node which is of a hundred percent so I'm in a really good spot I'll be honest with you I got very lucky with the spot I'm very happy with it but there's one other thing that this map doesn't really tell us which is defensibility now you're gonna face bandit raids and attacks on your base that's just a part of kimchi so any advantage that you can get is welcomed now if we look I'm actually built up on top of a plateau I have the obvious height advantage that's really great I'm built off the major road here so a lot of the holy nation patrols that I really want to avoid we'll just walk right past me that's great they don't walk through my base at all which is another great thing and there's only two ways up here one is this little back region that never gets used because I have walled it off and then the main path here which is the front and gate and most of my attacks will come up straight through here and if you noticed on my storm house here you'll actually see I have these nice little mounted crossbows in the perfect position just rain down hell on my enemy and as they're up at the gate I have a secondary defense here so if they manage to get to my first gate they'll have to go through a second gate and this essentially is my lifeblood up here this is the everything behind this gate is vulnerable so I need to make sure that whatever happens here that they don't get into the second gate now I'll talk a little more about defense later but now that we have our location essentially mapped out you may think to yourself okay great now it's time to start building but hold your horses because you need to start doing a lot of research before you even start that so if we look at our tech tree here you're going to need to build the tech levels here now in or sorry rather research your tech levels and to do that you are going to need to get your tech here and you have to build a small research bench now you can get a lot of the good basic base building text through just this bench alone but you will have to eventually upgrade to a research bench too and a research bench 3 which requires power but we'll talk about power in a little bit and once you have these established your researcher will be able to allow you to or unlock the building's needed to become a self-sufficient base however you may think to yourself well I don't want to build my research bench out in the middle of the wilderness so what do I do yeah you can actually buy a house in towns and I opted not to do this but it is a very safe thing to do is to buy a house in town and do all your research and said house you can build within the realm of your own house so you're allowed to build a research bench but that house becomes very limiting very quickly and you're going to want to go out and eventually become self-sufficient completely so now you've got all your research done and we need to move on and talk about the initial steps to building your actual base here so the first thing you're going to need is stone and the reason why is we've ever a little stone mined here then we're gonna need a manual stone processor which creates these building materials which is necessary for the initial building such as like a storm house or even like a little small shack so you're definitely gonna need access to this because building materials are very heavy and they're very unwieldy you can't have many of them in your inventory at the same time and you're gonna need to build this stone mine so again how do we do that that's that's where the stone stat from where we did our prospecting earlier comes into play if we look at our stone mine yeah we've got some really good stone patches up here of a hundred percent you want to make sure you can get as close to hundred percent as you can I have a hundred percent where my mine is currently because it increases the efficiency at said - your settlers use it and mine from it and that increases the overall yield so you want an efficient effective base so try your best for that as far as numbers in your base go I would try to have at least six because you're going to start noticing very quickly that more hands the better because some of these initial processors require three people to just barely pump out one building material maybe once every 40 to 40 seconds to a minute or so it's not exactly and that's that's real time not not game time and it can become a slug very quickly if you're working with a minimal amount of people now we've got our stone setup and we're going to eventually need to work over to our and you essentially do it in a similar manner we've got an iron refinery here and we've got a little storage just for our raw iron so essentially if you assign someone to the war node and the refinery every time they mine an F or they'll go ahead and put it in the box and then the guy who manages the refinery will go ahead and take the stuff out the box and use it for his refinery and do his tasks a key thing to note with that in particular the task down here you'll essentially assign a job you shift right click a resource so like if you want someone to purely mine you make sure that they have a boxes they can store stuff in so then you just shift right click the the iron here as you notice he actually has this is a duty already it's the least priority job and he will whenever he's not doing anything else he will go mine the iron resource and put stuff into the box and then of course he's also assigned to the iron refinery so he typically the slower servant here will typically shift and do everything automatically here and then eventually those iron plates will get put over into the iron plate box but I've been pretty effective with my use so I have none stored up currently so we've got our iron we've got our stone you will need copper later on for the electronics that get built for a lot of the power units actually so that's a good time now to talk about power so the reason why you need power is a lot of the upper tier buildings will require powers so if you notice in the right here I've got a 50 over 8 power with a battery charge so if we look at the actual power tab here we kind of battery bank switch any unused energy will be stored up in these battery banks and you have two different approaches towards well I guess you know you're about to where you can to purchase the power where one is when generation which is free and the one I've opted for so if you build these windmills in your base they will generate power whenever the wind is blowing if you don't have battery banks though and the wind isn't blowing you're not getting any power whatsoever so that's that's the big liability of this power source is there's no wind you're kind of screwed however the battery packs can kind of make up for it and the more battery packs you have the more overall efficient your base speed can be but sometimes you just go into these periods of almost no wind and it can be a little unreliable so if you don't want to do that you have the option of just building a straight up generator and I mean this is an effective method as well but she will need fuel to fueled I guess that generator and you're gonna have to go ahead and buy that you can't actually create fuel in the game however you can create biofuel which is the biofuel distillery here and this will pump out the fuel for you to use and I guess it's biofuel technically to throw into your regular generator so as long as you've got your crops more or less unmolested and you're creating green fruit which I believe is used for this biofuel distillery you'll have essentially an unlimited power source it just depends on how much biofuel you're creating at a time and you don't create biofuel very quickly so I prefer the wind generators and it makes sense you know we're on a big giant plateau but this should be pretty good wind up here I've actually got another windmill building up over yonder so we've got our power confirmed we've got our basic foundation built we've kind of looked at our defenses a little bit and now we need to look at the food I mean that's the major reason why you make a base in this game so you can be self-sufficient now you typically are used to going around and buying food and whatnot and you can make most of the food that you can buy in this game so I've actually opted to build wheat farms and cactus farm so obviously you need to research them first but if we go to our actual build tab here we can look at farming and I have an extra large cactus farm over here and I have wheat now cactuses you can build an arid climate no problem if you notice here I've got 100% fertility and also understand crop yield and I'm environments of cactuses grow great wheat however is a different story so I can build wheat here I begin I've got good fertility and again I want a plateau and typically most of this region has zero fertility but there are little crops and patches on this plateau I've noticed that actually carry over into the green environment zone that I'm bordering and so I get the hunter percent fertility from that biospheres which is really awesome however if you notice I'm still somehow in the arid environment despite having this fertility and I get a 60% crop yield on wheat now what that means is you have a 6% chance of every time the farmer hits the little little wheat node here you will have a chance to fail and unless your farmers that's pretty high and so I actually roll with two wheat farms and one cactus farm because the cactus is usually never fail me but the wheat can be kind of problematic at times and I chose these two crops because I can create dust witches so if we can just very quickly get out of build mode here and use Javik to kind of go look at this yeah we've got our dust witches here there are 70 nutrition so I mean look at the rice which you can make pretty easily and like swamp climates that's only 25 nutrition there it's easy to make rice but not very nutritional so you're gonna be making a lot of something and burning through it very quickly now dust witches on the other hand have 70 nutritional value and well the description is pretty awful I would hate to eat one of these apparently they're effective and I'm making enough to where I have a little stockpile going on here so I could probably invite more people into my base and not really break the equilibrium by any means so to be able to create these crop farms we're gonna make sure that we need we have a well and again I'll just go ahead and this is where the water stat from earlier kicks in so let's see did it do is its storage no I must be under farming yeah we got well so we gotta wait got lucky we have a nice little water patch here as well with a hundred and so I've got my well I think uh well Tier two actually is self-sufficient so as long as power it's constantly creating water and then that water will be directly used into your farms to create the crop and then I think for me I've had to create a little silo and a bread oven to create the bread for those dust witches so we're now completely self-sufficient on the food and we talked about the research and we've talked about the initial foundation now let's talk about the defense and attacks and all that kind of stuff so we're self-sufficient people are gonna want what we have this is kimchi it's a game all about scarcity and when you have it and people want prepare to defend yourself now I typically don't get attacked by animals which is great I actually have a few animals my little canal here knocking out a little a little path here but these four from traders and with that in mind animal attacks are just the worst because they are indiscriminate they will eat your settlers if they get a chance and they've knocked them out and that's extremely inconvenient if you just happen to be unable to defend your your town and they also make a beeline straight for your farms especially if you build infertile open areas so you're gonna need to build up a wall or something to funnel them into now I'm lucky because I'm on a plant so I don't typically deal with that but bandits are a huge problem for me and and also the holy nation because we've made them our mortal enemies in fact and the cages here I already have well a couple of holy nations suckers that uh walked a little too close to my base if you want to call it that now I already showed you the defenses from earlier more or less but again just keep in mind these gates can't typically hold off an attack very very well I mean like they're you can't just lock them outside they're gonna bust their way in and maybe like 30 seconds to a minute flat so these are just there to delay the enemy you really need to have a front line of fighters and you you definitely have too few with just six people like you need about ten fifteen twenty people really be able to man an effective defense and I mean make sure you've got guys up on the walls you know shooting crossbows and doing everything they can it kills many of them before they actually engage into you to the fighting your party because any loss on your end is super super rough now I can typically deal with the regular bandits but then when the holy nation attacks if any astute viewers have been watching to this point they'll notice that my stats on my characters are not good enough to hold off an actual holy nation attack so what happens when I deal with an attack that I can't deal with well first thing you can look at is actually diplomacy and just due to the nature of the holy nation they've actually have some other enemies other than myself minor spoilers here but there's actually a flat sam village up here which i allied with because we have some of our goals for obvious reasons and they actually will send reinforcements sometimes so if you notice I've got like some old flat Sam ninjas walking around my base now they usually send them in response to a raid sent out by Akron or sorry about the holy nation but if you notice I'm in the smack-dab of holy nation so that ninjas usually show up very late to the party and I mean they are effective though because they'll stick around for a while and any other bandit attacks that come afterwards maybe law and recovering from an old nation attack yeah they're they're useful okay so definitely consider diplomacy as well now okay so the holy nation attacks what do I do because I obviously can't deal with them and a direct one-on-one conflict well if we look at our Tim he is the world's greatest assassin apparently now I didn't exactly intend for this to happen he's my main character but let's just say he tried to escape rebirth several times and you only need to escape once so he had a lot of practice getting beat up and trying to escape the prison constantly so when all the bad guys from the holy nation show up if you have a single building they will make a beeline for that building and they'll typically knock down the door and then idle and the in the singular building that you have so if you look at my assassin here you can actually want to percent stealth Kol most characters that are at that holy nation grunt level and so he will just sit there and knock them all out one by one because they're usually all idling and facing the opposite direction and since my character still stats so high I can kind of get away with it let's say you don't have that though what do you do or let's say you made the mistake of building two buildings like I did and realize very quickly that they don't want car idle in a single building but rather they double back and forth between the two buildings and say and they're desperate bid for finding food and rating your storages well in that case you're kind of boned and you just kind of have to let them do as they please so what I typically do is hide all my members over here on the side of plateau where they're usually unmolested and they will decide to leave when they want to leave and holy nation assaults they will typically leave and return about their duties but if like hungry bandits show up they will kick you out of your own base they do not care they're like this is our base now this bill she just built you base the space you built sorry it's it's mine and um I mean by all means go to the nearby town and hire some mercenaries and take your stuff back just lay the beat-down on these guys don't don't let people bully you in your own base but anyways so yeah that that's kind of a tax in a nutshell don't worry you don't always get attacked you'll deal the traitors and you know other people might show up you know some payments you can actually maybe bribe to make them go away and yeah it's a dynamic system and the world does react to your presence which I really like so with all that said I know this video is dragging on a little bit but there's one last thing I want to talk about before I end and that is the endgame like what's the point in all this right you know yes you can have self-sufficiency and everything but what's the point well I think the point of in-game and kaanchi especially when you've established a sprawling base or maybe even Peyer is what you make of it really like for me I created the story based around this holy nation and Vista mantling of this tyrannical regime right but if that doesn't really interest you I mean there's a lot of very difficult enemies in this game and far-flung secrets and lots of nice little things and even bits of lore to discover if you decide to look hard enough and trust me you will have to go look for these things because in order to access the endgame research for your bases you need the appropriate text which if we look here I'm already starting to need with the ancient science books which are not easily accessible and also the engineering research which is you might actually find that in a few shops but they have to be a very very advanced kind of shop and those of you who are experienced with this game will kind of know what I'm talking about so yeah I hope that this guy slash tutorial sort of helped I know it dragged on more than I typically like to with my videos but base building is an extensive process and I hope that when you decide to go make your own base then it's a hell of a good one this is grand stratagem signing out

Channel: GrandStratagem

Views: 71,622

Rating: 4.6996589 out of 5

Keywords: Kenshi, Base, Tactical, Tactical RPG, Guide, Tutorial, Base-building, New, RPG, Noobies, Newbs

Id: l6VWFlw5I6o

Length: 23min 5sec (1385 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 16 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/FreeHats4U]

Tried to make a more recent walkthrough on what to look out for when creating your first base. Starring my own raider outpost known as Okram's Thorn. Feel free to steal that spot for your own playthrough!