Kenshi: Full Beginner Guide 2023 Update

welcome back to Falling Fox gaming everybody I'm your host Blaine and today we're gonna be doing a Full Compilation of my kenji's beginner guide now if you have watched any of the other videos in my series feel free to skip this video this is essentially going to be a compilation of all of those guides with some clarification on the points that need to be clarified there were several things that have a little bit of miscommunication and I just want to make sure that everybody watching here in 2023 and Beyond know that this guide is still fully relevant there have been no updates that have changed anything in a major way so everything is still fully relevant so if you are brand new to the game or looking at the game this guide will be perfect for you so let's just jump right in starting at the very beginning of starting a brand new game once you've started up the game and selected new game you'll be given the option of what starting scenario you want to play there are no wrong answers to what you can pick but some are much better suited to new players once you learn the game you can select any of the starting options and still have a great time but for beginners here are the ones that I recommend you try first The Wanderer this is the kenji's default new game start you start the game with one guy and some basic gear and that is all you started the Hub which is arguably the best starting location and you won't have to worry about too many dangers that is one of the safest locations in all of the game for new players the wandering Trader in a similar Fashion To The Wanderer start this start is quite easy you'll begin with a backpack full of items that you can sell in a pack animal this is a good start for those looking to play as a Trader or those that enjoy role-playing a less combat-oriented start my suggestion is to do the start if you want to follow a trade Caravan round and help them out this will allow you to loot the things that they run into and if you heal them after combat you'll begin building reputation with whatever faction they're a part of Empire or holy nation citizen this one's pretty self-explanatory you can start off in one of the major cities as one of the major faction citizens and you can go around and try to be part of one of their factions but be warned that both the factions have several strict rules that you must follow so pay attention to what the NPCs are saying or else you might find yourself in prison or laying on the ground bleeding out somewhere son of a captain this is a similar enough start to The Wanderer and the Empire citizen start except that you start in the United City's territory and you get a decent weapon you'll also be friends with the United cities and you'll have the holy nation hate you nobodies and freedom Seekers this is my favorite way to play the game these two options allow you to start the game with a group of people and they're similar enough that I just kind of group them together as a similar start basically Freedom Seekers start with Goods to build a couple of small buildings and some okay gear while the nobodies start with well none of that both are great starts and I would recommend these two starts the most after you learn how to play the game a little bit so start with The Wanderer learn how the game plays a little bit and then if you're happy with where you're at of knowledge wise of how to play the game then go ahead and restart with the nobodies or the freedom Seekers start before you click begin I always recommend that you check out the advanced options to make sure you have the game set up the way you want scrolling over each slider and option will tell you what it does but I have a few words of advice for new players who don't know too much about the world first the hunger slider controls how often your characters need to eat the further to the right that you have the slider the less often you'll need to eat for your first couple of games I highly recommend you you push this to the right by a couple of multiples to allow you to focus on learning other aspects of the game before you worry too much about food I suggest putting it to a round four to begin with this will require your people to eat still but it's far less often next is the chance of death slider this one is tempting to lower this modifier in an attempt to keep your characters alive but will also make the NPCs also unable to die this can be frustrating as you may want to keep yourself alive while killing NPCs a bit more easy there are ways to adjust that but for now just leave the slider alone until you get the hang of the game then you might want to turn it up a bit to make it easier to kill some enemies as a side note it can help to lower the slider in the beginning if you don't want to kill NPCs you can still loot them and make them far less dangerous the global damage multiplier sliders simply means how much damage everyone in the world is doing if you lower the slider the battles will take a great deal longer and it will really help new players get the hang of the game and it'll help you learn the micromanage of the characters in battle on the flip side if you raise this number it means everyone deals way more damage and can potentially one hit or even kill others in a single blow this slider is one of the best sliders to play around with to see what you enjoy the most as it can drastically change the feel of the game depending on what you want either epic slow battles to the death or a style of fighting where it's he who hits first wins or somewhere in between this one is definitely a personal preference slider so make sure you kind of play with it to see what you like production speed research speed and building speed sliders are all about personal preference if you turn them up then it does make the game drastically easier but only in matters of grinding some people like the slow grind of the game but if you want to get on with the later game stuff then you can turn these up to get there faster remember it's your game play it how you like ignore what the haters say number of Nest multipliers please please please use this one with caution this slider controls how many Bandit camps and animal camps spawn in the world and in the beginning they can already overwhelm you if you're not ready for them once you get the ropes of the game it is fun to crank it up and watch the world get weird as the animals can kill off towns and such with enough time passing but I do recommend that in the beginning you do not mess with the slider too much as you can very quickly get overwhelmed and not be able to save your game Bandits with the players is a pretty self-explanatory personally I turn this off as they usually only steal food or other small items but occasionally they will steal something valuable and it's very frustrating when the game is already pretty difficult in the beginning and then you lose your weapon or something easy prospecting I don't think this one has ever worked so don't worry too much about it theoretically it's supposed to make resources equal across the map for things like farming but as far as I know it's never worked properly so in general I just wouldn't worry about it and honestly it's not even that big of a deal you can Farm just about anywhere you just might have to choose a different resources if the one you're looking for doesn't work there alright this is the first spot where I actually have to pause the compilation and actually discuss some clarification on this point the easy prospecting button does technically work but I still consider it to be a useless button and let me explain why so to explain what this button is for I first have to explain what prospecting is so in the game there's a button you can click and your character will spend some time to basically research the area around him and depending on how high your science skill is you'll get a readout with all the information about the local resources around you the higher your science skill the further out that you can actually see and the more accurate the information will be by clicking the easy prospecting button on you remove the skill dependency and you just get a perfect readout every single time so for new players yes absolutely click the button and call it a day but in reality you don't need to even do this because prospecting is a complete waste of time you can almost always tell what the local area is going to be like just by using your eyes you can look around and if you see a bunch of rocks and stuff you know there's rocks in the area if you're near an area with a bunch of water there's a bunch of water in the ground so you can probably plant stuff if you're in a desert area it's a dry area you're probably not going to find much water it's really that easy it honestly is and any building you actually like construct product will actually tell you the percentage amount when you're actually trying to build the building so you can find the perfect spot for it you don't even need to prospect because you can just move the building around when you're trying to build and find the best location for it the prospecting skill is a way to kind of narrow all this down but the range is generally so short that it's just not worth it at most it's maybe a hundred feet couple hundred feet but really you need something that would do like an entire region for it to truly be helpful so my personal advice is just skip it don't worry about it just click easy prospecting on and just play the game for a new player you're not going to be able to use the information anyways because building is a long ways down the road and it's not gonna be worth your time after you've selected your starting scenario you get to customize your character or characters you get to choose between humans check hivers and skeletons each race and sub-brace have different starting bonuses and penalties to their skills if you select humans you can select between the greenlanders and The Scorch Landers if you choose hivers you can pick between Soldier drones worker drones And Hive prints check and skeletons do not have sub-races unless you have some of the mods which we will cover later each species has a large variation and what they are good at and what they are bad at but in the end all the characters are equal enough that you really don't have to worry too much about what you pick just pick something that you think looks cool or that you want to role play the stat bonuses and penalties are just modifiers towards how fast or slow they learn something so in the end all that it means is you have to spend a little bit more or less time training in that particular skill or Stat on the screen I've decided to add a screenshot from the Wiki page for Kenji it does have a little bit of information for those that actually wanted it kind of lets you know that the different races have different bleed out rates healing rates hunger rates their Max Speed their technical full amount of blood and then their limb HP this chart is mostly useless for those that are just playing the game but those that want to micromanage a little bit or those that like to know about the stats this chart can be helpful it also notes that the hivers and the skeletons are limited in their close clothing and armor selections neither of them can wear shoes and skeletons cannot wear shirts or hats whereas hivers can wear some hats and some shirts once you're done editing all of your characters and make sure that you do all of them you have to click the little arrow just hit confirm and your game will start after loading into the world you'll likely be a bit overwhelmed with everything on screen but you'll probably want to get started doing all sorts of fun things right away but let's slow down for a second and explain what all the different UI options mean and learn the basics before you go and get eaten by a beak thing first things first is the UI there are a lot of buttons and some helpful pieces of information that we need to learn before going further the UI is broken up into several parts on the left is your selected character stats both your own party members and NPCs can be selected to see what their General stats are here you can see what the character's state is things like normal injured bleeding and so on and you can see what their current goal is aimless patrolling sleeping and so on and their encumbrance percentage if this shows zero percent you are under your weight limit for heavy load and you won't be penalized more will be explained on this part later below those options are the character's base stats attack defense strength dexterity toughness and Dodge you can usually gauge how strong an NPC is by how high these numbers are and these only serve as a quick reference for your own characters there's actually a full character sheet that we can look at with better information on them on top of those two stat areas we can see the selected character or the item's name and faction Alliance if any that's about it simple but helpful for quick reference just to the right of all that stuff is the state and hit points of all the selected characters body parts these numbers can be hard to get used to because each race or subspecies have different Maxes and the minimum they can go to is actually dependent on their toughness when you're just beginning just know that a full greenish yellow bar means it's at full and it will lower as you take damage we'll cover these numbers more in depth shortly but for now just know that the higher they are on the screen the better the bottom center of your screen is your squad tabs here you can click on your characters to select them shift-click to select or D select multiple characters and hit the Tab Key to change squads you can also select people by hitting one through nine on your number Keys which you can also hold shift the same way as before to select or deselect multiple people you can also use this tab to give items to other team members as long as they're close enough to trade you can just drag an item over their portrait and let go to give them the item you can also edit the name of your squad in the full Squad menu which I'll be showing you here shortly to the right of the squad tab are six buttons that open up various menus in the game sta is your stat menu map is well your map Tech is your technology window sqd is your squad menu and help which opens a very unhelpful tutorial menu a quick note the map Tech and Squad buttons all open the same general menu that actually has a couple other tabs on it that people seem to forget about but they're actually very helpful tabs so we're actually going to talk about them before discussing the rest of the UI buttons so when you push any one of those buttons map Tech or Squad you will open this menu here from there you you can select any of the tabs on top all of which tell you about different aspects of the game the first one is the map tab here you can zoom in and out all around the world you can see locations and if you bend to one you can actually hover over to see some basic information about the town like the population the faction that controls it when you're on the map screen you can also right click to move your selected people much greater distances than you would be otherwise be careful as your people usually follow roads and this can be dangerous if you're in hostile territory the faction tab has three parts on the left is your relations with all known factions and your relations can change a few ways fighting a faction or imprisoning members of a faction in a prisoner's cage will almost certainly lose your reputation and quite fast and being seen healing members of a faction will slowly gain your reputation with them reputation in general is usually slow to gain and fast to lose so keep that in mind when you're working towards either being friends or enemies of a given faction if you're friends with a faction they will fight alongside you when they see you being attacked as long as they're not also friends with that faction they will heal you if they have first aid kits and sometimes they'll move you into a safer location if you're somewhere dangerous they will also allow you to pick them up if you so choose to and if you're fully allied with a faction they may sometimes also come to your Aid during base rate events on the flip side if you anger a faction enough they might attack you on site or they will in turn attempt to raid your base the faction name tab is for you here you can rename your faction at any point in time and you can change it all you want so you don't have to worry about naming your group something and then changing it down the line you can always change it to whatever you'd like and then on the right side there's an information section about upcoming events this is primarily for upcoming base events like raids demand or Traders coming to your Outpost but check it every now and then just in case you missed a pop-up notification it will help you from being surprised by random group once you've built the base of any kind the research and crafting tabs work mostly the same the crafting screen is a shortcut way of selecting what each of your crafting stations are building or working on I suggest selecting the actual station and selecting your desired item or research from there as you'll gain a lot more information here you will only see a summary as for the research tab on the left is the different categories of research and in the middle are the actual text that you can learn within them by clicking on a research you'll pay the book cost and start learning the tech as soon as you have someone working on your research bench you can see how long it will take to research the tech its cost and what it unlocks in the description section on the bottom in the beginning research can be very expensive and time consuming so I do recommend that you take time to learn the game a little bit before worrying about research too much research once learned cannot be forgotten even if that research bench is destroyed the squad tab is where you can create and name squads to appear in your squad section on the main screen here you can drag portraits around to move them to different squads or rearrange them within their current Squad to create a new Squad simply click add Squad you can also delete an unwanted one by clicking delete just remember that it has to be empty to delete it in the top right corner you can see how many party members you have in total with without mods you'll max out at 30 total party members you can also kick people out of your party permanently by selecting them and clicking the dismiss button in the bottom right corner once you dismiss the party member they will no longer be a part of your party and they are generally expected to be gone for good there are ways of getting some of them back but just be warned that normally when you kick them out they'll be gone forever the dialog tab is just a backlog of all the different conversations that you've overheard while playing and some of the major and minor events will appear here as well the AI tab has several options for your characters these choices will affect how your party members will interact with the world when you are not directly micromanaging them most of these options will only happen if you have the job button for them active even if they don't have an actual job set ditch items makes your characters unload items into storage bins if they have any sleeping when injured will make the wounded people go to sleep until they fully heal if they have an available bed nearby sit while idle has them run to the nearest chair and sit when they have nothing else to do heal help rescue allies makes your character 8 NPCs respectively by healing them fighting alongside them and picking up injured people this only happens when you are actually allied with a faction if you have not officially been allied with them they will not Aid them just because you like a faction or you think you're friendly with them it does not mean your people will actively help them they have to be a true Ally the share food option will allow nearby Squad mates to share food that is in their backpack the backpack with the food in it must be worn and both characters must be in the same squad for this to work when the characters are close enough together they'll share food if one of them is hungry feed animals you can elect not to feed your animals by unchecking this box if you uncheck this option animals will not feed from backpacks or their own satchels if you ever decide to do this know that you are indeed an evil evil person shoot first ask later if this box is checked any character assigned to a turret job will attack any Potential Threat this includes neutral creatures such as animals and people from neutral factions such as Bandits be warned however that this will make your turret people also shoot potential non-hostile people that will then become hostile which can of course lead to other problems generally I check this box as there are more potential baddies in the wild than not and better safe than sorry I always say finally the follow formation box this option makes your people follow their target in a specific manner this does not change how your people run around together when you select all of them and then click to move them what you need to do is assign people to follow a particular character and then move only that one character preferably your slowest character so everyone can keep up this can still be a bit buggy so what I do in larger groups is I have my main guy being followed by two guys in a formation and then have the rest of the party split into two groups following each one of them the military option is supposed to make them a bit spread out and stagger them a bit when they stop while the Caravan is supposed to create a long line but as I said it can be very buggy so don't expect too much that is it for the AI Tab and the selection of tabs in general we'll go back to the main screen now the last couple of buttons here in the blue box are pretty simple so I'll cover them quickly The Help menu is utterly useless it's mostly generalized information that doesn't really help you figure anything out unless you like vague text about something that could potentially work honestly if you need to look up how to do something you're better off either on the kenshi Wiki page or watching one of my other tutorial videos that'll be following this one the inventory screen is fairly self-explanatory but there are a few helpful things that I can say about it you can equip items to your character here by either right-clicking an item or by dragging it to the proper slot on your person some characters are limited in what they can wear namely hivers and skeletons for them the body part will be grayed out similarly you can equip a backpack in the same manner you can open and close it by selecting the open bag button if you opened your inventory with the shortcut key which is the default I on a keyboard then the backpack will already be open for you you are limited to what you can carry by the space in your bag and your base inventory and technically by weight if you carry enough you'll be moving so slow that you'll essentially won't go anywhere more on that in the next video I will also talk about your equipment choices in the next video so if you need help check that video out in the top right corner of this menu you can see your total weight with anything being over your total adding to your encumbrance if you're disguised you'll be shown here along with how well you're disguised and as you can see if you're a slave or look like one it will also be shown here the final thing on this menu that matters is the limbs button if you are unlucky enough to lose a limb you can place Prosthetics on your character from that button it works just like equipping items the floor indicator icon allows you to see which floor of a building you're looking at if you have it set to floor zero that will show you the ground floor of a building once you have someone inside the building if you click the up Arrow it will progress to further and further floors and then if you click down it'll obviously lower the floor this allows you to check out different floors once you have a character inside of a building if you don't have a character inside of the building it doesn't matter what level you have it set to you'll only see the outside of the building to the right of the floor indicator icon is the speed control system for kenshi the game has four speed settings you can either pause the game have the game Run at normal speed increase the speed or increase the speed greatly now generally you'll want to play the game on normal speed but you'll often pause it during combat or when you're trying to make decisions that you don't want to make hastily you can increase the speed depending on the task you're doing if you're doing some mining or if you're just traveling long distances but just be aware that when you're playing at higher speeds it gives you less time to react to threats throughout the world just to the right of the speed controls is the displayer that shows how much money you have the day and the current time now I have noticed that the time does seem to be a little bit buggy in terms of the day and night cycles sometimes it doesn't get dark until basically one o'clock in the morning and other times it's still dark or late in the day so in all honesty I don't rely fully on the time clock to determine day and night let's keep an eye on what it looks like in the game world so just be warned that sometimes the clock seems to be a little bit out of sync with the game World the final icon in the yellow box here is the button to open and close the build menu everything in The Orange Box can be thought of somewhat like an individual character's options the block hold passive jobs range taunt and sneak along with the bottom left icon with the arrows and with the character running indicates options that you can toggle for each individual character in your party the rescue medic and Prospect buttons are all actions you can have a particular character or selected characters do I'm going to cover them very briefly they really don't need much explaining but I am going to kind of give you an idea of how to use them in the game so that way those of you that don't know what they are can use them effectively without having to worry about the minute details the block option sets your character to a purely defensive stance where they gain a bonus to their blocking ability but they will not attack the bonus you actually get from the Block toggle option is really not all that great and honestly the only time I've ever really used it is when I've had multiple people in a fight and one person is just outnumbered and I just set them to blocks that way they can hold out a little bit longer until their other teammates can get to them more often than not you're actually better off just leaving this option off and letting your characters try and fight and if they get knocked down let them get knocked down and then have them get back up to fight again the hold option prevents the AI from taking control of your characters and having them chase down enemies or run over to new combat when it's nearby this is primarily used to keep your people in very specific formations or to keep archers in a specific location so they can fire without hitting friendly targets it's a very micromanage Button as you have to control each one of your people individually when this option is toggled and honestly I do like using it but for a lot of people it's not a very good option especially when you don't know the game too well it's better to let the AI have your people run around and attack targets they see fit if you have the passive option toggled it simply means that your characters will not attack even if they're being attacked themselves be very very careful with this option if you forget that it's on your characters will let themselves get killed only turn it on when your characters are generally in a safe area or if you really really do not want them engaged in a fight the jobs toggle option is one of the more complex things and can G this button allows the AI to control your character without your input if it's toggled off your character will simply just stand there and defend themself and that's just about it however if you have this toggled on then your character will do any of the things from the AI menu that we talked about in the last video or they will do jobs that you have assigned to them now we haven't actually covered jobs as a game mechanic yet so I'm not going to go into that too deeply yet but know that your character won't do any jobs unless you have this option toggled on you can leave a job in their cued actions without them actually doing the job just by unselecting this option so for instance if you have someone on medic and Mining if you toggle this off they won't do either of those jobs until you toggle it back on it's a nice way to keep your characters with a say a profession but without actually having them currently doing it the ranged button simply means whether or not your character will prioritize using their ranged weapon over their melee weapon if you have this turned on your character will use their ranged weapon until they are attacked in melee at which point they'll draw their secondary weapon if they have one if you have a character that has a range weapon and the secondary weapon if you want them to use their melee weapon in their secondary slot instead of their ranged weapon just toggle this option off and they will draw that one instead of using their primary ranged weapon as with many things in kenshi this button can be buggy and sometimes they don't switch their weapons properly so make sure when you're toggling this on and off that you're watching your characters to make sure they're switching their weapons properly taunt is another self-explanatory button it simply means that the selected character is attempting to draw as much attention from the enemies as possible meaning they attack him instead of your allies this is really useful if you have a well-armored person or a well-trained person with a group that's not very well trained they will take the aggression from the enemies and allow the Lesser trained people to attack from behind or the side or run away the final toggle button is the sneak option now this is something that needs a little bit of explaining and we'll cover a sneak when we actually get to these stats but basically this is the button that you click to make your character go in and out of stealth mode I do highly recommend you go into your key configuration and hotkey this to something really close to your basic movement keys I have mine set to the tilde keys that way I can quickly go in and out of stealth if you need to and it's uh it saved me multiple times so it's something I highly recommend you do the stick figure icon with the two arrows next to it is a toggleable option for each character that determines their movement type anything from walking to running to traveling as a group with the slowest team member and so on and so forth this option I highly recommend you just make it so all of them have the icon set to movement as a group that way everyone in the group that you've selected travels the same speed as the slowest person in your group that way you don't outpace each other the rescue and medic buttons are actions you can have your selected characters perform the rescue button will make it so anybody selected will pick up any and all Fallen teammates or Allies if you're palette with another faction and you're near a downed person the medic similarly will assign the medic job which means they'll use their first aid kits to heal them up or robotic kits if it's a skeleton and the last button here is the prospect button which I'll cover in detail a little bit later the next part of our guide is going to be talking about the stats of your characters now I warn you that this is going to be a very long and dry section as there's a lot of stats to go over and a lot of just details that don't necessarily matter so much to your day-to-day gameplay so I do invite you to skip ahead to the general information and tips that I'm going to give afterwards until you play the game a little bit and actually care what the stats are but the stat guide is going to be here just for those that actually want to know about it so here we go you can open up your stat menu by either clicking the stat button or by pushing c as the default hotkey and it will bring you to this menu here normally this menu will just be overlaid over your general game but I'm gonna block out the back screen so I can show you information a little bit clearer the first thing we're going to talk about in the stats menu is the attributes because every other skill is affected by the attributes the strength attribute is one of the most important things in the game it affects your max carry weight and the Damage you do with several weapons along with martial arts damage the primary way is to increase the strength attribute is by using heavy weapons carrying heavy loads and by carrying other people either allies or Fallen people if you want to use blunt weapons heavy weapons or any of the hacking type Blade weapons or unarmed it's very important that you have a very high strength attribute so practice training it pretty early on I will discuss easy ways to train the skill up in the tips section so look forward to that in terms of importance toughness is very similar to strength toughness is your general ability to resist damage deal out some martial arts damage and your ability to resist dying in the game World toughness can be trained by getting yourself back up after you've been knocked down instead of using the stealth option to play dead it also trains up faster if you're not wearing armor and when you take more damage from a single hit it's kind of a complex skill in how it actually trains up but generally the more you're getting beaten up the more the skill is increasing and the tougher enemies you face again the faster the skill scale will go up generally you want to have as high toughness as possible because it will mean that you will resist dying when you're knocked out and if you go into a coma dexterity is very straightforward it simply affects how quickly you can attack and block and increases the damage of your bladed weapons such as swords it will also increase your rate of fire and your reload speed of your ranged weapons and the only real way to train the skill up is by using light weapons so the best way to train the skill up is to use a light crossbow and a light offhanded weapon and then just have it go up over time sorry no shortcuts the final attribute is perception and it really only affects ranged weapons it increases your accuracy your range your ability to shoot moving targets and it's trained up using turrets and other ranged weapons if you want to train this I highly suggest you start off with a really really weak crossbow and equip it to your characters because you are going to shoot your friendly targets quite often while using this bow you will eventually be able to stop shooting your friendly targets but that's going to take quite a while and I wouldn't expect it to happen anytime soon I'll explain this more in the tips section coming up in the interest of not making this a two hour long video I'm going to actually summarize the rest of the skills in a few different categories to make things easy for new players to understand if you scroll over any of these individual skills within the game menu you can actually see exactly what it does but most of the time knowing the precise definition does not really help you the summaries I'll provide here will give you more than enough information to let you know how to train the skill and what you're exactly using it for when it comes to weapons kenshi has a very simple system all weapons have a specific category that they belong to katanas Sabers hackers heavy weapons blunt and pull arms not including martial arts here because it's a little bit different all of these skills are improved the exact same way by attacking with that particular type of weapon and the more used weapon eventually the more damage you'll do with it it's that simple each type of weapon has some pros and cons about it but generally you can use just about any weapon and still be effective with it so long as you train the skill up a little bit while there are differences between each of the types of weapons I generally recommend that you just play with the weapon that you think looks cool because honestly at the end of the day that's more important than how it performs in combat like I said all weapons can be good so don't worry too much about the specifics behind a weapon just make sure you enjoy what it looks like ranged combat and kenshi is actually quite a bit different than the melee combat for starters there is friendly fire for ranged weapons so be very aware of that you will shoot your own teammates quite frequently in the beginning along with that a Target cannot Dodge or block a arrow so anytime you shoot at a Target if you hit them you will actually hit them there's nothing they can do about it that being said your skills start off so poor that you'll generally Miss frequently as you level up either your crossbow skill or your turret skill you begin to hit more and more frequently improving your accuracy aiming speed and reloading speed is actually the primary reason why you want to level up your range skills the damage you gain from increasing your skills is very minimal and generally the crossbows in the game do a lot more damage than the melee weapons so you won't see too big of an increase by leveling up your skills but you will see a slight increase the final and most important part of the range skill tree is a precision shooting skill the Precision Shooting skill is what determines whether or not friendly fire takes effect once you have this skill high enough you'll no longer hit your friends but in the beginning you're gonna be hitting your friends a lot so it's best to give your people very weak crossbows and weak arrows in the beginning so that way you're not hurting your people too much when you're hitting them so generally crossbows are very weak in the early game but as you get to the mid to late game they start becoming extremely powerful to the point where you can take down entire groups before they even get close to you now that we've talked about the weapon skills let's talk about the combat skills it's separated into two categories and it's determined by whether or not you have a weapon equipped if you have a weapon equipped you will be using the melee attack and melee defense skills if you do not have a weapon equipped you'll be using the martial arts and the Dodge skill the way these skills work is that they go up respectively while you're using a weapon or while you're not using weapon in combat your melee attack and melee defense will go up if you're using a melee weapon and your Martial Arts skill in your Dodge skill will go up if you're not using any kind of weapon as you increase melee attack you'll land hits more frequently you increase how fast you attack and you'll generally wield your weapon a little bit better in combat melee defense will increase your chance to block an incoming attack and will increase how quickly you actually do the block so you can get back to attacking yourself when it comes to martial arts there's a couple things you need to know first of all if you're using martial arts you actually take damage when you're striking enemies this is because as a fleshy human you don't have any kind of armor on your fists once you get your Marshall up skill high enough you will eventually stop taking damage from that unless you're a skeleton which at that point you don't take any damage from using martial arts One Way or Another another cool thing about the martial arts skill as you increase the skill you'll actually learn some new moves which actually do different things in combat such as knocking people over a little more frequently or stunning them now if you don't have a weapon equipped instead of using melee defense to block you'll actually just attempt to evade attacks altogether now this is actually better than blocking because when you block you can still take some damage depending on the enemy if you dodge you outright avoid the attack altogether the one big downside to Dodge versus melee defense is that with evading attacks you can actually get stuck in what's called Dodge locked you can actually get to the point where you're so good at dodging that you avoid every attack around you but that leaves you no time to attack yourself which means you could actually go in combat and never be able to defeat an enemy because you're never attacking the only way to really fix this is to Simply get a mod for it there's a couple of them out there and I recommend you check them out the thievery and athletic skills really don't need too much explanation the information I have right here on the screen is all you really need to know about them stealth determines how easy it is to remain undetected and increases your disguise Effectiveness lock kicking determines how quickly and how effectively you could pick locks the average increases your chance of stealing items and assassination determines how successful you are at knocking someone out Athletics is simply how fast you run and swimming is how fast you swim when it comes to the tips and tricks section I will explain how each one of these skills are used in more detail so don't worry about the details yet when it comes to the trade and science skills they all function the same the higher you have the skill the faster you are at the action that you're assigned the medic and robotic skills also increase the efficiency of using first aid kit and skeleton repair kits the higher you have the skill the less of the kits you use as you use them the higher you have your engineering skill the quicker you can build structures and repair them and then the higher your labor skill improves how quickly you can mine and how quickly you can process Goods the science skill determines how quickly you can research new technology and technically it's supposed to determine your skill at prospecting but as I've said before the prospecting does not work so don't worry about that the weapons armor and crossbow smithing skills determine how quickly you can actually build items and the quality of the crafted items at the various stations the farming skill increases the speed of your farming and improves the yield of each of your crops the cooking skill improves the speed of your brewing and cooking so as I've said before kenji's skills are pretty self-explanatory and you really don't need to know the details of them whatever skills you're using while you're playing will level themselves up and you'll just get better at everything that you're doing all that being said let's get to the general tips the next video is going to cover all the basics of playing Kenji and some general information of what you can do in the early game to make the rest of your game more enjoyable but for the final section of this video I want to leave you guys with a couple General tips that will make everything else easier for you just in case you don't know about it first and foremost is learning some of the hotkeys the space bar is one of the best hotkeys as it pauses the game or Returns the game back to the speed which you had it set for along with using the F1 F2 and F3 keys to change the game Speed without having to actually click the button with your mouse you can also hold the right Mouse button down whenever you can interact with an object or person to see a list of all the options you can do you're not just limited to right clicking and just leaving out whatever happens most of the time you can do multiple things to an object or a person so it's always worth holding down the right Mouse button to see what you can all do the last tip is going to be more of General advice for those that are just starting Kenji Kenji is an open World sandbox game with very very little guidance it's not a game for everybody and it can be very hard for a lot of people to get into there is also a pretty steep learning curve because there's so many different options and different ways to play the game that you may jump in the game expecting one thing and finding yourself not enjoying that but not knowing that there are other options and other ways to play the game so my biggest suggestion for most people is to play the game for an hour or two if you're not really having that good of a time with that character start a new game with something different the more you start new games the more you can see the different starting locations the more you can try different role plays and in general if you are self-governing and self-guiding you can have an unlimited amount of fun in this game I have over a thousand hours and I continuously still have a great time every time I play because I go into the game to make my own adventures and you kind of have to do the same thing if that's not your style game this may not be the game for you and I'm sorry to say that it's pretty blunt but that's the way it is if you're somebody that needs somebody to hold your hand to play the game you'll probably not have a good time and if you've played the game for about 20 hours and you're still not really enjoying it it's probably just never gonna click for you so the very first thing you should do when you enter the game world is familiarize yourself with the controls now you can use the mouse wheel to scroll in and out you can use the middle Mouse button to turn the camera or you can use q and E to turn the camera you can use wasd to move the camera around or the arrow keys I should probably also mention at this point that you actually have to right click to move your character around your selected character is down here if you have more than one character they'll be listed down here you can select however many of them you want and you move them around with a right click you can also do this on the map to have them move great distances now I've already talked about some of the shortcut keys in the other videos but an important one to know is I opens up your inventory and you'll be using that a lot the other thing I want to mention is that if you have a backpack it will automatically open it once you have clicked open bag at least one time with most of your characters you can always hit this button again the open bag to close your backpack if you need to one to understand the basic camera controls you want to move on to being able to interact with objects now the first thing they need to know is that if you left click on anything it will highlight the item down in the bottom left corner over here and it'll tell you everything about that item that your characters can actually know so just here we clicked on the market stall C and it says as ran by the holy nation Outlaws it tells you the town you're in which is the Hub and it's open to the public so public if you click on say a ruined building it will tell you similar information down here except for that it's also for sale so if you have 4 800 cats which is the money in this game the currency you can purchase it one of the first things that I think you should do before you even start moving your character around is pause the game and take a look around at your surroundings if you are in a town when you start off click on many different objects and see what types of things they are anything from the market stalls to the broken water generators here to the lights to the different buildings they all tell you different information in the bottom left corner here and while none of it is super duper important it's really good to know generally what things are in the game you may Overlook something because you think it's something different one of the big things that this happens to is buildings oftentimes you can tell what a building is from way outside the city if you spawn and say you're up on this hill up here you could click on the buildings from all the way back here and have a general idea what's going on in the town this building here if you clicked on it it's the bar what about that big tower over there you click on the tower you see that it's ran by the Shinobi thiefs down here so you know whether or not to avoid them when you start the game and when you explore the world always be looking around take the time to pause the game and just take in your surroundings there's a lot of things that you can see in the game world that you might very easily miss one example of that is these things right here right outside town if you just kind of look it looks like a bunch of trees and some rocks this is not actually a rock it's actually a mine if you look at it and click on it it actually shows in the bottom left corner what it is this is an iron resource and this is something that's very easy to miss if you don't know about it it just looks kind of like a rock when you first start the game I highly recommend you click on just about everything you possibly can just to see what it does another really cool feature about looking around is if you hold the ALT key it actually highlights everything that's on the ground this means anything that's on tables or anything that's loose that you can pick up you can pick it up freely and when you scroll over if it goes green that means you can pick it up without any repercussions whatsoever and it's just going to fill up your inventory and that's about it it's effectively yours at that point but if you go inside say a store everything in here highlights red that means it is an owned item and you have to steal it if you want it and in Kenji there's several different things about that particular art that you need to know before you start wandering around stealing everything it's not like many other games like Skyrim and stuff where you can just put a bucket over the shopkeeper's head and steal everything it requires a little bit of we'll say practice the nice thing about Kenji is that you can't accidentally pick up an item so if you right click on something it will tell you right here hold down the ALT key to steal items you have to be holding alt to actually steal anything once you've wandered around a little bit you may be interested in picking some items up that you see especially if you start off in the hub where there's actually a bunch of little items that you can take now in all honesty these items are worth very little money and they're honestly really not worth picking up you can if you want want to you can just pick them up and sell them if you want but for you guys it's actually more important just to kind of learn how the game works if you hold alt and left click on an item you'll pick it up if you're holding alt you have to left click but if you're not holding alt you right click you'll see that we have picked up an empty run bottle where three C's which is three cats and then the cup which is worth six cats now that we've discussed interacting with objects a little bit let's talk about interacting with NPCs there's two basic interactions that you have with NPCs either combat or conversation most NPCs if you scroll over them the cursor doesn't change if you see here nothing happens your cursor stays exactly the same the only way to interact with that person would be to hold right click and select one of the following options either to follow them bodyguard them which means to protect them if they get attacked or attack them now you can do that with any NPC that you see there is one other type of interaction however if you move your cursor over an NPC and the cursor changes to a chat bubble that means you can talk to this person every NPC is a little bit different but there are a few basic types of conversations you have conversations that just give you you a little bit of explanation about who they are and what the world is around them and then their shopkeepers and other people that have special dialogue options you can find these type of characters just about anywhere but the bars are the most common place to find people that have special options such as over here this is a mercenary Captain mercenary captains can actually be hired along with their crew to help protect you and your people they're very expensive and they keep all the loot of anybody they defeat if you take that loot it's considered stealing but it can be worth it in the early game if you need to protect a base or something like that or if you're just really struggling for any type of combat the other type of person in a bar you can talk to is someone like this they're a Drifter you can see that their stats are extremely low which is actually a pretty good indicator that you could probably hire that person so if you right click that person you will now see a small little dialogue system where you can click one two three on your keyboard or click it with your mouse and generally it's a small little dialogue followed by will you hire me for a certain amount of money or sometimes they'll join you for free this person wants 6 000 cats to hire them you can't afford it so sorry this type of Internet action is very common in bars throughout kenshi you can generally hire people to join your party by talking to them and paying a small fee the final type of interaction here is talking with this person over here behind the bar the shopkeeper if you click on them you see down here that they are a shopkeeper underneath their goal that means you can buy and sell goods from them simply right click them and ask them to do business now the one thing I will say is whenever you do this hit spacebar pause the game it does not matter how you interact with this person whenever you talk to if someone and open up a shop it automatically unpauses the game even if you've paused it when you're right next to them so make sure you re-pause the game if you planned on having the game paused while you're interacting with them buying and selling is simply just right clicking an object and bringing it into your inventory something as simple as right-clicking food here or bring it on over into your inventory if you shift right click a stack of items it'll bring all of it over in your inventory like so the final thing I actually have to say about this particular scenario that we have is that our character is hungry if you have food in your inventory your character will automatically eat it when they get hungry enough there's no specific measure of when they get hungry enough your characters automatically do it for you if you also have a backpack and have food in your backpack your character will share all that food with your current party members in the same Squad if you have multiple squads they will only share it with their particular Squad which I'll explain in a later video if you watch here I will unpause the game and they ate the Gohan so now their food is completely well it will completely fill up and our food has been eaten as much as they can to fill up their hunger meter now that we've looked at interacting with the world around us and talking to NPCs let's talk about making money in the very early game the easiest way to collect money is just simply mining all you have to do to mine is take your character and right click on the iron ore your character will automatically begin mining this bar will fill up and then it will generate iron as you're sitting here as time goes by the only thing you really need to know about mining is that one this little uh resource right here Can Only Hold up to five ore so you have to clear it out periodically to make sure that you can keep mining the other thing is down here is the number of workers that a particular resource can handle this particular one can handle up to three people we currently have one out of three people working it the more people you have working in the faster The Spar will go up your laboring skill will affect how quickly you can mine but honestly in the early game it doesn't really matter as just the more characters you have the faster it'll go that's just kind of how it'll go in your entire game once you've collected some ore simply bring it over in your inventory I shift right clicks that way it just drags everything in your inventory quickly for you or you can drag them one by one or right click them one by one to bring them over slowly once they're in your inventory all you have to do is go back and sell it to a shopkeeper a really quick side note about mining while iron ore is the most common resource to find in the world there are also copper nodes throughout the world right next to HUB there's this one down here and then up here on the far side of this mountain there's one way over here you can't really see it but it's way over there the reason why I bring this up is because copper sells for anywhere from double to Triple the amount that iron does so if you're looking to just try and make pure money and not worry about strength training go with copper over iron every single time the next thing I want to talk about is combat now I'm not going to cover this too in depth because honestly there's a lot of advanced stuff you need to know about the combat in the game for your characters to be really really efficient but in the beginning when you're just starting out the only thing you really need to know is that to do combat you select your character and right click on the enemy you want to attack your characters will fight and until one of you goes unconscious as I mentioned in a previous video every race is a different maximum hit points every character's hit points can go to negatives below zero to a number that is determined by their toughness score as you get beat up your toughness score will rise and you can go further into the negative before your characters limbs either break or you go unconscious the most important things to know about combat and Kenji is that the game is designed expecting you to go down and get knocked out many many times throughout your gameplay so don't fret if your character gets knocked out the best thing I can advise is that you use multiple characters in your games so that way you can leave one character in a safe location and come to the rescue of the other characters with first aid kits or just simply being able to pick them up and carry them back to rest in a bed because the primary ways of healing limb damage and body damage is by using either a first aid kit or robotic repair kit if you're a skeleton and then resting in a bed if you're on your own the game can be incredibly difficult because if you get knocked out there's a good chance you might just simply bleed out in die I've mentioned several times that I prefer to play the game with multiple people in my party and let me show you guys why to begin with you can always have a second person working on something like mining collecting money while the other person is out adventuring and doing whatever else you want and they can actually rescue one another if something bad happens I'm first going to show you guys how to trade between one another so if you have two people here you have newbie mcnube face and Noob two here both of them have their own separate inventory if you push one and two on the keyboard you'll switch between them and as you can see Noob 2 already has some Med kits and newbie Noob face has a single one I'm going to give this basic first aid kit to Noob 2. the simplest way to do it is simply take the object and drag it down to their portrait down here as long as they are within a certain proximity there's no exact proximity number but relatively close you'll automatically drop the item into their inventory the other way to do it is if you select one of your characters right click and hold the other character and open up the trade menu you'll open up both characters portraits here and you can trade freely between the two so long as they're close enough another tip is if you want to trade between two people you don't necessarily have to do the right click method what you can do is you can actually click this little circle icon right here on your inventory and it'll keep that menu open when you select a different character and open up their inventory as well you can do this with any number of characters their sheets will just simply overlap the next thing I want to show you is how to actually use a first aid kit this actually presents us with an opportunity to show you guys some other camera controls as well if you double click the number key corresponding with the character or double click a portrait you'll actually snap to and lock your camera to that character so you can zoom in and out and it will stay on them we currently have Noob 2 selected we're going to have him run over to newbie and we're going to hold and right click and click first aid now you can just right click as you see the cursor turns into a green plus icon that's the medic icon that means your character will run over here and try and heal him there's two things that you can actually do to prevent having to do this exact function one you can give your character the medic job you can either click the button and your character will automatically begin medicating or if you shift lefficient it will add it to the jobs themselves so he'll begin healing him that's all you have to do to use a first aid kit as you heal a companion you will use the med kits up if you watch here closely it will begin to drop rapidly the reason why it drops so rapidly is because we're not very proficient in the medic skill if you come right here each character has a field medic skill the higher this skill is the slower these Med kits will be used up when you're healing somebody newbie here is now now unconscious and he's going to be for a little while you see that his stats here are now fully recovered in bright yellow that means they will heal eventually over time and given 110 seconds he will likely wake up in this particular case he will not fully wake up because his toughness is actually only three which means he will be knocked out until his stomach heals up to negative 12 at which point he will wake up so he's going to go into a recovery coma as soon as he hits zero with the unconscious timer and then as you watch his stomach will slowly heal because it's been bandaged and as it heals up to negative 12 he will be able to get up but what happens if you're in a dangerous area where you don't want to be stuck out here well this is where you can have a character pick somebody up you can do this with any unconscious person whether they're friendly or not you can either have them pick up the character by right clicking when your cursor changes to the pickup icon or you can hold right click and select pick up now Noob 2 can run freely and bring newbie back to a bed and that's generally what you want to do if your character is unconscious you generally want to try and get them to a bed because their wounds will heal much much faster when a character has been bandaged their stats will turn bright yellow as you can see down here now that is not actually healed that is just where your character will naturally heal up to however if that limb gets hit one time that entire yellow bar will disappear and the Damage will come directly off the darker color here which means while his head is fully bandaged up if he gets hit one time this 27 will take the damage not this entire gold bar here so he's still very vulnerable to being hurt very easily by putting them in a bed what it does that actually heals the lower the darker color here quicker so this character will heal fully very quickly so to heal your character all you have to do is put a character in a bed by selecting Noob 2 who's carrying newbie you can right click on a bed Click put into bed and you'll pay the fee they will set the character in there any character will begin to heal if you watch the stats now they will heal quite rapidly the two notes to this is one the best thing to do is ask you to buy a camp roll from one of the vendors because you can place that just about anywhere in the world and have a portable bed anywhere the only downside is that you heal quite slowly in that but at least you will heal the other option is to save up and buy a house and build a bed inside your own home while newbie is recovering let's take a look at building now there are many reasons why you don't actually really want to build in the early game the biggest reason is as soon as you build a building Bandits would begin to attack your place and honestly it can derail a fun campaign very quickly if your base is constantly getting attacked however building can be done in town as well if you purchase a building you can always add stuff to your building so I'm going to show you guys how the building function works and I'll let you guys play with how it actually works in the game world for your game in a later video I will discuss some Advanced tips to building and when is a good place to build and where is a good place to build there's a couple rules that you have to know if you click the build icon right here the game will pause and you'll be given this menu here in the bottom right corner is all the different hotkeys to actually moving the buildings and changing the rotations and everything like that the important thing for you guys is on the left hand side of the screen here this is all the different categories that you have buildings camping farming lights mining storage Tech and so on you'll get a couple new things as you of research which is a whole other ball game so I'll explain that later as well in the beginning you're not going to have too many options to choose from if you decide to build outside of City walls there's a couple rules you have to follow by clicking on the actual building within the category you can see that we're going to try and build a small shack now if you see the color blue that means you were too close to another town to build you can't build in another City's territory if it's blue that means you're within their territory when it goes green that means you are outside the territory so right here so while squint is right there we could technically build a shack right here and be that close to another town if we wanted to if you do that you will be visited by people from the nearest town such as Quinn here and generally they'll require taxes or something like that because you're effectively building in their territory the only way to get around that is by building really far away from civilization which in kenshi not necessarily the best option it's usually better just to pay small taxes and move on if the icon turns red such as this that means you can't build it because there's an object blocking it there are a couple mods that I highly recommend there's the slopeless mod which allows you to build just about anywhere as you see we can't build on this Cliff side here because the angle of the ground is too steep if you get the slopeless mod you can actually build up here if you so chose there's some reasons why you'd want to do that and there's certain build locations where it really sucks like right here if you want to build right here while your character could easily enter that building and live there the game doesn't allow you with the slopeless mod you could build right there an important thing to note when you're actually building a structure is the rotation and keeping an eye on where doors are your characters must be able to get up the ramp into their doors for them to use it it's very easy to actually build a structure that your character can't get into and it's very frustrating when it does happen now the way the building menu works is you can actually set up multiple buildings to be built and you can choose when you want to build them for example we have the small shack here if we wanted to build a small shack here all you have to do is Click left click and it'll drop down the building schematics there but say you want another building right behind it you just left click again and there you go you now have two buildings set up to be built if you right click it'll get rid of your selection and you can always choose other things such as lights maybe some farming or some camping like a campfire or a camp bed we just do a campfire right here because why not and then what you do is you click confirm here to actually set up a queue for all these objects if you hit undo it'll delete the most recent one you set down or if you hit Escape it will actually just get rid of this menu and none of that stuff will be saved so what you want to do is Click confirm and it'll set up a wireframe for all the buildings that you need to build campfires are free and they're instantaneous so there they are it's just automatically put up there campfires are helpful because you put raw meat from animals that you kill inside here and it will automatically cook it into dried food that you can eat right here similar to how a mine works now any building that has a wireframe on it can't be used until you finish the construction the way the construction works is down here every building requires certain material components in this case it's just building materials some buildings will require iron plating or steel bars or something like that in the early games I'm also going to be building materials and iron plates what you have have to do is you have to actually add all five building materials for the construction to be completed if you cannot afford all five building materials you can always add one or two and just build the building up to that point every time you add one building material this bar right here will fill up a little bit and you could build the construction up to that point as well in order to actually build something you'll actually have to right click on the building to set a character to building it now unfortunately Noob Tube doesn't have any building materials so he can't build it but one thing you can do is shift right click and add the engineered job to your character and anytime you have access to building materials you'll grab the building materials and he'll put it into this building and attempt to build it when you're new to the game Base building can seem very intimidating there's a lot to do and a lot to take in and there's not a lot of resources to tell you exactly how to do things today I'm going to try and simplify almost all that information under three main categories choosing a location for your base planning out your base and deciding which topics to research and there's one thing I want to add before we talk about Base building understand that in kenshi Base building is considered an end game mechanic so if you're building prior to the end of the game or the end game phase you are going to be putting extra stress on yourself so just be aware of that you can absolutely do it just understand that it's going to be very difficult until you have a bunch of stuff in game to defend your base with so let's Jump Right In now the single most important decision you'll make in the entirety of the base building process is choosing where to build your base if you build in the wrong location you can end up with a lot of problems that will actually ruin your experience with both Base building and potentially kenshi as a whole before I begin let me start by saying that there is no one perfect location to build a lot of different locations have a lot of really good things and really bad things about them some places are obviously better than others but generally there is no one perfect location the other thing to take note of is that you could build many different types of bases something as simple as a military Outpost or just a few storage buildings but today we're going to work under the assumption that you are trying to create one single all-encompassing base that is going to house all of your people all of your stuff and it's going to be self-sustaining the first thing you need to consider when choosing a location to build your base is your neighbors this includes the wildlife such as the animals and beasts that roam around the local towns settlements and any Bandits that might be in the area it's very important that you understand all the different threats that are in your general region because you will be dealing with all of them now having a base comes with several problems and that is assault against your base if you build in an area where you have something like big things or gorillas in your local area they will attack your base you may be able to handle one or two of them out in the wild but when you have six or seven of them attacking your base you need to understand that this will weigh heavy on both your troops your resources and sometimes just your general time management of playing the game if you do not want to deal with the micromanagement of dealing with difficult adversaries it may be worth finding a new location when determining a building location there's kind of a priority list that I like to go under to determine where I want to build the first thing I want to look at is who I want my major neighbor to be this is something like a faction such as the shack the holy nation or the United cities and then the local towns that are going to be nearby under most circumstances one of these big factions are going to demand something of you if you build anywhere near their region they're going to consider your building under their territory as a sign that you're willing to pay respect to them something like the holy nation requiring you to take part in prayer day or the Sheck requiring you to pay taxes those are just a couple of examples but there are other things out there that you are required to do if you build near a major faction one of the big benefits of building near a major faction is that you get to choose one of their towns to be by or perhaps be in between two of them being near a major town means you have a lot of trading resources and generally it's a little bit bit safer because a lot of the big monsters are usually out of the way or if you end up in a really bad spot you can always run to one of the major towns and just hunker down there for a while after figuring out which town or faction you want to be nearby the next thing to look at is your local Wildlife choosing to be near gorillas or big things like I mentioned can be very dangerous and honestly for a new player I recommend you just completely avoid that altogether The Strain on your resources that gorillas and big things cause to your defenses is just not worth the time especially when you're just learning the game so if you're looking around and you see a big thing or a gorilla in your local territory it might be worth just choosing a new location altogether After figuring out what Wildlife is around the next thing to look at is your local Bandits and local gangs oftentimes if you're in an area where their starving Bandits or dust Bandits you're almost always safe to build there because they're two of the easier enemies to deal with if you end up dealing with things like reavers cannibals or some of the other high-level Bandit gangs such as the Black Dragon Ninjas you may honestly find yourself being attacked so frequently and by such powerful enemies that you have no chance to recover cover if you even survive at all so when you're first looking for a place to build take a look around and see what type of Bandits are in the region and see what type of stats they have if their General stats are anywhere from 10 to 30 you're usually in a pretty good spot if they start getting above 30 they're generally very difficult enemies to deal with in the long run with that being said do be aware that dealing with dust Bandits and starving Bandits for your entire game may get boring as they don't provide too much of a challenge to your base after you've set up your initial defenses so one thing to consider is that maybe down the road you might end up building a second base in a more difficult region and keep that in the back your mind when you're building and when it comes to investigating your neighbors the final thing I like to look at is the local Villages and the trade routes if you can see them now the different Villages generally don't play too big of an impact with your base but it does give you an area to go and potentially sell stuff or an area to potentially run to if there is too much trouble at your base a lot of the smaller villages in kenshi actually sell some kind of valuable resource especially to early Base building such as selling food food for your people or selling water for crops these are two resources that you can sometimes find in the Big Towns but finding them in a village as nearby your base might be a little bit more convenient after determining the general region you want to build in the next thing to look at is the resources and the terrain now both of these things go hand in hand but generally you're going to prioritize resources over the terrain type the resources in kenshi are all pretty straightforward and they're actually pretty simple to deal with but there's a lot of really tiny nuances that can make your choices a lot more complicated but when you're first starting out there's a couple decisions that you can make that will just simplify the entire process and everything else will figure itself out as you play the game the first resources you really want to make sure you have nearby your base is iron mines they are the single most important thing you're going to need when you first build your base because not only will it be used for most of your crafting and most of your building in the game it can also be used as a way to generate money just simply selling the raw iron ore can actually be very beneficial in the early game as long as you have iron nearby you really don't need anything else unless you want to be 100 self-sufficient and iron can be used to craft most things and you can sell it and buy the other stuff that you need if it comes down to it but if you want to be self-sufficient there are a couple other resources you need to have nearby copper is one such resource copper mines are pretty plentiful throughout the world and making sure there's one in your base or nearby your base is important because you use copper for both selling and for some of the advanced crafting recipes within the game the final three resources that you need are rocks water and wind all three of these resources require research to be done before you can actually Harvest them and they each serve a very different purpose rocks are gathered through a mine that you can build once you've researched the building and you will generate rocks that can be turned into building materials you can eventually build a well that will generate water which you can then use to water your crops and then you can build a windmill to generate power from wind to be very clear having water rocks and wind is not a requirement to have a good base it just makes it a little bit easier to have a good base which I'll cover at the end of the video when I go over tips and tricks and personal opinion stuff but just let you guys know that you do generally need all of these resources if you want to be 100 fully self-sufficient and never have to leave your base to go to town for anything once you've found a suitable location for a base the next step is planning it is a good idea to plan out some of your base right in the beginning but you don't have to plan every little detail out as you'll distress yourself out trying to make that work down the line instead you need to focus on a few main parts first the first thing you're going to do is decide where you're going to place your gate now kenji's game engine is very specific and that you're only supposed to have one gate per base if you have more than one gate you will find that enemies will be really confused and they'll often go to both gates or sometimes they'll just walk through walls or attack your walls if you've seen me running into this issue it's most likely because you have more than one gate at your base one of the other important things is that kenshi assumes that your gate is kind of centered to your base there's actually a region around where you build that kenshi considers your actual personal base so if you build too far away from there the game can get a little bit buggy or confused so generally what I try to recommend is that you have your gate be in the center-ish area of where you want to build don't build too far in any One Direction away from that if you end up trying to build a very long base you will definitely find some issues with the pathing once you've figured out where you're going to put your gate you also need to figure out where you want to build your walls this can be a little bit confusing because walls don't play actually a big part in Kenji as long as you have one single gate up your walls are almost never attacked they will almost always attack your Gates if you do build multiple Gates then your walls are important there is one very important thing about walls and that's how you lay out your walls for your defenses most walls once you get past the tier one walls have spots where you can mount crossbows or other forms of mounted turrets there is obviously many different ways that you could attempt to build a base and set up your defenses but I have found the most effective way to set up a base with the entrance is having a giant v like this be the entrance of your base now if you have an area where you can't make a giant v like this don't fret as long as you can try and get one wall kind of like this in front of your gate then you can actually make use of turrets to defend your Gates if you're playing on a game where difficulties are not changed around too much most of your units can probably take out attackers before they get through your gate with this type of setup this is not including some of the harder enemies like beak things or paladins from the holy nation once you've figured out your general layout for your walls the next thing to consider is where you're going to place all of your different buildings now if you haven't completed very much research you're not going to have very many options for buildings but as you complete more researches you're gonna get several different building types some of them are very large so one thing I would recommend very highly is leave a lot of space in multiple different areas where you might be able to build a large building if you've already done research and can actually build some of the larger buildings I recommend laying down the framework for it so that way you can actually see where it's going to be when you eventually construct it you don't have to have the materials allocated for it you can do that at a later time if you are unsure of how you actually want your base to look in the end one thing I recommend is build several different buildings that way you can have them isolated depending on their purpose I recommend having one building have nothing but beds to act as a first aid area where people can rest when they're injured have one building dedicated towards crafting stations and storage if possible for those crafting stations and then I do recommend having a single building if possible that's going to have all your miscellaneous storage things like weapons armor and even your general storage it will make it a lot easier for you if you have all of your stuff in one location if you spread it out throughout your base you will probably spend a lot of time micromanaging those resources once you've figured out the general location that you want to put all your buildings the next thing to do is allocate a spot for a farm now you generally want to have the space to build the largest farm possible so what you want to do is you're going to want to select your farms and then go to the largest size to see what kind of space it takes up now you don't have to start with that size Farm you can upgrade your Farms as you go along but you definitely want to make sure you have the room to upgrade it in the future if you choose to do that so you can generally start with a smaller farm and then upgrade from there but if you have the resources or if you want to you can go straight for the biggest farm possible and that's generally where you want to end up in the and then once you're done figuring out where you want your farm the final thing to do is find out where you can put down all of your Machinery now this is where the game gets a little bit more complicated because as a new player you're not going to know all the different Machinery that's in the game and honestly it takes a while to research all of them so the best thing that you can do is just leave a fairly large area throughout your base you don't have to have all your machines in the same location so you can have some decent space open throughout your base but I like to try and leave a fairly large section where I can just throw it on a bunch of machines so that way I can have a bunch of people working next to each other in case they need to defend one another and this will also allow you to have some storage containers nearby to dump those resources into which I will explain in the tips section of this video when it comes to researching Kenji anything you choose to research is purely subjective on what is actually good and bad you really can't go wrong with learning any specific technology but there are ones that are better than others for Base building now the list I have compiled here is just kind of a general idea of what you need to actually get your base going there are some that you could add in and potentially take out to make your progress a little bit quicker in a specific area but I wanted to make a list here for you guys to actually just take a look at and what I like to have researched prior to ever even building a base and as I said this list is purely subjective in my opinion of what is good and bad I personally think that you'd probably actually want to have under core you probably want the stormhouse research as well just to have a bigger building but it's also not required you can make do with a small house you can see what I'm going for by having all these Technologies listed the way I do it's primarily stuff to get you going you will need more stuff research like crafting and everything eventually but in the beginning it's really not necessary when you first build a base it's primarily about just getting kind of the shell of your base a setup and then fitting all the little details in as you go along but I'm going to discuss all that in the tips and opinions section that's coming up next I just wanted to have a list here to show you guys prior to us actually talking about it so let's move on to the tips and opinions section where we'll show actual gameplay and not just these balls of text I've been showing you so now that we've moved on to the tips and opinions section of the video I do want to mention that I do highly recommend you do all the research that I've mentioned so far prior to actually building a base I also recommend you have at least four total characters in your party that way you can be multitasking you're definitely going to want somebody doing some mining so you can be having an income while you purchase books to do some research now in order to do the research up to this point you need a research bench level 2 which means you actually have to build a research bench somewhere and then upgrade it I would recommend that if you are building somewhere like in the hub you should probably save up and buy a storm house to repair that way you have a big enough building to actually put a research bench level two the basic research bench is a lot smaller and can fit in one of the tiny houses but the level 2 and up research benches take up lot more space so you'll need at least a storm house now if you don't want to do any prior Gathering and research before Base building understand that it will make everything a lot harder so in general I recommend that you actually build inside a town first and then do some research and then go build your own base before you actually set out there are a couple things that you want to bring with you when you actually build your base in order to get a sort of automated process going to where you can keep building and have the resources that you need to to build you're going to need a total of 12 iron plates and three building materials to get yourself started that will allow you to build the Machinery to actually continue building everything else without having to run back to town to get more iron plates or building materials when it comes to picking on your base it's purely subjective on whether or not a spot is good for you some people will like a certain spot where other peoples will hate that location so I'm not going to try and tell you where to build but I'm going to show you one of my favorite building locations right in between the Chek Kingdom City of squin and the Hub two fairly safe locations for a new player and there's a spot right in between them that is a pretty good starting spot for any new player so let me show you where that is and here we are so we are in a relatively flat location and right over here is the city of squin now squin is one of the best starting locations for a player because it has all the necessities and it's very very safe because the shack welcome everybody and up on the hill over here you can even see the Hub so you have two fairly safe locations for players all within Rock throwing distance now we're going to focus on this flat kind of Hilltop right here this location has mines Galore you have iron mines you have copper mines there's so many of them that I don't even think you're probably ever gonna get enough people to work all of them the reason why I like this is because you can build your base however you want and still have mines very close by you do not have to have the mines inside your city walls if you do not want you can just have them nearby especially in a place like this that's pretty safe around here there's only dust Bandits and starving Bandits and then bone dogs all of which a player can handle even in the early game if you prepare yourself and now I need to talk about something that's a little bit controversial for some people now a lot of people have gotten a little bit angry or annoyed with me that I said the prospecting button is useless and let me show you why I think that it pretty much is and it's not necessarily that it doesn't work properly anymore it seems like they have kind of fixed everything but to me it seems very redundant and unnecessary prospecting Works purely off of your science skill which you can only raise by doing research so unless you have one character doing research at all time and he does a lot of research you're limited to a very small Zone that the prospecting actually works on the radius is expanded based on how high your science skill is so if you don't have a high science skill you're only looking at a very short distance away from your character on top of that all you're giving is these graphical maps that it's just color and honestly it's not very useful because as they updated the game they actually implemented a system that's much more user friendly and pretty much replaces the Redundant prospecting button so while the prospecting button does show these cool maps and gives you a little bit of detailed information for most players this information is completely unnecessary all you really need to know is that these resources are in the area and you can tell that just by looking around you can see mines on the map you you can see that there's rocks on the ground the only thing that might be kind of helpful is water but there's an easier way to do that and let me show you if you go into the building menu and select one of the buildings that gathers one of these resources such as a well you'll see that it says 60 that is the quality of water so that is how much you're gathering in that exact spot which is actually more helpful than just looking at a general map that says hey there's water in this area you'll know precisely how much you can get and you can move this around anywhere within your line of sight and anywhere where the game is actually loading so depending on your draw distance it could be a very very far distance away that you could check this will allow you to very quickly scan the entire Zone around you for any particular spot that is perfect for the resource type you're trying to gather there's absolutely no reason to sit through and look at the maps anymore because you no longer have to just rely on those maps to figure it out all the resource Gathering machines will tell you exactly what you're going to get in that particular spot that's not something that was originally in the game and I think they added that in because people complained in the early days that the maps are kind of hard to use for new people or people that didn't understand it you can do it if you want and you can get some detailed information but it's far more time consuming to use the prospecting button when you can simply click on a building that you want to build and see what you're going to get from that particular area so instead of trying to rely on the prospecting button all you have to do is look around a general area do you see mines then you have or if you see rocks on the ground that means there's spots to dig with the mining machine if you can't actually see physical rocks on the ground if it's a fairly hard area you can likely dig up rocks from it the only thing that you might be able to gather from it is the wind and water but those percentages really don't matter because either way you're going to generate the resource so at the end of the day prospecting button doesn't really serve a purpose anymore other than trying to be a little bit more detailed and I don't think it does a good job for the sake of showing you guys how to build and set up your base and plan it out I've moved to New locations a little bit wider and a little bit brighter so that way it's easier to see everything to begin building your base open up the building menu here on the right hand side and go on over to your left side and select walls the first thing you want to place down is a gate the reason for that is that the gate is considered the center of your base once you build it what that means for the rest of your base is that the further away anything is from your actual gate physically the more likely there is something to go wrong or bug out with your game another thing you want to do is avoid main roads which you can tell just by kind of looking at the ground and sometimes looking at your map if you have any of the map mods installed because if you build a gate on a made Road sometimes it'll break the pathing just with the entire game engine and you'll have to move the gate eventually otherwise your characters will not be able to go in or out of your gate in terms of actual positioning of your gate it doesn't really matter I just like to leave a decent amount of space in front of my gate so I can create a giant V with walls to create a firing line of turrets leading up to my gate some people try to build higher up to give your crossbows a little bit extra damage when firing down but I tend to disagree with this method because it seems like crossbows either miss or can't fire properly when they're up too high so my personal recommendation is to try and find a flatter area where you can build a straight line which also gives you a combat area just outside your gate and if you so choose you can rename your base right here on the right hand side once you have the blueprint down for the gate you can actually move on to the rest of your base if you wish you don't actually have to continue building it unless you have the extra resources most of the time I will actually just build the blueprint for the gate name my base and then move on to building my basic Machinery however for the sake of showing you guys how I do this in the early steps of the base building I'm going to show you guys the blueprints of the walls that I'm also going to do now walls are a little bit tricky because you actually have to kind of get used to the finicky way that the controls are with the building menu so once you click walls you can snap it to a gate by left clicking it and then from there you can move the wall around and change the direction of your gate remember the arrows are pointing to the outside of your base now when we build the V it's going to look a little bit confusing because all the arrows are gonna be pointing inwards almost like it's looking like it's pointing into your base but it's not it's actually creating a corridor for what you're going to have turrets on top that are going to shoot downwards towards people coming towards your gate and just as a reminder you do have to build a ramp to get onto the top of your walls so when you want to build turrets up there you'll have to do that in the future I'm not going to finish constructing the walls but I'm just going to show you guys the general layout of the walls that I do for the v formation one other quick note is that with walls for every little arrow that you see that's when you have to actually pay the resources to build that section of the wall if you keep extending the wall out further and further eventually it'll create four sections and then the fifth time it goes out it'll actually combine them into one section which is usually what you want to do to avoid paying the cost over and over and over again as for the V itself what you want to do is you want to go out kind of straight and then Arc it just a little bit to the left and right away from the gate giving yourself a nice little Corridor where enemies are going to have to come in and get shot by a crossbows before getting to your gate now I like to build it to where the sections of the walls are either four or five segments long which is like the big wall segment that seems to be the optimal size for it if you're in a smaller area four will obviously do but go five if you can and this is what looks like when it's completed now once we get turrets on topless which would just be the mounted crossbows you can actually have people to stand up here and shoot at Intruders as they come along as long as you build a gate like this and only one gate for your base people will actually line up outside your gate to talk to you before they actually attack this will give you time to get defenders in place if you don't have anybody standing up there at all times now the next thing you want to do is get a mind set up and this time you want to do a stone mine followed by a stone processor that way you can actually start building your own building materials to complete your entire wall and these resources will be generated as long as you have people working on it so it's basically free to you minus the labor when it comes to the stone mine and anything that gathers resources from the ground such as a well or a farm just look for something that has a percentage above about 40 percent as long as it's above 40 percent you will generate the resource at an okay speed you don't need a min max and make sure it's at 100 but in this particular case we'll see if we could find one just for the sake of having it that way the higher percentage just simply means that you gather it quicker or in the case of fields and Farms how much resources you gather from the farm each time it harvests and here we are with a spot with a hundred percent so we're gonna go ahead and place the mine here the next thing I'm going to do is place a stone processor this will allow us to turn any Raw Stone we collect from the mine into building materials and then I usually put my iron refinery right next to my stone processor just that way everybody's kind of working together in case there's an attack that can defend one another and as with most of the machines it doesn't really matter where you place it I personally like to place it somewhere near my stone mine that way it's a quicker trip to actually turn the Raw Stone into building materials but at the end of the day it doesn't really matter once you kind of automate your process it's just going to be happening in the background while you're doing other things so don't stress too much about it in the beginning it will seem kind of stressful because you're gonna try and micromanage it to get as much building materials as possible to complete your base but once you kind of get going you'll kind of forget that it's even there and eventually you'll just max out on building materials I also recommend placing a storage unit for building materials and Raw Stone somewhere nearby eventually I wouldn't make it a priority but having it there on hand will make things easier in the future it'll give you a nice stockpile once you have your stone mine your stone processor and your iron refinery you will officially be ready to automate the process as much as you want what you have to do is you have to have people working on the machines if you have four people they can actually each work their own individual thing and they'll completely automate the process and it'll be mostly hands off at that point if you have less than four people you'll have to do some of the managing yourself so generally what you're going to do is you're going to start by having somebody work the stone mine from there you're going to transfer the stone into the stone processor and then have somebody work the stone processor that will then turn the stone Raw Stone into building materials which you can use to build structures such as walls and buildings in the meantime you can also have somebody working in Iron Mine while they're getting iron you can take the raw iron and put it into the iron Refinery from there you'll have somebody work on the iron Refinery and they'll turn that iron into iron plates which is used to build most of the equipment inside buildings and things like mounted crossbows for your walls now that I've shown you guys a couple of the general ideas of what you want to be doing I want to actually go into showing you guys an example of a base that I have personally used in one of my campaigns on my channel so here we have what I like to joke around as the Millennium Falcon base so as you can see instead of using the v formation for the Gate entrance I actually use the straight lines this is why I recommend against it I actually used it extensively in this playthrough and I didn't like the outcome of it I found that previously when I had used the v formation it was far more effective at taking down enemies than this straight pattern that leads all the way up to the gate so in this particular case I want to say that I have tried it both ways very extensively and the V works out better with this particular base I was going for a very Compact and very large structure base and it works really good once you have a whole bunch of research done but you can't quite do this in the early game because you don't have all these buildings unlocked so let me just kind of give you a rundown of how I set up the base just to kind of give you guys an idea of what I would do on a general playthrough in this particular case in the bottom right corner I set up all my machines outside my main walls these small walls you see kind of bordering everything was actually something I did at the very end of my playthrough just to stop some cannibals from coming in and killing my workers when I wasn't paying attention right next to my machines is the stone mine and then just above that is a small farm to produce cloth to create armor now in this particular base I don't have a crop for food because I didn't need it just inside the walls I actually have a bunch of storage containers just sitting out and about you don't have to do it this way if you want you can actually put the storage containers inside buildings I just find it that it's a little bit easier to access your storage containers when they're outside of walls this way I don't need to take a character inside a building just to see the actual storage containers I can just access them from outside now this base was organized very well in the top area I actually had a prison it's all just jail cells from beginning to end and on top of that I have windmills this generates electricity for the few buildings that need it and that's about it there's really nothing else in this building the building in the back middle is actually where I have a bunch of beds laid out and some storage for some special characters and some tables and whatnot to allow people just to sit down this is effectively a medic building and a residential building and then the building left hand side was my crafting station building I had all my different crafting stations inside there and again on top I had some more windmills to generate a little bit more electricity the two big towers were completely empty except for crossbows on top to add some added defense to the back of my base and the sides now you do not have to have defense on the back or sides of your base like I said as long as you only have one gate they will always go to your gate first they will never attack the walls unless the game is bugging out the only thing this does is it allows my people to shoot at people from the sides and the back before they ever get to the gate and you don't have to have massive buildings to do that any of the buildings that you build crossbows on top of will work including just walls you can just do walls around your base and put crossbows back there and people will use those to shoot Intruders now in the beginning you're not going to have buildings that are massive like this like these buildings are actually very very large compared to the ones you're going to start off with even if you research the and medium building shells the biggest buildings are still going to be a little bit smaller than these so one thing I do want to recommend is try and go for getting a compact based layout that you enjoy the Aesthetics of the one thing I see a lot of people do is try to min max your base to make the space perfectly optimized you're going to stress yourself out doing that and what I would recommend is instead of worrying about trying to do something like I did here where it's super compact just give yourself some free room to where your characters can move around without getting stuck in walls and everything and make sure it looks pleasing to you make sure you can get to your storage building nicely if it's close by your crafting stations then you don't have to run back super far away and things like that you don't want your base to be complicated because honestly kenji's game engine is very old it will struggle a little bit to keep up with you if you make it very large or very complex so generally keep it simple a couple buildings for some beds and some storage a couple buildings for crafting maybe if you get prisoner cages do that prisoner cages do not have to be inside you can keep them outside so you don't even need building for that and you don't actually need guard towers at all the basic necessities for your base are simply a couple beds to heal people up and some storage everything else is just kind of a bonus so while I could sit here and talk about a whole bunch of advanced tips and that I don't really think it's worth your time I think it's better you just get out there and start building like I said you're gonna screw up many times over and don't worry about it the whole reason why I taught you to build the processors and the refineries right off the bat is that's basically an unlimited supply of building materials so if you screw up the only thing you're wasting is a little bit of time build some stuff if you don't like it disassemble it and rebuild it now I have a whole bunch of other tips that I want to give you guys and I think this video has actually gone on too long so I'm Gonna Leave You guys with just a couple short tips here just to kind of get you out into the game one make sure you're having fun building your base if you are stressing out stop building your base and go find something else to do I have played Kenji a lot and one of the big things with Kenji is that the game can be very buggy between trying to change the elevation of your building things to the orientation of your buildings it can be very stressful especially when you place something down wrong and you don't realize it until the end don't stress out what I recommend you do is you save before you build each building once you build the building take a look at it make sure it works properly and then if it does great you can move on if you don't like it reload your game and all you did is just backtrack a little bit before you wasted your time building the structure and tip number two is get used to dealing with the machines this sounds stupid but honestly there's a little bit of a learning curve of dealing with the machines and the crafting in this game you know it makes sense when you just have your character automatically doing it it's very easy to forget that they were supposed to be doing something else first like oftentimes people will have somebody working on their iron Refinery but nobody collecting iron ore so you end up just having a character standing around for 36 in-game hours doing absolutely nothing so occasionally check all your machines check all your people make sure they're doing stuff what you can do is you can assign people multiple jobs and if they can't do the top one they'll move down the list but I recommend against doing that most the time because sometimes can't use game engine will bug out and they won't do anything because they're not sure what they're supposed to be doing and that's just the nature of an old game engine and the third and final thing is I know I said we're supposed to be creating a fully self-sustainable base here but I actually almost always recommend against that the reason for that is eventually you're probably going to want to play with some mods because Mods make this game infinitely better even if it's just a couple of the simple mods the mods that add more items to the shops or make a couple things easier to obtain are almost always recommended or even required in some cases if you add the mods that add more food and stuff to shopkeepers you never have to build a farm because honestly farming is probably one of the most annoying things to deal with in the game because gaining water is relatively slow and the crops grow so slow and then you have to make sure somebody's harvesting them and then putting it into a container it's honestly a pain in butt and I would recommend you just skip farming unless you really enjoy it if you have a base dedicated towards that that's perfectly fine and if you're role playing that it's actually decently fun I've done it myself but if you're just trying to have a sustainable base just get one of the mods that add more items to shopkeepers and then just sell or and buy food for your people it will save you a huge headache down the line and then when you feel more comfortable with the game then you can start farming and then one last kind of like little bonus tip you can have stuff outside of your walls and it's perfectly safe just remember to move your people inside the walls if you ever get attacked and to keep an eye on the local Wildlife with that in mind you can also remember to actually take out the local animal camps and stuff nearby your base so creatures quit spawning nearby all right in the fourth video I actually forgot to show an explanation of the v formation walls so I'm actually showing that here with a little bit greater detail this was introduced in video five so sorry about that double content the very first thing I want to talk about is the v formation for the walls that I discussed in my previous video I accidentally forgot to include the actual image of a completed wall so that way you can actually see what it looks like in person so thank you to those that pointed it out the proper way to make the v formation is to have the gate at the center of the wall acting as the bottom section of the V you then have a wall section going out away from the gate on each side and have it angle slightly away from the gate itself and then at the very end of the gate you want to have a slow Arc as a turn to create the outside section of the wall for your base the reason why you want to have the slight angle is that as enemies go around it in the slow Arc your turrets will begin aiming before they can actually shoot at them so by time they get in range they'll get shot almost immediately if you have this angle very sharp and if they just come around it I like like a 90 degree angle enemies will begin around that corner and get around it and then continue running down your walls before your turrets actually start aiming at it I don't know why kenji's game engine does this but I've played this game for several hundred hours using this exact method and it works extremely well if you follow this method and if you have about six or so good turretsmen you can kill just about anything before they ever get through your gate and anything that does get through your gate will be severely weakened and the final couple things I want to talk about when it comes to Base building is the general idea of how bass defense Works generally bass defense comes in a couple phases first you'll get a warning saying that something's coming to visit your base but you won't recognize what they mean by just their generic names usually unless it says that it's a raid then you know it's going to be a combat encounter usually after you get the warning it will take a day or so for whatever encounter it is to get to your base once it's there they'll generally try and talk to you and then you'll have a chance to essentially tell them to piss off or you know you can attack them more often than not I recommend if you think they're going to be hostile Style Just Have Your crossbows open fire immediately your crossbows will do heavy work against them if they're unprepared once they start attacking your base they're gonna go straight for your gate as long as you only have one gate set up they will go straight for that gate and attempt to tear it down while that's going on what you want to do is you want to have people inside your gate trying to repair the gate while they are trying to repair the gate some of your people will be hit by the crossbows it's just a part of the way kenshi works with their accuracy and the ranged weapon firing as a general rule of thumb just kind of ignore the fact that your people are getting hit by your own ranged weapons and your turrets it's just part of kenshi and eventually your people will stop shooting each other but it takes quite a long time so it's better just to accept that it's gonna happen now while your people are repairing the gates they generally won't get hit from outside the gate but there are the occasional enemies that will swing just magically through the gate and hit your people so make sure you're keeping an eye on the people that are trying to repair the gate while this is going on what I usually recommend is that you have at least a couple of beds nearby preferably in a building that's pretty dang close that you can haul off anybody that gets hurt right to it so they don't die if you have somebody do that along with a small collection of medical supplies you can heal them and get them into bed immediately and they'll be back on their feet in a day or two and then one thing people seem to forget about or people don't know about is that you can actually hire mercenaries in town to protect your base if you do this they are usually extremely effective for their region most mercenaries are a tier above the current like people you're fighting out in the wild so like if you're at the Hub or in one of the shack towns The Mercenaries are generally much much better than the bandits the only downside is not only do you pay them they also get to keep all the loot if you try and take any of the loot they'll consider it stealing but in the early game it can be very beneficial to have these people working for you and just keep an eye on the contract terms because once the time limit is up they'll head back to the town they came from and then you'll have to rehire them moving on from Base building we're going to go into the idea of adventuring in Kenji and it's actually quite a bit different than a lot of other games and let me explain why in general kenshi tried to take a realistic approach the primary way they did this was by making it so whenever you took damage in combat there's a chance that you can't heal up all the way and you'll see this by your health bars changing in color but sometimes your health part doesn't change color in fact some of the health part disappears altogether this means that you have combat damage fatigue and the only way to get it back is by resting in a sleeping bag or a bed of some kind which brings me to my first rule of adventuring always make sure you bring a couple of sleeping bags I generally bring one per two people you have in your adventuring party if you're bringing four people bring two sleeping bags if you're bringing you know 10 people you could bring six or seven if you really want but generally you only need about half as many sleeping bags as you have people as you'll always want to have people up and about doing other things while your party members are resting the other thing they need to keep an eye on while you're adventuring is your hunger meter now the quick and fast rules is basically if your characters get too hungry you'll suffer from malnutrition and then your stats will be negatively affected as a general rule of thumb just keep a couple pieces of food on you per person while you're out and about and you will be just fine your characters will automatically eat and if you're in the same Squad they'll eat from each other's backpack as long as you have that option ticked and don't forget to to bring medical supplies like bandages and splints in case your people break their legs and for any skeletons you'll have to bring repair kits along as for the adventuring itself it's almost impossible to predict what you're going to run into in the world of kenshi depending on where you are geographically and what the locals have dealt with you may not run into the same thing multiple times in the same general area or you may run into the same thing over and over again it's best to assume that most things are going to be very dangerous to you especially in the early game so when I'm out and about I follow the three general rules of thumb anytime I leave the safety of my base or a town first assume everything is hostile until I can prove otherwise and assuming this always have your characters in stealth mode unless you know the local region is safe it takes a lot longer to get places but you usually end up getting there safer and things usually cannot sneak up on you plus this will also train your stealth skill anytime you pass by a friendly or just happen to pass by some enemies that don't notice you the second rule is to never fast forward unless I know the region is safe this means you have to to pause the game frequently and take a look around with a camera to ensure that there's no bad guys in the local area it's very easy to overlook bad guys so unless you're really used to doing this I would almost never speed up game time while adventuring around it's just not worth being ambushed when you could have easily avoided it the third and final rule to go by when you're adventuring is actually a two-part rule the first part is to have fun enjoy it and make sure you're taking your time that way you can enjoy the weird wonderful world of Kenji the landscape is beautiful and there's a lot of really cool things to discover and if you're rushing it you're gonna miss out on a lot of really cool things that kenshi has to offer the second part of the rule is the more serious part and this is to not fight enemies unless you have to when you're out adventuring now you can pick a fight with anything you want whenever you want when you have a base nearby or a town because you can always run away or get to town or have somebody come rescue your people if you get taken out but if you're just out adventuring and you're far from base or town or in an area you don't know it is not worth having a bunch of party members go down or potentially all of them and then losing some of your team or all of them because you were in a fight that was way over your head there's a lot of strange creatures in kenshi that could just take out a party especially an early game party and you just don't know until you learn the game better and even then sometimes things can take you by surprise so when you're out adventuring don't look for fights instead avoid them as much as possible and come back and take on the fights when you're more prepared specifically for that fight another important part of adventuring is the gear you're wearing now I want to be very clear about this do not worry about what weapon or what armor you have equipped as I said in my past videos focus on what you think looks good and what you enjoy having your characters wear at the end of the day the stat penalties and everything are not going to be so bad that it will hinder you in your game just enjoy what your characters look like if you don't like it change up their look find something you enjoy that's the best way to do your armor and your weapons what I'm talking about is the backpacks that you're wearing backpacks are a very important part of kenshi especially adventuring and many of the backpacks are designed for a very specific purpose in mind and if you're wearing the wrong one at the wrong time you could find yourself in a lot of trouble because they actually have some penalties for wearing them there are quite a few different backpacks in the game and honestly there's only six that I consider to be primary ones because the rest are very specific in their purpose or they're kind of hard to find so you won't really run into them all that often before I talk about any specific backpack I'm going to talk about the different modifiers that happen for wearing backpacks in general all backpacks affect the same general stats but just a different degrees now the primary thing you're going to look for in backpacks is the encumbrance reduction this number indicates what type of weight reduction items get when they're placed inside the bag any item inside either of these two bags will have their weight reduced by 50 percent and if you were to remove that item from the bag and place in your normal inventory it would regain its normal weight it only counts while inside the bag other than the encumberance reduction the only other benefit that backpacks give is an extra inventory space now the penalties for wearing a backpack are pretty substantial depending on the backpack you're wearing the combat skill bonus penalty is a direct negative to all of your combat skills offensive defensive and your weapon skills themselves so it's almost like a compounding negative effect on your stats this is really bad if you're wearing a Trader's backpack or a large backpack that has a really large modifier or a really large negative it will make it to where your characters are very ineffective in combat while wearing said backpack the rest of the penalties are direct multipliers to your base skills Athletics combat speed stealth and Dodge Athletics is pretty straightforward it's a simple reduction or modifier to your base speed of running around the game World Combat speed is the same thing except for it takes place only when you're in combat and the final two penalties are your stealth skill and your Dodge skill that will take a hit for wearing a backpack now having a stealth scale penalty does kind of suck because it makes it more difficult to sneak around the game world and it'll also make it harder for you to avoid fights if you come across one while adventuring the Dodge skill penalty isn't as bad because it only applies if you're a martial arts character that is not wielding a weapon if you're wielding a weapon you will use the block skill not the Dodge deal oil now that you have a general understanding of how backpacks work I'm going to explain to you guys which backpacks I like and which ones I do not like right off the bat I'll tell you right now I do not like the small backpack and I barely ever like the large backpack the small backpacks added inventory Space is really not all that much but I guess it is worth taking if it's the only thing available to you as for the large backpack it's a really good backpack for if you're in town doing things but once you get out into the wild world you don't want to have a negative 10 penalty to all your combat skills it's just not worth it ever not to mention the heavy hit to your stealth and your Dodge skills as well you'll effectively be a Sitting Duck if you're wearing this backpack in combat and improving by quite a large margin is the Trader's wooden backpack and the standard wooden backpack now these backpacks also have some pretty heavy penalties but items placed inside them stack which means you can stack up large quantities of food medical supplies building materials iron plates anything you need can be stacked and thereby taking up a lot less space in your inventory it is worth noting it does not work with weapons and armor and finally we have my two favorite backpacks the small thief's backpack and the standard thief's backpack now these are in my opinion by far the best backpacks to wear at pretty much any point in the game unless you're directly hauling supplies around their encumbrance reduction is a little bit less than the other backpack types but their penalties are pretty much non-existent with the only common penalties being the thief's backpack the standard one with a negative two to your combat skills otherwise there's no other penalties I usually go for the thief's backpack the negative 2 combat skill bonus in my opinion is completely worth having all that extra space one downside too that these backpacks is they are a little bit more rare than the other backpacks so you'll usually have to track down one of the Shinobi thieves Towers which are in a lot of the major settlements and their vendors will usually have them for sale otherwise I don't think many of the merchants throughout the world sell these types they usually sell the regular ones and the wooden ones when it comes to preparing for adventure that's about all the information that you need to know you have all the basic tools at your disposal now go out and adventure and just use common sense when exploring take your time pause frequently and look around if you see any animals Wildlife or Bandits or anything like that keep an eye on them and make sure they don't sneak up on you make sure you're taking advantage of using stealth as often as possible and if you get injured rest set down your bed rolls build a campfire cook any food you may have found or any meat from any animals or Wildlife you had to kill and avoid as many fights as possible while exploring the whole point of kenshi especially in the early game is Just exploring and seeing what's out there part of Kenji is just exploring and finding all the little quirks that make it fun the one thing I will say that you should take to heart is going slow is always going to be your best friend if you try and rush anything especially the exploration part of the game you're gonna find yourself in a lot of trouble you will get ambushed a lot and you may find your characters getting killed because you end up in a situation you cannot handle there's a lot of dangerous regions in kenshi and about the only ones that are kinda safe are the ones right around some of the major towns if you're having trouble finding a safe location just look for a big town and consider that your home base for a while and stick near there at all times until you feel more comfortable building up with supplies and then heading out on your own remember that kenshi is designed for you to lose combat a lot your characters should be getting knocked down one of the biggest tricks to Kenji is actually learning how to rescue your characters that are hurt the final piece of advice I'm going to leave you with is if you're playing with multiple characters leave one behind in a town near where you're exploring this character can be off mining near the town or they can just be standing in the dead center of town with some medkits or skeleton repair kits if you're using skeletons and have them be ready to come rescue any party members that get into too much trouble this is a character that could run out and use medkits on your players or pick them up and bring them back into town or just distract a dangerous enemy so the rest of your party can escape in general I always have one safety character always ready to help out my adventuring party because if you don't do this there are times where you are going to get a complete party wipe if you come across something like a big thing or a gorillo and you're not ready for it we're going to talk about two different locations that I consider to be ideal for beginners to start their first bases I'm gonna try and keep this video very short so that way the people that are trying to watch this for actual information can pop in watch the video and then get back to playing their game so let's Jump Right In without wasting any more time the first location that we're going to talk about is right in between the towns of Hub and squin located in the western part of the world this is probably the safest location to build your very first base if you're just starting out and if you're still new to the game the reason that I consider this to be one of the best locations is that you have every single resource you need nearby there is tons of iron tons of copper if you plan to well there's lots of water there's lots of rocks so if you're going to build a mine for building building materials and pretty much everything else you need is nearby both the town of Hub and squin have enough shops and mercenaries that you can hire if you need them that there's no real threat of losing anything from building this location the other great thing is that if you do build here the only people you're ever gonna have to deal with in terms of hostiles are usually dust Bandits and starving Bandits and after the first maybe 10 hours of playing the game neither one of those become very much a threat which is also one of the only downsides to this location is that if you stay here long enough and you build up enough defenses there's no real threat of building here so if that's something you're looking for you may want to eventually move your base or to start off building somewhere else this is just what I consider to be one of the best starting locations one of the things I love about this location is that you don't even really necessarily need to build defenses you can build your base in any layout that you want and pretty much nothing will attack you that's dangerous enough that requires walls or turrets or anything like that all you really need is a handful of people that can fight and at the end of the day if you don't want to deal with those enemies like I said you can run right to squint over here hire some mercenaries and they can come take care of any Bandits that may be on their way and the local fauna and Wildlife is generally pretty tame you really only ever have to deal with bone dogs and there's only usually a couple of them at a time so there's no real threat so if you're looking for a relatively chill experience with Base building this is where I recommend you build now you can actually build anywhere in these Hills it doesn't have to be in this exact spot this is just my favorite spot because it's kind of the closest in between the Hub and squint the second location is also really fantastic but there is a couple requirements to it and the first is you have to have at least one human preferably a greenlander a Scorch Lander will work but I would definitely recommend at least one or two greenlanders to be in your party the reason for that is it's going to be in holy nation territory here holy nation people when you build in their land they're gonna come once a week and require you to participate in prayer day if you have any non-humans they will pretty much declare war on you and they will attack you relentlessly and then eventually you'll probably die because they're quite difficult to deal with but if you have at least one human where you could have them participate in prayer day which is basically just like a little like chat bubble kind of conversation you have with a small group of holy nation people and then have everybody else hide inside the building during this encounter you're pretty much golden the other downside is that if you have anybody that is non-human women and they're out in the world you have to be careful for holy nation patrols because again they'll attack you on site so as long as you're dealing with mostly humans or all human parties this location right here is absolutely perfect because it's extremely safe you have a lot of holy nation towns and just general like little like Villages nearby that you pretty much never have to deal with anything bad even the bandits and stuff don't make it very far into this territory because oftentimes they get wiped out by holy nation patrols so if you're looking for another location similar to the other one where there's a lot of resources and stuff nearby and you're dealing with mostly humans in your party this can be another great location for you the other thing that's nice about this location compared to the other one is if you're playing on a little bit better computer you can have your draw distance up quite far and you can see for great distances the one warning I will give about this location is that because Kenji kind of bugs out sometimes occasionally your base will get attacked by an incredibly powerful raiding party and this can happen from cannibals from the far north any of the fogman like raiding parties from the web West or anything in between honestly I've seen some crazy encounters just randomly show up and it only really happens over in this area for me so that is something to pay attention to you will have to look at your warnings on your information sheet to make sure you're not missing anything important or do some extra backup saves every now and then just to make sure you don't get ambushed by an incredibly powerful force again if that does happen though I would recommend just going to one of the local holy nation towns and hiring some mercenaries to take care of them because the holy nation mercenaries are very powerful and can usually handle just about anything in the world now just a couple of parting notes before I end this video as I've said in previous videos in this series there is no perfect location to build every single person has a different idea of what they want for their base so honestly I recommend you look around for a location that suits what you want the reason why I posted these two locations is that I wanted to give new players an idea of where they can build and safely build up their base including doing the research needed to build other buildings and other infrastructure for your bases if you're new player it's generally a good idea to find a place like this where you can build and do your research and get money and resources and whatnot slowly at your own pace while you learn the game a lot of other locations in the game world have a lot of very difficult things to deal with either some of the local Bandits or some of the local you know monsters and stuff can really ruin your base building experience if you're constantly being attacked by something strong in these locations even if you're attacked frequently it's going to be by weak things that you can usually deal with if you guys have any other questions or comments or if you guys know of other good locations please leave comments down below to help any new players that watch this video and just want some ideas of where to build and that's going to do it for the beginner's guide now I had more stuff I wanted to originally put in it but honestly after a while it gets really hard to make a video around small amounts of content aside from it just being little tidbits here and there so what I'm going to say is this if you have any more questions please leave them in the comments below and I will do my absolute best to answer them I want to make sure that I can help out begin beginners as much as possible and let them know that this video is extremely relevant in 2023 and Beyond so I might even have to release this video in the future with an updated title and stuff because people keep thinking that the videos are outdated because of the date I put the date on there to help YouTube help with the algorithm and help new players find a guide that's brand new to that year that they're playing it in so just make sure you do me a favor and if you've watched this video if you like the guide and everything leave a like leave some comments anything you guys do will actually help the algorithm pick this video up and show it to more people so they can learn more things thank you guys all very much have a great one and I'll see you in the next one and don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already

Channel: FallingFoxGaming

Views: 81,964

Keywords: fallingfoxgaming, falling fox gaming, Kenshi Beginner guide 2023, kenshi, kenshi guide, kenshi beginners guide, kenshi tips, kenshi tutorial, kenshi hud, kenshi starting out, kenshi new game tips, kenshi starting tips, kenshi training tips, kenshi tips for beginners, kenshi guide 2023, kenshi tips 2023, kenshi beginner guide 2023, kenshi new player guide, kenshi how to, how to, get started, play, kenshi ui, kenshi starting guide 2023, how to play kenshi, falling fox

Id: z6HsDqyNkBo

Length: 108min 48sec (6528 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 12 2023