Quick Beginner's Guide to Kenshi

hey everyone its grand strategy here with the quick beginner's guide on the survival RPG known as kimchi now this is a very kind of diamond-in-the-rough game that you may have noticed on Steam it's been an open beta for the better part of a decade now and you may have even seen one of your favorite let's players take a stab at this but maybe you're watching this video now because you're a little intimidated about all the crazy information that's launched at you at the beginning of the game and you're not quite sure how to get a handle or just you know some quick beginner tips so where you can still explore the game without having to go and you know read through a wiki for three or four hours so I'm gonna here to hopefully help you give you some quick beginner tips so let's get started so we're gonna go ahead and start with the new game here and you'll notice immediately you can choose different beginnings and if you want you can pause the video read through each of these they're all actually pretty interesting but don't feel like you're gonna be locked into a certain play style if you decide to pick one play style over the other yes some of these are easier but I would generally start off with The Wanderers star this is the typical standard start you only have to control one character and that's really good to help you kind of understand the basics and also your limitations in this game so let's go ahead and start but if you notice there's Advanced Options these just more or less change different multipliers that you'll become familiar with over play leave this for default for now so we're gonna go ahead and begin this game is essentially the setting is in a post-apocalyptic kind of wasteland that you know there's a scarcity and it really gives you this nice sense of like desire for exploration because this is not a triple-a game this is a game that there are still new things being discovered about it in the game world each day and I mean if you really want to spoil yourself on the wiki you can and there is a link below and it is helpful for people who want to become you know get really into like the base building and all that kind of nice stuff but I leave it to you to play how you want so this is a great character customization screen I could spend hours here if I wanted to I highly recommend picking up some of the mods in the workshop because they offer a new options from the default based game and there is a great amount of functionality so you don't have to worry too much about having to implement all these mods and it doesn't get too crazy so one thing I will touch on before we start is the actual races themselves now if you notice in the bottom left there are different racial stats with different modifiers don't be too intimidated by this the only stat that really particularly matters is the base hit points but just picking the regular human like with the green Lander with a hundred you'll be fine you just get bonuses to these skills here which means they will just train faster if you notice say like with the Scorch Lander you'll give multiple stats that train faster where some you do take a penalty so it just kind of depends on what you want to specialize your character in I will add one additional note that there is a race here called the skeleton and these this is a robotic race so they will not be able to heal injuries in the same way that an organic race would they I mean if you want to play this you can but I just want to caution you in saying that they're essentially their medic or first-aid kits are extremely expensive and difficult to come by so yes they are stronger with a base hit points of 200 and they do have some very unique skilled traits that will level up faster but they can be very quickly a liability but so we're gonna go ahead and start with just your basic human Green Lander here and we don't really care too much about what he looks like but here we go we're knee con and the border zone so let's just go ahead and hit map here or sorry m4 map and you'll notice we are in the hub this isn't about the middle list region of the map and many of these different starts will start you in different areas of the map there really is no direction in this game you can decide to do whatever you want there are missions there are quests there are reasons to go and explore different towns I've been to squint before this is where some of the shuk actually live but this is really a game about discovery so you know your character has its basic needs as we'll see in the bottom line here I'm slowly losing hunger points and we also have our status points here so let's talk a little bit about that real quickly my blood stat is at 75 different races have different bleed multipliers so some will bleed out much quicker than others but let's talk very quickly about what these different limb stats mean if you're familiar with maybe door fortress or a game and that similar vein I think maybe like rim world it works in a very similar light so if our head stat goes into the negative our character will start become unconscious and start to bleed out most likely if it's a cut wound if our left arm is just completely mangled we may actually end up losing it completely and having to find a replacement prosthetic in the game the same goes for your legs if your leg goes crippled your character will start hobbling around and if you're trying to run away from something good luck but let's look at our actual base stats and you'll notice very quickly we have one strength one toughness one dexterity zero perception and one and everything now just to give you some perspective the maxes I think 99 so we are actually pathetic I'm talking like if we walk outside this town and encounter one group of little small bandits we're not gonna be alive for very much longer so what is a newbie player to do well there are two ways to make money in this game which is really should be your primary objective is trying to make sure you're not starving to death so we need to acquire money which in this game is cats so if you bring up her inventory this is what we start off with which is not much at all but in our bottom right here we have our money it's the C for cats 1000 cats that's a pretty decent start and I will say here there's two ways you can go about it the first way is you can be a nice loyal laboring peasant of society if we want into the easiest way to make money in the very beginning is to actually start searching around our opening town and looking for some sort of resource of over here actually we see an iron node and we could run over here very quickly let's go ahead and speed us up and here comes nikan are nice a little laboring peasant and we can just right-click on this ore and he will begin laboring on this or node now as he does that he will slowly start to produce an ore and that will take time he will become exhausted but over time will eventually see an or node pop up in his inventory and his laboring stat will increase its effect its increasing right now and with a higher labor stat that makes it more efficient and more management etc etc and with each or we can just immediately sell that into town and eventually we can buy food with that now that is the slow laborious way of up and there's even bandits after me so it's also extremely dangerous so let's run back into town before we get murdered there's a whole little army after us I hope there are cars that can stop that but if not let's just run to the bar we'll be safe there right haha yeah so this game is actually very dangerous we're just gonna go ahead and close that door and Oh someone wants to drink with us so well there's there's a lot of bandits on the door um okay they oh okay alright so we've got a bar bar fight going on here and they're after me this is a ok they're all fighting each other let's try and run out very quickly and maybe we can survive yes so this game is a little difficult for people early on but let's talk about that second way of making money and that is actually to steal things now right now I'm running for my life that's good because I'm training my athletic stat right now and trust me you are going to become probably the fastest man alive in this game especially early on because there is no way I can take on 20 different bandits who probably have 20 melee skill when I only have one so we're gonna keep running for our lives here and we'll even speed it up a little bit because there's not much we can really do accept run away and maybe we can lose these guys and double back into the town and they are very persistent but I'm sure the people in the bar have probably wiped the floor with those bandits by now so we can probably get back in here and show the actual stealing set in fact look we have some of our bandits here right now I can loot their corpse hey I just got a new armored piece welcome to the world of kimchi oh yes the people here have been utterly massacred thank goodness for bar guards I guess so yeah their corpses are littering the floor and if you notice there is no red indicator when I hover over them so we can freely loot their items and that's what they get for attacking an innocent newbie now let's say I want to steal things what's the point of stealing things well let's go ahead and do our sneaked option here and if you'll notice there the line of sight and stealth in this game is actually pretty robust it characters have to have a direct line of sight on you and right now I'm obviously in their detection but let's go ahead and just hit alt and right click and if you notice we'll see that there are items and you'll find items in almost every single shop you can see them out on the counter they are all worth money now we could have mined out a piece of iron ore in a single day which one may have given us 100 cats or so or we could just steal these steel bars here and that would be 600 cats immediately and we can steal all of this actually and it would be very very profitable very very quickly now the only problem is if you are caught stealing which I believe we had a 30% chance of being detected we would be immediately beat up by these nice guards that just massacred an entire bandit gang so probably not a good idea to immediately start your criminal career right now especially when they're all awake and looking directly at you that doesn't mean stealing is impossible in this game but you do have to be smart about it so once you actually steal an item you have the option to fence it and if you fence it to an opposing faction you have a very high success rate but if you're trying to sell the shop owner exactly what you just took from him this game is a bit savvy about that and you will most likely be caught so with that in mind you can become extremely rich and I highly recommend save scumming but if you're someone who's not in to save scumming you are going to have to do the laborious route I'm afraid and I think that's part of the fun of kimchi so what to do after you've attained money so really you can do whatever you want if you want to train skills I highly recommend may be sticking around towns as you just noticed a giant banner gain came after me but I could have actually participated in the fighting and maybe got some skill up points you can actually go get enslaved if you want I know it sounds a little ridiculous but it actually is a very easy and secure way to bolster your laboring stat for instance if I went to a certain city that was hell-bent on using slaves to do all their labor if I was knocked out there and enslaved I would be forced into a routine of obedience and just do nothing but spend all my days slaving away until I finally decide to free myself now some people may find that a little boring or egregious or etc but say you're someone who is more interested in the base building aspect of this game and that's another really interesting aspect so if you decide to do base building I highly recommend that you start hiring followers so yes this is a squad RPG survival game you can very easily play it solo like I am but it is extremely dangerous now when you hire new recruits remember you need additional money usually it's 6,000 for average recruits 9,000 for recruits with special skills in fact I believe we can talk to someone in here oh no get out of my face okay how about bard thug drunk okay actually he's not maybe someone we want to hire what about you okay so ki ga-oh ain't seen you around before you recruitin depends what your price six thousand cats so we don't have 6,000 cats but this is your easiest way to find new recruits is to go into nearby towns and check out the bars the NPCs do rotate over time so you get it's a little bit like mountain blade if you're familiar with that game so it does pay to go and explore and travel so another way to make money is actually to trade if you can brave the waste you can go to a bar and once you've made a certain amount of money or you go to a general store you can buy luxury goods or rather valued Goods and let's go ahead and give you an example of what that looks like real quickly so we'll go ahead and talk to the barkeep you should have some Goods here for instance let's see should have yes so like building materials is a valued good or steel bars is a valued good and you'll you can see the average price here so the price markup here is 120% that means it's on average a 20% higher in cost so we definitely want to buy the goods here but it would be good to sell steel bars here for a profit so that's another way you can make money and and once you've invested into some of the higher priced valued goods you can actually make a pretty nice profit doing that but again remember you have to make long treks and that can be extremely dangerous so be sure to hire some mercs to support you and your trade endeavors with that in mind say you have a motley crew with you and you want to start off with your base building I highly recommend just getting a bunch of building materials that was actually the thing we just looked at in that base and you're going to want to find a spot to prospect so that's something that if we look down in the bottom right we have our prospect button and we will get a very vague and kind of blurry object here if our science skill was much higher this would be much more defined and easier for us to essentially understand and don't worry you can you can hire people who have high science skills and they'll usually let you know that but you want to find the areas that generally have high water and high fertility now that's kind of the beauty of kimchi is finding a nice occasion and keep in mind there are areas that are owned by certain factions and I'll have extremely dangerous monsters inhabiting them and roaming bands of critters will end up at your front gates and you're going to have to defend yourself so really kaanchi is a game of what you want to make of it essentially if you want to be a solo sword wheeling wanderer type or Ronin type you can totally be that if you want to try to build a sprawling Empire that competes with the different factions in this game that there is an actual integrated diplomacy system as we can see here under the faction this is only five factions here but there are many more maybe dozens more to be discovered you can do that as well you can have a political weight in this world if you don't like a particular faction you can hire up to 50 recruits and train your own little army and start leading raids into their territory and steal all their stuff for resources I mean it's it's a very very robust game and there's a lot of potential for you and your new game of kimchi this is grand strategy and I hope this guide was helpful see you next time

Channel: GrandStratagem

Views: 132,274

Rating: 4.7878313 out of 5

Keywords: Kenshi, Survival, RPG, Steam, Asian, Post-Apocalyptic

Id: tfP7BFuEtpY

Length: 16min 45sec (1005 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 13 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/LapseofSanity]

Thanks for the vid, agreed that the bandit attack was pretty on point for the game.

[u/FreeHats4U]

My first stab at creating a quick guide for Kenshi. Not intended to go super in-depth with game mechanics, but rather just give newer players a feel for the game's beginning stages. Bandit attack really solidified my point towards Kenshi's dangerous world.

[u/Kexby]

Well done! I could have used this when I first started, cause I had no idea what to do :)