I have 8.3 hrs on the game and all I've done is getting killed by starving bandits and dust bandits and giant beak things. I got imprisoned by some Okran cult too. Almost forgot, went to some swamp and gone one-tapped by a small spider.
The game is good, but how do I get good?
Skill issue, watch some youtube videos and learn
The game is good
It's not. It's another of those "wide as a lake, shallow as a puddle" sandboxes.
The game is not good, it is boring slog, and you should do something better with your life, rather than listen to autists with sunk cost issue who will try to convince you otherwise.
steal beak thing eggs at night for income and then set up an outpost in gut once you have enough fighters.
you get beat up repeatedly until you build enough toughness stat, or whatever was it called, it's basically a resistance stat that's built by surviving beat downs, that's the one thing that makes kenshi unique, eventually after so many beatdowns your character starts kicking ass on its own.
that, or just download training equipment mods that you can build on your own base and sit for hours browsing Anon Babble on your second screen while your character trains
I usually go the boring grind route but it's safe and it works. Buying buildings in the town, setting up auto mining, fighting stuff outside of town, looting, researching, all in the city walls. Skill trainer station mods are easy mode but running dudes back and forth with backpacks full of rocks gets old.
train sneak first by sneaking in a city, then knock out a bandit and kidnap him to your house or any place that can be locked, and train with that guy by fighting him, and then putting his unconscious ass in a bed to heal him, and repeat many times. if he escape, just kidnap another one.
its long and tedious, but best way to level up a lot of combat skills.
Learning how to play and exploit the game's systems is 90% of the fun, after you learn everything it gets really boring.
it's a sandbox. you're responsible for digging your own reservoir. you don't even know what you mean when you say catchphrases like that you little shit
I need games to tell me what to do
you might like gacha games, they even have systems to make you play for certain amounts of time daily
You're mistaking depth for hand-holding. Kenshi doesn’t spoon-feed you or pad your brain with endless quest markers and dialogue trees—it throws you in and says "good luck." It’s not shallow, you just don’t know how to swim. This game gives you systems, not stories—and the people who get it are out here building drug empires in the swamps or leading skeleton-only crusades into the Holy Nation.
skeleton-only crusades into the Holy Nation
i think not
I like Kenshi's whole "get stronger by losing fights" idea, I just wish the training system as a whole was a bit better. Toughness is handled well enough I think, and more armor lets you take more hits before going down to level faster. But on the other hand, you can actually level weapon/strength skills slower with stronger weapons because it takes less hits to take people down.
In the vanilla game you stop gaining experience by beating up weaklings, so the best way to level up is taking a high level guy prisoner and keeping him alive as a living punching bag. Then you beat him with broken/rusty weapons before healing him up again.
Tell me this Anon Babble. Can I play it "solo"?
as in with one character the whole game? yes it is possible however the beginning is extremely tedious as you will have to suffer loses and wait for your character to heal on his own, if he survives at all
doable but more difficult and a much longer process in the beginning. One of the big benefits of having a squad isn't just more people in the fight, but healing your boys that got KO'd. if at least one person gets up in time, they can prevent everyone else from bleeding out on the floor
Tried this after doing the beakthing in the bed, save reload thing to level toughness and you'll still get beat down eventually, you'll get swarmed and stuck in the dodging animations and never get out.
Raising a bonedog is a glorious and miserable experience.
Yes and it's pretty easy. Just get enslaved and break out of it and fight the guards, they'll keep you fed and healed until you become an unkillable god.
step 1: RUN. All the way across the map, until you have like 50 athletics. Go to the north UC cities in the desert area, they're pretty safe as long as you avoid the skimmers and samurai.
step 2: SNEAK. Sneak around in a city, until you're good at it. Use control right click to queue move commands and just watch your guy sneak back and forth. If you see trouble at the gates, go involve yourself in it. Take some shots at bandits while letting the guards take the heat (just watch out if there are crossbows on the walls, they love to friendly fire). Loot the dead bodies of absolutely everything and sell it for meatwraps, a decent backpack, a sleeping bag, and a bitch from the bar (find a cheap one).
step 3: NIG. "practice lockpicking" by doing it. Break and enter an armor store in one of the UC cities and steal a suit of samurai armor.
step 4: BULK. Samurai armor at first will weigh you down on its own but carry your bitch on your shoulder while you walk, weighed down and overloaded, all the way from the north UC to Skinner's Roam. You should get some significant gains. Pick up more crap to weigh you down as needed.
step 5: TRAINING ARC. While wearing your heavy armor and your biggest backpack, get the shittiest weapon you can find, and go fight bulls and hungry boys. The more maluses you have the quicker you'll level up, that's just how the xp system works. If you want to power level toughness make sure your bitch is a good ways away and not in the fight so your character will 'play dead' and you have to choose to get back up, which massively boosts toughness. When you get knocked out have the bitch come patch you up and put you to bed to sleep it off. Soon you'll be a killing machine and wiping your ass with the bands of hungry boys, especially if you take off the heavy armor and replace it with stuff that actually gives you combat bonuses.
there are better ways to start out, but my usual method was using guards as meat shields against roaming bandits. either I'd lure them to the city gates and then join in the fray when the guards beat their ass, or I'd use the "protect" job or whatever its called on a patrol and help them fight whoever they run into.
Really only useful when you're so weak/poor that you can't win a direct fight with shitty bandits.
Do not read the wiki
The game seems hard, but it actually isn't, level up sneaking, there's a way to level it up fast, it should be obvious if you pay attention, almost any skill and stat really.
Commit to the consequences of your run without savescumming and it will be more fun.
Making a base also kinda ruins the fun of the game imo.
more hits
less hits
For the record, XP comes from HP loss, not number of hits. Armor is beneficial for training because the increased number of hits means better damage distribution across limbs, thus more hp loss before being downed and needing to rest. ie,
Nude: -67 Larm, -105 Stomach. Downed in 2 hits for 172 HP of xp.
Crab Master: -60 Head, -100 chest, -90 stomach, -80 Larm, -55 Rarm, -64 Lleg, -44 Rleg. Downed in 30 hits for fuckton HP of xp.
Technically the big chunks removed by being nude is "faster" as in more xp per hit taken, but the issue with training is recovery time, and the latter way gives you so much more xp loss before next rest. Of course, both means pale in quantity versus playing Up-Downs, which is also enabled by wearing good armor.
Ditto for dealing damage. A sword dealing 20 HP per hit is more likely to deal more overall damage spread across all the limbs as opposed to a sword dealing 120 and dropping an enemy on first hit. However, dealing xp is multiplied by the difference in combat stats, so high level targets are better for training for two reasons.
ps never mine, unless it's late stage strength training and you want to fill an entire merchant's backpack with stacks of iron ore
Making a base also kinda ruins the fun of the game imo.
a nomadic band of like a dozen guys and buying town property here and there as outposts is the most fun. Basebuilding brings with it a lot of hassles
Armor is beneficial for training because you get many more chances to block, dodge, and attack before you end up in the 'knocked on your ass whenever the enemy even looks at you' state.
you just know
It’s not shallow, you just don’t know how to swim
Okran is right about skeletons.
The best way to train toughness is to find a fuckhuge mob of starving bandits - they only have sticks so you will not die no matter what until your torso or head hp goes to -200. When you get up among a ton of enemies you get extreme toughness exp. So get your scrub, bet him in heavy armour, aggro starving bandits lose to unconsciousness, get up, get hit instantly and fall, recover, get up, get hit, fall, recover, get up, and you got like 70 toughness in one in game day.
The more damage you get up with the more exp you get. The more enemies you get up around the more exp you get. Don't level up attack or defence as much as you can so you keep getting exp from starving bandits.
the crux of heavy armor toughness training is the 'get up from playing dead' exploit. when you hit 0 hp in your head or torso every additional hit to it will knock you down again, and with heavy armor causing you to only take 1 or 2 damage at a time you'll get knocked down and get up again many more times before you're beaten in to a recovery coma
That too, of course, but the sentence was about toughness.
Yes, that's playing Up-Downs, which is by far the easiest means. I prefer POLICE! over starvers though. You're less likely to accidentally murder your way free, and since they're stronger, you have more wiggle room in your own stats to get the gear before beginning to train. They also don't roam away if you're KO'd and hobbling.
The game is more fun when you start building a settlement
Find a nice spot (you can google best spot) and begin building your village.
otherwise the game is boring as fuck. It's basically kind of like Mount and Blade, where the hobo phase is just you grinding your main character and finding initial fund to become a village lord. But unlike Mount and Blade, theres no endgame. Once youre stable with your village, the game kind of ends there.
Sure you can grind your death squad stats to go kill bosses, but it doesn't really do anything compared to starting your own country in MBlade.
Games like Project Zomboid or Dwarf Fort have the similar issue
theres just no endgame. once you get past the initial hurdle, the game just ends.
where you have to make your own "FUN" when you get pass the hobo phase
mount and blade or starsector dont have that problem
this is why Rimworld keep pulling enemies out of its ass to keep you from getting bored with its story generator
gave Hobbs the Michael Jackson treatment
I captured the bugmaster but his stats are so high he's more worth it as my training dummy.
I want my sandbox to be 1ft x 1ft and 6ft tall
Retard
how do I get good?
Grind more.
That's literally all there is to Kenshi. Or pretty much any sandbox game, Kenshi is just unusually empty and shallow outside stats grind.
That's literally all there is to Kenshi.
Actually, now that I think of it, Kenshi combat did have a minimal skill/micro element.
Building my little empire was definitely the funnest part of the game. I just wish my first town didn't turn out so ugly and bland, I had no idea how to city plan so it just naturally snowballed into this mess, but it was still comfy. I had smaller neighboring towns I was building which looked way cooler, but this shithole here was the capital of it all.
Greenlander women fuck Bonedogs
settlement
Nomadic trade caravan/treasure hunters for exploring the world. When you're forced to buy/loot gear instead of just crafting your shit, things gets a lot more interesting.
The game is more fun when you start building a settlement
That's what ruined the game for me. Automating settlements and crafting workflows is janky as fuck.
It's a nice if empty sandbox game, but a shitty colony management game.
I wish there was a MnB/Rimworld tier sandbox that is not about running the whole colony/country and more of a smaller scale.
there is always Eve online
I already have Microsoft Office installed, thanks.
holy shit I would brutally murder for a good sandbox that is also sci-fi
Kenshi sucks without the kill mod. You literally can't kill enemies directly. They only go unconcious and you can't kill them when they are down without a mod.
Puddle is giving it credit
the eve excel meme is only if you're doing industry, in all other areas it has nothing to do with spreadsheets
The biggest bottlenecks in early game Kenshi is lack of toughness which makes you take around 50% extra damage or some shit and lack of athletics which means you can't even outrun anything that's not an iron spider or the like. Once you've raised those to remotely sufficient levels you'll have a lot more chances to escape or survive encounters and before long thrive once you get both your melee defense and melee attack up enough. Alternatively only focus on your athletics and use a crossbow and beat the game cause AI is too retarded to counter the stop go movement a player can do.
For me, it's a small 5 to 7 guys party, mix settlement building with exploration, as in settle in a place, loot ruins nearby, move to a new place and repeat. Less guys than that and everything takes too long, more guys than that and the game becomes too tedious to micromanage
falling for the hashish meme when grog is easier to produce, sell, and is legal everywhere
I seriously hope you guys don't do this. Honorable mention to Bloodrum if you're using mods that let you make it.
Not really true. Wounds degenerate and eventually kill if they're on the head or chest.
You can also make enemies bleed to death with cutting damage.
to be fair, copper mining near squin is the fastest of them all, it's like 80k cats per day with a maxed labourer team
I wish Kenshi had a more robust faction warring system.
For me the most fun part is once you've become allied with one of the big three factions and start leading allied patrols into big town battles.
If more of the warring stuff was automated, or at least had enemies actually pushing back, it would be much more fun.
Kenshi has that issue with a lot of things. Imagine being able to establish an actual faction and have npcs settling in your bases you make when they're large enough and have extra beds and buildings. Imagine a proper war between factions like you said. Imagine being able to actually enslave people and build a slaver kingdom of your own. This game is the walking embodiment of almost great but killed by it's mechanics not being developed enough.
kenshi has the framework for what could be the greatest game of all time. i hope its sequel realizes that instead of trying to go down the AAA slop route
play Morrowind
Git gud kwk
No.