Kenshi Cheeser’s Guide to Kenshi Walkthrough

Kenshi Cheeser’s Guide to Kenshi Walkthrough 1 - steamsplay.com
Kenshi Cheeser’s Guide to Kenshi Walkthrough 1 - steamsplay.com
How to make the hardest starts of the game super easy.

Don’t read this if you haven’t played the game yet. While there aren’t any real spoilers here, they do show to bypass the progression hurdles of the game.

There are more-or-less 3 techniques to progressing in this game, depending on how you classify them:
* grinding ( the obvious approach )
* cheesing ( using the game’s own mechanics against itself )
* exploiting ( taking advantages of glitches/bugs in the game )

The problem with exploits is they tend to be unstable, get patched and can detract from the game experience.

Arguably cheesing can detract, too, but the idea here is if you really hate the grind, this article is for you.

 
 

Getting Started

 
First step, choose a start. 
 
Choose the hardest start. Vanilla will be the guy who lost an arm (Rock Bottom). 
 
Better yet, download a mod that gives you only a torso and immediately dismiss your helper. 
 
Click “Advanced Options” 
 
I don’t mess with most of the settings here. Some things you think might help you, but they actually don’t. For example, you might speed up research or, building or production, but you don’t want to because they actually make it to *more* work to increase your skills. You end up spending more time micro-managing so don’t adjust them. 
* I usually extend hunger time because I don’t like micro-managing food and staying fed is only ever an issue in the very early game anyway. 
* enable “Bandits loot the player”, because we’re trying to make an easy game as hard as we can. 
 
Once you’re in-game, if you’ve chosen the torso route and have an unwanted helper, you want to dismiss that helper. A lot of people don’t seem to realize this feature exists: 
 
Bring up the Squads interface, grab that unwanted character with your left mouse button and drag them onto the dismiss “button”: 
 
Kenshi Cheeser's Guide to Kenshi Walkthrough 
 
If you choose the torso route, and you’re inching your way to Heft at 1mph, you may be tempted to save-scum. This is the only acceptable time to save-scum. There is a *very* high likelihood you won’t make it. Any other time, save scumming will leave you feeling you’ve cheapened the experience. 
 
 

Food (Skellies need not read this)

 
If you’re playing a Skeleton, you can skip this section. 
 
Your first priority is securing food. This guide is assuming this isn’t your first time, but just in case: 
 
1. mine enough copper or kite bandits to town guards to secure provisions to pay for a few morsels of food, or 
 
2. steal a bit of food from a bar near you. Just stay in the darkness, turn on sneak and wait for the eye to indicate nobody is paying attention to you. A little bit of patience goes a long way here. If you’re just a torso, it will be super easy to do this. 
 
 

Legs and arm

 
You’re 2nd priority is acquiring legs. If you didn’t choose the torso route, you can probably skip this section. 
 
If you’re playing a torso, you have at least 2 options: 
 
1. wait for miscreants and skimmers to get taken out by the gate guards, collect and sell the loot and buy your needed appendages. 
 
2. steal from the skel merchant’s unlocked chest (right next to the jail). Ideally wait until both a right and a left leg show up, because you will probably get caught, jailed, taken by slavers and end up somewhere very far from where you’ll have a chance to acquire legs again. So, wait until both a left and right leg are available here. 
 
Pause the game and steal both legs. You will likely get caught, just keep reopening the chest and trying to them until you get them. Put them both on before resuming your game and prepare to face the consequences. 
 
If you have an arm, you can mine copper and just pay for legs, but if you already have an arm, you probably have legs, too. 
 
NOTE: you probably want to pass on economy legs, the Athletics penalties are too severe. However, economy arms can serve you very well for quite some time. You’re going to need a left arm later, so make sure you at least have an economy left arm before you proceed. 
 
ALSO: I recommend boycotting stealing from this point on. This game mechanic is too overpowered and actually takes away from the fun of the game. 
 
 

Athletics & Stealth

 
Your next priority is Athletics. You really shouldn’t leave your starter town until you can run 21 mph. This will allow you to get away from anything except a Beak Thing. 
 
Turn on stealth and run back and forth across town until you can sneak at 21mph. You don’t need to train strength yet, so don’t be over-burdened and don’t wear athletics or stealth penalizing gear so you can get this trained up sooner rather than later. 
 
I strongly recommend also acquiring a backpack before you leave your first town. 
 
 

Money

 
By far, the most fun I have getting early game funds is to be had in Drin, a little war camp in the northeast corner of the Bast region. 
 
Kenshi Cheeser's Guide to Kenshi Walkthrough 
 
This is a major point of conflict, huge armies of HN and UC clashing as well as the occasional outlaw and cannibal party. 
 
Watch the HN fall, pick up all the swords, especially off the Paladins and sell them at the bar. 
 
 

Lockpicking

 
While in the Bast region, head to the city of Bast itself. 
 
Throw yourself into a low-level cage and pick your way out of it. Keep doing this until your lock-picking is level 20 or so. 
 
Now go find the highest level cage in the area, if memory serves correctly it’s somewhere around level 45 or so. 
 
Now keep picking your way out of this cage until your lockpicking is level 61. There’s now no lock in the game that can keep you out of it as long as you don’t have any lockpicking penalties. 
 
 

Protection ( martial arts, dodge, toughness )

 
Nothing is more important than living another day. 
 
Now that we have food security, the ability to run away from most threats, and a bit of spending cash, we now need to secure protection. 
 
Before you leave Drin, at some point you’ll run across a fallen UC Samurai. You should relieve him of his armor as you will be needing it shortly. 
 
Also, stock up on food if necessary, you’re going on an extended excursion next. 
 
Head to Burn’s tower next and recruit him. Since you’re there early, he’ll most likely still be alive. If he’s dead, go get Sadniel or a nameless skeleton recruit and come back to Burn’s tower. 
 
You should know where Burn’s tower is, it’s really hard to miss, but just in case, it’s due west of World’s End on the north end of the Floodlands. 
 
We’re going to spend some time here securing your protection. 
 
The first thing you need is to train Toughness, Dodge and Martial Arts. 
 
Put your armor on your skeleton and send him forth to battle iron spiders, and broken skeletons. Well, what I really mean is send him out to get beaten to a pulp over and over again. Every time he falls into a coma or is dying, pick him up and put him on the skeleton bed upstairs. NOTE: you need a left arm to pick up your skeleton! 
 
Keep doing this until he starts winning fights. 
 
Now load him up with as much iron as you can. Ideally if you can bring some traders backpacks with you, fill 2 of them with iron and put them in his inventory. 
 
If you can also put a large backpack on him that will reduce his ability to Dodge making him easier to hit and training even more Toughness and Dodge and now Strength too. 
 
You now have a skilled kung fu skeleton who will be capable of getting you out of some tight spots. 
 
 

Assassination

 
Before you leave Burn’s tower, this is a fantastic time to train Assassination. 
 
However, word of warning, I would encourage to boycott this skill. You can literally and trivially knock out the most powerful enemies in the game. Like thievery, it is just way too overpowered. 
 
You’ll need to remove your armor to do this (too heavily penalizes assassination skill), so don’t do this before training toughness or it can get you killed. 
 
You’ll notice some friendly skeletons roaming around the area. Start attempting to assassinate them. When you fail, they will turn on you and give you a free beat-down (more free Toughness!). You will also level your assassination skill. 
 
Eventually you will start succeeding. Check their swords, I’ve seen them carry Mark III at least, which is not a bad start. 
 
 

Protection Part 2 ( weapons, melee attack/defense )

 
Last task before leaving Burn’s tower. 
 
If you don’t have a nice weapon, you’ll find some usable ones in Burn’s tower’s storage. Equip your weapon, put the armor back on your skeleton (if you removed it for assassination) and start training your skeleton with it, too. Same procedure, keep sending him out for beat-downs and healing him until he starts winning fights. 
 
Next head to Mongrel, it’s in the middle of the fog lands. 
 
Send your skeleton in to battle the hordes both with sword and with martial arts. 
 
When he’s good enough to take out a crowd both with sword and without, you now have a capable protector who can save you from almost any situation. 
 
 

Combat ( weapons, melee attack/defense, martial arts, dodge, toughness for fleshies )

 
The most important key to survival in Kenshi is being able to defend yourself. 
 
If your main is also a skeleton, repeat the training process for him as you did for your protector and you can skip the rest of this section. 
 
If however you’re a fleshie, your training technique will be a little different. I have not found a way to train combat that’s anywhere near as efficient and safe as Burn’s tower and the fog. These techniques don’t work for fleshies because Burn’s tower only has a skeleton bed which does little good for a fleshy, and training against hordes of fogmen is just too dangerous for a fleshy. 
 
Acquire some more armor like your protector’s or just take the armor from your protector. 
 
Go start an outpost near Squin. 
 
Don’t bother building a wall! You want them to attack you. The more free beat-downs the better. Dust Bandits and Black Ninja can sometimes send very very large groups which is amazing training even for larger squads. 
 
I recommend training both martial arts and swordplay. Swordplay is more survivable solo but martial arts is superior in every other way (and you might have your sword taken away from you). Most of my playthroughs have been martial arts only. I have owned huge collections of Meitou weapons but never used one or had a squadmate trained in one. My most recent playthrough is the first time I’ve used swords and I haven’t gone to acquire any Meitou weapons yet. 
 
Park your skeleton protector in Squin, away from the action, but close enough to run to your aid when you are in a coma or dying. You can keep him in the outpost with you if you have many recruits by now, but if it’s only the two of you, don’t take the chance. 
 
FYI, if you get taken as a slave, you have many more free beat-downs and free healings to look forward to. If they steal your armor or sword, you don’t have anything expensive yet so no big deal but you can send in your skeleton protector to take down the slavers and recover the stolen items ( if they didn’t just get dumped on the ground which they often do ). 
 
 

Strength

 
Strength is simple and fairly fast to train. 
 
Get 2 trading backpacks full of iron ore and put them in inventory. Wear the heaviest armor you can and equip a large backpack and fill it with ore too. 
 
Pick up a squadmate and remove a leg from a 3rd squad mate. 
 
Set movement speed to “match” on all 3 Kenshi Cheeser's Guide to Kenshi Walkthrough 
and walk back and forth across town. The legless one will cause the whole ground to move at 1mph but the overloaded toon will get full strength increases. A handful of trips back and forth across town will see your Strength skyrocketing. 
 
Another very effective technique is to overload several squadmates and set them to mining and hauling copper or iron, so if you have some crafting you want to level at the same time, this might be the better choice. 
 
 

Armor smith

 
Make bandanas 
 
Even better, get an Engineering Research and hammer out some armor plates until you hit level 40, then make Heart Protectors. 
 
Don’t put torches around the plate beating station and make sure you didn’t speed up crafting on game creation or this will take much more micromanaging. 
 
 

Weapon smith

 
Never cared about this because you can’t make Meitou weapons anyway. 
 
It’s pretty easy to level though, just pick something that uses the least resources and make lots of it. 
 
 

Other skills

 
At this point in the game, you have at least 2 squadmates that are very capable warriors. Also if you chose, you can make the best armor and the 2nd-best weapons in the game and can produce more goods than your town can afford on a daily basis, so money is no object. 
 
There’s really no point to grinding anything else, but I’ll try to touch base on the rest of them here just in case: 
 
For the rest of the skills, they are either very easy to rank up to useful levels or I’ve never experienced a compelling need to grind them up. 
 
I’ve never once cared about Dexterity/Perception/Turrets/Crossbows/Precision shooting in all my play-throughs, so I have no suggestions to make about them. If you love the ideas of crossbows, my hat’s off to you, it’s just not my cup of tea, so I don’t have any cheese to recommend here. 
 
Field medic level doesn’t make much of a difference. 
Engineer either 
Robotics either 
Science makes prospecting more accurate, but that’s not a big deal 
Crossbow smith probably the same as weapon smith 
Labouring never noticed a difference 
 
Farming level matters because it effects your success rate which can be critical in the early game, but there’s no shortcut to just grinding through it either. Hydroponics doesn’t seem to be effected by farming level but I could be wrong here. By the time I get hydroponics I just don’t care about farming level any more. 
 
Cooking level I haven’t noticed mattering, either. By the time I get cooking to any decent level I already have so many cats that I prefer to just buy food cubes instead of the hassle of making them. If I’m going to setup a complex chain of production I’m going to manufacture hash or skeleton repair kits. 
 
 

Summary

 
Using these techniques makes even the most difficult start to Kenshi easy. 
 
I recently did a playthrough where I started with the Torso squad mod and set a self-restriction that I wasn’t allowed to own any cats nor build anything. I through most of the torsos into slavery and even this was an easy playthrough. I’m ready for Kenshi 2 and hoping they make it much more difficult. Not more grindy, just more difficult, and add some real consequences to bad behavior, especially OP ones like thievery and assassination. 
 
The reason that Kenshi is so easy is that short of dying, every bad thing that happens to you gives you a benefit, too. Learn to harness this and you will find Kenshi (ch)easy, too. 
 

Written by royce3

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