Short disclaimer.
Some of the info contained will be on how to basically break the game, there are many, many ways that kenshi can be played, so really, how you actually play the game is up to you. Just be aware that if you like the struggle and doing the hard yards to get to the top, dont come crying to me if you make more money than you will ever need if you follow all of the power gaming tactics I lay out later in the guide.
Ill generally be assuming that people will be starting with a solo character and looking to build a squad rather than doing the solo god warrior playthrough thing, so be aware of that one as well.

This stuff will be fairly basic, skip on if you already know what you are doing to some extent.

Ok, so first point, Kenshi is one of those games where pretty much everything you do will give you xp for something. Every swing you take at an enemy will up your fighting skills, every step you take will up your running skill, every time you heal, carrying heavy weights, every time you sneak you get more stealthy and every time you get beat down, your toughness goes up.
So getting a beatdown is pretty much always a good thing as long as you survive, you will always come out stronger at the other side. My Kenshi philosophy is 'beat the cripple out of em' its rough, but it works. Losing fights is good in this game as long as you dont loose people. Embrace that idea and dont be afraid to pick fights you might lose. PS: You are going to loose a lot of fights.

The world of Kenshi can be both brutally unfair and surprisingly forgiving at the same time. Many enemies will happily continue on their merry way after beating your whole squad to the ground without even pausing to rob you. So if someone wakes up in time or you leave a squad member hiding over a nearby hill till the coast is clear, then you can just heal everyone up and drag them off to the nearest bar for rest and recuperation. The flipside of this is that other enemies are far less polite and in some areas laying on the ground is a sure fire way to end up being eaten alive, enslaved or dragged off and tied to a pole where you will be.. err.. eaten alive. The trick is to learn which areas contain which sorts of enemies and plan around that.
Another point on the forgiving side of things is the justice system in Kenshi. Being arrested is generally no big deal, the guards will come, beat your arse down and throw you in prison. They might steal some of your gear, but they will also give you enough food to keep you from starving and heal you up. Then you wake up, do your time and you are square with that faction again, no worries.

The economy of Kenshi at first glace is also very nasty, shopkeepers buy cheap and sell... really expensive. Dont be daunted, once you get a handle on things, there are multiple ways to make decent amounts of money with varying amounts of effort, Ill cover many of them in later sections.

Early game mobility is KING. If you take the basic start then you are level 1 in everything. At a minimum I think enemies are level 5 or so. And they come in packs of at best 5. If you arent sure you are in safe territory, you want nice healthy legs and light, unrestrictive armour so you can run away from those who would do you harm. There arent many enemies that can outrun an unencumbered character, so if in doubt, run like hell. PS: Expect to be running like hell often.

Picking up at least a second character should be pretty much priority number one early game. If a fight isnt going so great, then if you can get at least one character away, then its usually simple enough to either come back once the threat is gone and heal up your squadmates or incase of more nasty situations, run off and get some mercs from the nearest town and then save who you can. However you handle it, having at least 2 squad members ups your survivability exponentially.

Mercs.
Mercs. Mercs, Mercs, also, mecenaries.
For a very low price, you can get a crew of bodyguards who will get you through about 60% of the world with no problems. They also come respectably armed, so taking some out and running them into the dirt will get you some mid level gear very early.
Even if you just want to take them out killing, taking some mercs out will generally pay for itself quickly.

While there is no 'wrong' way to be playing Kenshi, ive noticed some people can do things the hard way the first few times without realizing it, so here is a very rough outline of a semi optimised way to play the game

1. Scrabble up enough money to get some basic food so you dont starve.

2. Run around a bit and try and make a little extra cash to get another squad member, or look for someone you can pick up for free.

3. Rinse and repeat while you explore the world, look to build up a squad of 6-10 as well as some sort of pack animal, Garrus are my personal choice. This will be your base combat/exploration squad. Join the shinobi thieves in the Hub (costs 10k).

4. Run around, explore, get into low level fights, generally train your squad and upgrade their weapons and armor as best you can, sell anything else you find to start to build up a bankroll. Collect any free research books you can get your hands on and put them in your pack animal.

5. Buy a house in a town you like, grab an extra character and have them build a research bench and start some research while your combat squad keeps up the exploration, training, money making and picking up extra research books.

6. Start looking for a decent base site (check the base building section of this guide for more info on what to look for) during your travels, continue the research, maybe pick up some more recruits as extra fighters. Make fat stacks of cash.

7. Once you have picked your location, go on a recriuting and building supply buying binge.
12 more characters to live in and run the base is far from silly, if you dont have a large stockpile of food, get as much of the noms as you can as well. Another pack animal for trading runs to and from the base can also be handy.

8. By now you should have a good combat squad, they will hang around while you get your base set up, get up some walls and get some basic production going. Your scientist can move into the base as well. You want to hang around for a bit so you can work out how nasty the threats in your home area are, do a little more fighting, clear out any nearby unwanted nests or camps, all the general housekeeping things.

9. So you have the basics of your base set up, some production going and what is becoming a semi decent wrecking crew, things are ticking along nicely. Time to make a bit of a jump and start sending your combat squad into some nastier areas. Go looking for more advanced research materials and start poking your nose into the previously mentioned nastier areas. See how you go against fogmen or cannibals, try and wipe out beakthing nests, etc.

10. Hunt those advanced tech materials and make top quality armor and weapons to finish kitting out your wrecking crew. Time to stop screwing around and gear them in all the best stuff so they can be the best face smashers they can be while you finish off the research tree.

11. Big game hunting. So you have your squad, they are all blinged out and getting pretty skilled, its time to find out how skilled. All of those really nasty enemies and locations that wiped you in your travels, its time to check them out again and see how you go. Kill some megabeasts and meet the bugmaster.

12. War. Pick people you dont like, wipe them out and loot all of their pants. Kidnap their leaders and generally let everyone know that your people are combat monsters by application of heavy objects to faces.

13. Profit?

Greenlanders
Pretty much your basic humans, flat 100hp on every body part, 20% buffs to xp on cooking, farming and science with no real debuffs. Humans in general are as accepted as a race can be in the world of Kenshi so they make a good starter characters. Easy to find and recruit in most cities, greenlanders are a good choice to have working in your base because of the buffs they have.

Scorchlander
A little more interesting, Scorchlanders get a 20% buff to stealth, dodging, weapon and armor smithing, athletics, a 10% buff to Dexterity, a 10% debuff to strength and a 20% debuff to labouring, farming and cooking.
Flat 100 hp across the board
Currently fairly rare to find as recruits, generally my pick for a starting character who will be trained up as an unarmed thief who will roll with my combat/exploration squad. The smithing bonus is interesting and if you have them to spare, scorchlanders are the people you want working your forges. Problem there is your smiths should be full time smiths once you start, it takes a long while to get them properly trained, so dont count on being able to have them as both explorers and smiths at the same time.

Shrek
20% buff to toughness and attack
10% strength
20% debuff to Dexterity, athletics, stealth, farming, thievery, robotics, science, labouring, dodging.
125 hp across the board
As you can probably see, the Shrek are pretty much your strong, tank class. Slower to hit due to the dexterity debuff, they are geared towards big weapons and big damage. Shrek eat a little more than the other races, but are well worth it. No combat squad is complete without a few shrek sporting fragment axes.
The holy nation who are the faction who dominate the centre of the map are semi hostile to shrek, meaning that if you walk towards their cities, they will be warned to leave before they get attacked and if you go near one of their patrols with shrek in your squad, they will only *probably* demand you hand them over before attacking.

Hivers
Argh. I love the hivers, they are probably my favorite race in kenshi. Their towns are great places to sell stolen loot, when you walk into their villages they will laugh at your floppy human feet, when you leave their shops, often the shopkeeper will chase you asking you to buy more stuff. The only people they are racist towards are hivers who are in your party and even then, they give you fair warning to leave. The only character I fell like I just have to recruit is a hiver named beep who is a dimwitted worker drone who just wants to become a great swordsman because he has realised that in the world of stab or be stabbed, its better to be the one doing the stabbing.
But. The hivers are pretty much the weakest combat race in Kenshi at time of writing. Really its the combination of low hp and lack of armor slots that does it, hivers just go down quicker and more often than anyone else. Hivers do get a combat speed bonus (1.2 to most other races 1 for workers and princes) and do eat about half as much as anyone else though, so there is that.
Edit: Disregard all of that, skeleton limbs change up the game in all sorts of ways. Hivers tend to loose limbs like its going out of fashion and robot limbs are basically just better than normal ones. Hivers are fine as fighters now.


Hive Prince
20% buff to Dexterity, athletics, stealth, thievery, first aid, science
20% debuff to labouring, strength
80 hp across the board
No shirt or shoe slots
So you look at these stats and think: Master thief in the making, right? Fast and light, all the right buffs...
The problem with that idea is twofold, 1: Your thief should probably be rolling with your combat squad so they can get to far off towns where there is the juiciest loot. And hivers are pretty much the lowest tier as fighters for the reasons mentioned above.
2: The Holy nation dominate the centre of the map and hivers will be attacked if they try and enter their cities, so there is a big chunk of the towns in the world you cant steal from.

Good as a researcher or possibly a medic who hangs back from combat though?
Silly past Jimbob, things have changed so much.

Hive Worker
20% buff to Dexterity, athletics, stealth, farming, thievery, labouring, turrets, engineering
20% debuff to cooking, science, strength
100 head hp, 75 other parts
No shirt or shoe slots
Sort of like the dumber version of the prince, they have the same issues as thieves or fighters really. A good pick as farmers, workers or to man turrets though.

Hive Soldier
20% buff to attack
20% debuff to farming, first aid, smithing, robotics, cooking, science, engineering.
200 head hp, 100 other parts
No shirt, helmet or shoe slots
The stats might not shout it when you look at them, but these guys are actually some of the worst fighters in the game long term. The lack of helmet is the killer here. Ohhhh, but they have 200hp you say? Late game you will meet things that can smash down 200hp in a hit or 2 if there isnt serious armor protecting it, so yeah... scrub tier.
For all that, I often use them as base defenders, most of the soldiers ive been able to recruit have respectable starting combat stats so you can have them hang out near the gate and beat down whatever small threats come your way with plenty of time to heal their injured braincases in between fights.

Skeleton
20% buff to robotics, science, turrets
20% debuff to stealth, thievery and dodging
200 hp across the board
No shirt, helmet or shoe slots
Most other races have a healing rate of 1, (shek have 0.9), skeletons have a rate of 3. Once you get them rolling skeletons can self heal at an amazing rate.
Another interesting one, skeletons have something to offer for noobs and veterans alike.
They dont eat, they dont bleed, so they are very difficult to actually kill. They take tiny amounts of damage every so often if they are outside that can only be healed with a special skeleton bed (which arent all that common at time of writing) that must be powered. They cant wear much armor, but with 200 across the board and some skills, they can be a little bit tanky. While other non humans are disliked by the holy nation, skeletons are kill on sight.
So what do we have here and how can we use it? Well, remember when I said earlier that step 5 on the road to kenshi domination was to buy a house in a town and set your researcher up in it?
A skeleton is perfect for the job, you can leave them there with a big pile of research and forget them without having to worry about them starving to death or eathing 1000s of cats worth of food.
Being made of metal, skeletons are not on the menu for anything that would eat your other characters alive so they are good to leave to fight said things that will eat you while your more tasty characters leg it and come back and pick up their robot buddy later.
They are great round the base, can be left on turret duty pretty much forever, can be trusted to stand and work whatever machine you put them on without a break day in and day out. All good stuff.

The real drawback of the skeletons in my eyes and what makes them a very bad choice as fighters for new players is the fact that they can only be fixed with skeleton repair kits, which are realllllllly expensive (average price is about 4k for one). If you know what you are doing, then skeletons can be really useful to have in a combat squad, but it is not a cheap option and probably not the best choice for new players.

Update:
The introduction of skeleton limbs changed things up a fair bit, everyone can now get some pretty serious upgrades to the amount of hp their limbs have as well as most of their stats. Shrek probably still have the edge as fighters, hive princes with scout legs are insanely fast and even beep can start to look pretty tanky with 200hp legs.

Domesticated

Its worth mentioning that any animal you buy will have its stats and health slowly raise as it 'ages'
So up to a point, the longer you have them, the stronger they get.

Goats
Can be found running wild, following nomads or brought to join your squad, goats can be surprisingly tough little suckers early game and many a wanderer in the world of kenshi will have their butts saved by a bunch of kamakazi goats charging out of nowhere at those who would do them harm. They drop a fair amount of meat and can be a good early game source of food.
I wouldnt reccomend them as additions to your squad though, apart from for funzies.

Bone Dogs
Age up to respectable lower mid tier fighters, the dog that starts with you on the man and his dog start can age up one stage further than any other dog in the game, probably putting it into upper mid tier as a fighter.
Wild dog nests are reasonably dangerous early game but they will be scattered with loot, including at times blue tier weapons, as long as you are unencumbered and quick you can often get your first decent weapons from dog nests.

Bulls
The ones you can buy probably end up being somewhere a little lower than bone dogs on the fighting scale, but they do have a nice big backpack so they make decent pack animals.
The wild ones are passive, but with decent stats, so they make for great combat training partners.
If you win, then they have a decent amount of meat, leather and some horns that are worth selling, if you lose, they just leave you on the ground and walk off. They have a charge attack that does a decent amount of damage and knocks people back, so they can be an amusing addition to a combat squad.

Garrus
Generally my choice for a pack animal for my combat squad, Garrus seem to have something of an AOE attack when they charge, often roaring into melee and hitting 4 or 5 enemies at a time for ok damage. Better fighters than bulls when fully aged up in my opinion, decent backpack and a lantern on a stick on their backs, Garrus are pretty useful to have around all in all.
Like goats, wild Garrus have an interesting habit of charging out of nowhere and saving your squad from having their faces smashed in by dust bandits early game. One of the few denizens of Kenshi I count as being acutally friendly, so I dont bother wild Garrus.

Wild but not hostile..ish

Swamp Turtles
They are huge but... possibly bugged at time of writing. It seems very difficult for them to get off their attack animations and when they do, it doesnt do much damage. They also drop a large amount of meat when attacked.
This combination makes them pretty much free food and weapon skills at the moment.

Raptors
They move in large groups, I cant remember ever being attacked by raptors, though some will try and eat people who are KO'd. River raptors are encountered usually around the holy nation, they have low stats and are good early game targets, each one carries a hide that sells for 400ish.
River raptors are much more nasty, they have decent stats, damage and a respectable amount of health. Best not to mess with them till you are ready.
Raptors main trick is they are attracted to ripe crops and will knock down your gates to get to them.
So in general... Dont set up a base with farming anywhere they spawn unless you want to be hacking piles of the damn things down on a regular basis.

Hostile and openly murderous

Skin Spiders
Lowish hp, ok stats and fairly hard hitting, luckily they generally seem to spawn in fairly small groups, I generally dont find skin spiders to be a big threat even early game as long as you dont have a few groups turn up one after the other.

Blood spiders
Pretty much the entire reason I avoid the swamps till I have a bit of a squad going. Blood spiders are fast moving, come in reasonable sized groups, attack fast and hit like trucks (~75 damage a hit by memory). Also, they eat people. The main saving grace with blood spiders is they have very low hp, so a character with okish combat stats can take multiple blood spiders out with a single hit with a decent 2 handed weapon.

Beak things
High on the list of things that will wipe out a squad and then eat them all. Beak things have high hp, good stats, hit hard and will pretty much always outrun anything on 2 legs. Not to be underestimated even if you manage to get one on its own, to be feared if you come across a mob of them walking around and you really want to be sure of what you are doing before you go poking at a Beak Thing nest, even if they do generally have 10k+ worth of loot in them between eggs and weapons.

Gorillos
Tough and good fighters, but solitary, im generally not unhappy to see gorillos round. You can outrun them with a bit of work or swarm them with a larger squad. Gorillos are always hostile to the Beak things that they live in the same areas as. This has been my saving grace more than a few times when Beak things have been chewing my face off and a Gorillo wanders into range and distracts them away from me.

Security Spiders
The ones that you will find in shops are not to be messed with lightly, in the wild you will find them in 2 flavours: One with stats of about 30 or so that will be a tough fight for an early squad, probably your first real introduction to the idea that some of your weapons like katanas arent as great as you thought they where. In some of the more hostile areas, you will see swarms of these things running about, so you have that to look forward to.
The other one really falls into the 'GARRRRGHGHGHGHGHGGHGHGHGHGHGHGGHHGH RUN' catagory. Their stats sit at about 100, they do about 100 damage per hit and are tough as nails. These horrors are probably the second most common reason for me to hit load game behind beak things.
They arent super fast though, so as long as your legs are in ok shape running should work.

Righto, so your combat squad is your meat and potatoes in kenshi, they will be the ones doing all of the exploring, they will probably be doing most of your trading and obviously the ones you will send out when you will have fighting to do. There is not much point in having a mega base and unlimited money if you dont have the fighting strength to do anything with it all. Im not going to go over solo play or even small squads, but most of the training tips here should work as well for one person as they will for 10.
Note: You can play kenshi any way you want, but this section of the guide will be for how to build a fairly well optimized combat squad with the fewest things you will have to work around.

Ill be going over notable recruits in another section, so for now ill mostly be speaking more generically about the people you will pick up.

Numbers
The first important question when you are building your squad is how many people you are going to want it to be when you are done. More people will probably lead to slightly slower leveling and they will eat more, but they can carry more and obviously in a fight, the more the merrier.
If you are starting out, id say the bigger the better, unmodded max squad size is 12, so lets say go for 10 with two extra slots for amazing recruits you might bump into later game that are just too good to pass up.
Ok, so we have our number, time to move on? Whoa, hold up, lets be smart about this.
I generally try and recruit fighters in spurts, that way the new guys will have more seasoned fighters to carry them through, just rolling out with 10 scrubs is probably a good way to loose a few.
So I start trying for about 5 or 6 at first. If you are new to the game id advise going with all humans, they will be fine as fighters and the holy nation wont bother you if you go through their territory. Its far from essential, its just that the holy nation controls a large amount of territory and most of it is about as low level player friendly as kenshi gets, so its the smart play.
So I take those guys, run around for a bit to get some skills, then once they are a bit trained up, ill go looking for some shrek, take my numbers up to around 8. Run about with them, get the new guys a bit of experience, then pick up the last few people in my travels to round the squad out.


Composition: Races and Roles
For all I say here, any race with enough training can fufill any role, so dont think that this is some sort of list of hard rules.


First up, you want a thief. Your fighters will be running all over the map and they will be the ones who will need the stolen gear right away, so the thief might as well run with them. I usually run my thief unarmed, partially for fun, but also because if you get caught the guards will take your weapon and it can be more than a little crippling to loose your 100k katana to the popo. Might as well be a scorchlander so you can get the bonus to dodge and s/he might as well be your starting character as scorchlanders arent easy to find.

Humans shouldnt be too hard to find anywhere, so you will probably grab greenlanders to take up the next 4-5 slots. No grief from the holy nation and warm bodies to fill the ranks. Grab recruits with higher stats if you can, but anyone will do if you put the time into training them. Any weapons will do, but katanas are common, pretty decent all round and will give you a good boost to dexterity training. These guys will pretty much end up being your rank and file fighters.

So you have your core built up and a bit skilled, move on to shrek territory and lets pick up some big hitters. 3 or 4 shrek later and your squad is starting to look like something. I go 2 with fragment axes for that big damage and the other 1 or 2 with hackers for variety. Ill often set up any shrek with a hacker as designated high strength people, they can carry any heavy loot or downed/slow/crippled companions who slow up the party if its time to run away.

So we roll around a bit more, people gain skills, its time to pick up the final few and round out the squad. More humans/shrek are fine, there are a few special recruits that it is well worth leaving a spot open for them to fill as well, up to you really. If you want a hiver, id go with a prince, they will end up being the best fighters and will do quite well with katanas. The big question is though, to skeleton or not to skeleton? By this stage you should have the money to be able to afford the repair kits, but they are still a fair money sink with the main real upshot of having a skeleton or 2 in the squad being that they can be used to pull a little BS on things like fogmen and cannibals because they arent edible, so these enemies will leave them alone when they are down.
The choice is really up to you.
Picking up a medic isnt a bad idea, mostly for splinting, I have everyone set to medic duties and stocked with medkits, you can never tell who is going to be the last one standing after a big fight, so everyone may as well know what they are doing.

Animals
You may have noted that the squad doesnt include any animals. Well, im going for fairly optimal here and animals have some issues in that sense.
For a start, by end game humanoids will just end up being better fighters. Dogs are pretty respectable for most of the time, but they will just get outclassed by the time everyone is running top tier gear and high skills. Armored weaponmaster>Elder Bonedog>Adult Garru in terms of fighting prowess.

Then you have pack animals, that huge storage space is really handy and they can fight well enough to get through the early and mid game, but they have a rather glaring issue.
If a human gets both of their legs broken, anyone can pick them up and just carry them if you need to move faster, animals however can only be picked up if they get KO'd so if your pack bull gets one of thier legs knocked down to -200 then you can either keep your whole squad with them and just walk realllllllllly slowly to your destination, or you can leave them behind to hopefully catch up and hopefully not get murdered while carrying all of your loot when they are halfway across the map.

I still generally run a pack Garru up until the base gets done, then it becomes my trade animal. But yeah, if you are going for optimal then you probably dont need it.

Gear
Ill go over weapons and armor each in their own sections, but for now here are some basics:
Weapons: The best you can get and a good mix. You want each character to specialize in a weapon to get the maximum levels for that type and you dont want to find a god tier sabre but have nobody who is using sabres.
Armor: Best you can find with the lowest debuffs. Some of the armor debuffs are pretty crippling early game, so many types are better off just not used till you are ready. Again, more info in the armor section.

In a perfect world id like everyone to have at least 4 basic medkits till they have the skill to use better ones, then 2-3 standard medkits after that.
Maybe half of them should have a splint kit, just one for the squad is really fine, you dont burn through them fast, its mostly to prevent having to do micro.
One person will be running a thieves backpack that is stuffed with food. I leave it on them so everyone can eat whenever they want, the -2 debuff isnt a real headache and again, it cuts out on micro.
Someone else carries my 'supply' backpack containing a couple of bedrolls and a large supply of spare medkits of various kinds, maybe a few splint kits.
Two people with backpacks that can stack items (the green ones) for trading/stackable loot/books/whatevs. Keep the backpacks in the characters inventory rather than on their backs to avoid the more nasty -5 debuff from wearing it.
A few more large backpacks/thieves backpacks for looted weapons/gear. This stuff doesnt stack, so the more space the better. Again, not worn on the back when its not needed.

The Basics

So, the very basics of how skills work: Pretty much everything that you do using a skill will make it go up at least a little. At higher levels, skill gain will slow down. So the first beatdown you get might put you from 1 toughness to 10 toughness, but getting from 50 to 60 might take many, many beatings to get though. All pretty basic things if you have played any RPG really.

Toughness

Pretty much converts directly to Hp, higher toughness means a lower knockout point and higher damage resistence. Training is about as simple as it can be, just get hit. The quickest simple way to train toughness is to send your squad out one at a time to fight groups, save however many people you need to kill all the enemies in a final wave once you have sent out all of the others to have their heads beaten in. Then everyone gets healed up and dragged back to nearby beds or a bar for full healing, then send them out to do it again.
Say it with me kids: Beat the cripple out of them.

Strength

All around a very useful skill, strength will up your damage with heavy weapons and martial arts and your carry weight.
Luckily its also one of the easiest skills to train.
First option is to just overload your characters and have them walk around, early game once I have 5 or 6 characters, I will find 2 iron nodes close together and load everyone up to 75-80% encumberence then just have them walk between towns. Once they start to build up a little, buy some stacking backpacks and fill them with ores, then take them off the backpack slot and put them in the inventory. Setting someone up massively overloaded and following one of your workers who runs all over your town (farmers can be good for this) is a good zero micro way to train strength.
Option 2 is to just have everyone grab a body after you take out some enemies (strengly xp is doubled while carrying a body) and just carry them around, its easy to dump the bodies if you need to fight/run away.
Option 3 is the real power leveling option. If overloaded, strength will go up by large amounts (often 1 point per hit) with every punch landed using martial arts. So you just take your backpack full of ore, give it to someone then take away their weapons and have them fight unarmed. With enough weight, getting to 70 strength doesnt take a massive amount of grinding.
Option 4 is to constantly keep everyone at at least a low level of encumberance so you have a constant low level of stength gain all the time. Heavier armour, heavy backup weapons (higher tier clubs are good for this), random crud, whatever you want to pile on people to keep that xp gain constantly ticking over.
Option 5 is to hand out the classiest frag axes you can find to your students, they are stupid heavy and provide a decent xp gain as you fight, not the quickest option, but very simple.

Strength is one of the only skills that I can think of that wont really go up without you playing with inventories once you get it fairly high, so as a rough guide, I try for about 40 strength as a base on my mid/late game squad, 70 on anyone with martial arts or heavy weapons.

Dexterity

One of those skills that will pretty much just slowly tick up as you play and get into fights, ill just give an outline of my (admittedly very basic) understanding of how the mechanics of raising it work.
Every hit with a weapon that does cutting damage (or with martial arts) raises strength a bit. The higher the percentage of the damage done by the weapon is cutting damage, the more dex you get from it. So a weapon with .40 cutting and .60 blunt will give less dex xp than one with .60 cutting and .40 blunt. Martial arts does its own thing in this regard, it always does blunt damage but every hit still makes dex go up.

You may have noted I said every hit makes dex go up, so by my (again, imperfect and happy to be corrected) understanding of the thing, the best weapon to raise dex is a 2 handed katana.

Little stuff worth having

Personally I have everyone in my combat squad have medic down as a job all the time (shift click the button that says 'medic' with your whole squad selected). You are never sure who might be standing and who might not be at the end of a fight, so everyone might as well be as good at patching wounds as they can be.
If for some reason (say to have a top level medic to splint people) you want to power level first aid, then just heal every hurt thing you come across.

Dodge. Part of me rebels against this for some reason, but having some dodge skill on everyone is optimal, so for a perfect combat squad, you should probably rotate out one or two people to run unarmed at any time to up the dodge skill. Issue is that it doesnt go up all that fast, still, if you want optimal and are willing to grind a little, then you should. Thinking about it, taking weapons off everyone and throwing them all against a large swarm of low damage enemies (hungry bandits seem perfect) is probably a good way to go about it, maybe pile some weight on everyone to get a decent strength bonus as well.

Sneak. Everyone might as well have at least some sneak skill. If im healing my party at a bar in town, then as people get to near full health I have them just try and sneak around the town while we are waiting for the rest of the crew to get up to full strength.

Athletics will go up fairly fast from just running from place to place, one of the things that kensh has in spades is distance. As a rough rule of thumb, 40 is about where I am comfortable in being able to run away from most human enemies.

Swimming is reaaaaaaallly slow at first, but levels quickly, so if you come across a decent sized area of safe water, then its not a bad idea to speed the game up and send everyone in to do some laps. Most enemies seem to have really low level swimming and there are a few places that will require you crossing a long stretch of water to get to, so you might as well not suck at it.

Robotics will be handy later game when people start going all deus ex, but its worth only handing out the skelly kits to a few people, it takes about 12k worth of kits to get someone to a semi respectable level, so if your combat squad is 12, then it can get expensive to train them all up.

There are a couple of people that you can recruit who are worth noting, they dont always spawn in the same location, but if you are powergaming a squad, they are worth looking for.

Hobbs.
Many starts will spawn you in at the Hub. Hobbs is a greenlander with trash stats and gear, but if you have just spawned in, the cost of free makes him a game changer.

Ruka.
Well, if you where in the Hub and you liked Hobbs, you might as well swing by Squin and look for Ruka in the bars, that seems her most common haunt.
Again, free.

Kang.
Kang is another shrek that hangs around Squin, he will cost you 6k, but he starts out nicely statted and ready to fill the 'guy who crushes face with big heavy stuff' hole in your squad.

Rane the Giant.
Another big shrek with nice stats, found in squin or admag, she will cost you 7500 and can hold her own in a fight from day one.

Griffin.
Pretty much the male, greenlander version of Rane, Griffin can be found in any holy nation town, so he isnt always easy to find, he costs 10k and will spout some stuff about you being the chosen one when he meets you, but he keeps quiet after that.

Green.
Green is an interesting one. You will find him in one of the bars in Shark usually, he costs 2300 cats and is a hive worker drone. All of his stats are 1 except for a little bit of athletics but he does have about 70 crossbows and turrets. (No precision shooting at time of writing though, so he will shoot wildly into combat and hit your own guys for a while).

Halmut.
Halmut is also usually found in shark, his stats vary between about 7 and 20, apparently at random. Free though.

Silvershade.
Another one found in shark, Silvershade is a hiver prince who costs 3k and starts out with 10 in almost all his stats including lockpicking and theivery. If you have plans to turn a hive prince into a thief or swordmaster, Silvershade is probably your best pick.

Doctor Chung.
Greenlander found in the swamps for 3500, pretty rubbish stats (I think he has 5 in hackers, that is about it?) apart from his first aid, which is 40. Really handy to have early on to put splints on people, though you have to get through the swamp full of things that eat legs to get to him, so there is that.

Crumblejon/Stubs Momuso/Infinite Wingwang.
All have been in the game for a long time and can be found in mongrel, these 3 lads deserve a mention. Crumblejon is possibly the only character that has sort of freakish proportions, so he will fit in ok with whatever freaks you made with the character creator. His stats are ok though he used to start with 60 strength, its down to 20 now. He is free if you can get to mongrel.
Stubs is a scorchlander and wang is a greenlander, they both come out of the box with stats at about 15-20 and cost 5k a pop.
All 3 also have a decent selection of travel barks from what I can tell.

Bard.
Bard is... trash. He comes with 1 in every stat, can be found all over the map so hunting him down isnt easy. He is a generic greenlander who costs the generic 3k.
His travel barks make him my second favorite character to recruit though. He sings, he tells jokes, people throw rocks at him, its all fun. Unless you are doing some sort of challenge run, id say always pick up bard.

Beep.
Beep is like Bard 2.0. Hive worker you find in mongrel just wandering the streets. He is free, has 1 in every stat. If you bring beep with you and manage to actually get his fragile ass through the fog, you can watch the transformation of beep into a cyborg god of war. (Seriously, ive never seen the guy keep both his legs for more than an hour ingame).

Cornelius.
[THIS SPACE LEFT INTENTIONALLY BLANK]

Ok, so there are two real ways to play kenshi in terms of economics, thievery and everything else.
If you want to power game (or even just not gimp yourself) stealing stuff is the only way to go.
So the hows, whys, wheres and whens of stealing will be covered in the next section, this will be the everything else section.

Day 1
So we might as well start at the very basics, so ill take the rock bottom start as my beginning.
Naked, broke, lonely, injured and starving. This is the way to start a game of kenshi.

So how do we get a few cats to get some of the basics going day 1?
3 (well, 4, but one is a little more random) basic options really:
1. Mine up some ores and sell them.
Safe and simple, find an ore node (copper is worth more, but iron is often faster to mine, it will depend on your area) near the town you start at, the closer the better. Mine it and sell it. This is a good option for beginners, because its pretty much zero risk, you will be able to slowly build up some basic stuff like food, a few medkits and maybe a backpack and shoes quickly enough. If anything runs up and tries to attack you, you run to the gate guards and they will take care of it, which brings us to option 2......

2. Kite enemies into the gate guards and steal their stuff.
You can also do this passively while mining, often wandering spawns will find their way to towns where they get killed by guards, just keep an eye out for damage numbers popping up, they are the easiest way to spot combat.
But again, basic idea is simple, find a group that will be hostile/not friendly to the gate guards, get them to chase you, lead them to their deaths then steal their stuff. Bonedogs are a person favorite for me to do this with on day one, they have plenty of meat on them as well as teeth and leather to sell. Food can be very expensive in kenshi, so not buying it is good and having enough you can sell it is even better.

A combination of these first two tactics is how I would reccommend people new to kenshi go.
Mine till you see someone worth kiting to the guards, if you get your legs injured, then mine till you are healthy before trying to repeat the process, and over and over till you are ready to move on.

3. This is the more risky one generally, but in plenty of places in kenshi there will be loot of varying quality just laying on the ground for the taking. Bonedog nest are the first place to check, if you are quick and a little lucky you can run in, grab a weapon laying on the ground then run off before you get mauled. You can try this with beakthings though it is a high risk/reward play.
The real powergaming way to do things though is to look where you are then just head directly towards the nearest place that will have great loot. Libraries, good ruins, labs, whatever is nearest just to get a decent amount of starter money/gear. Depending on where you choose to go, many of these places wont have anything actually living there, the risk is in the trip to and from where you want to go. Obviously though, you need to know where these places are, but if you are powergaming, you probably have the wiki open anyway.

4 is... a bit more luck based, just run around looking for people fighting in the world, then either wait for the fight to end or just run in and grab what you can, then run like hell. Maybe you get lucky, maybe you murdered.

But yeah, early game id advise you do all these things, pick up anything you can sell or use, its all money.

Early game
Ok, so you have a little cash and a few people, now you have a few more options. All the ideas from above will still work, but maybe you can also win a few fights as well.

1. Just kill people and take their stuff. Its the old RPG classic, murder anyone you can get away with murdering then steal their pants and sell them for cash. The average dust bandit has about 1300 cats worth of gear, a beserker frag axe goes for about 1200. The odd bandit will also have an ok bounty, but taking the guy out then carrying him all the way to a police station can be a bit more than its worth.
Its worth nothing that starting as a human then killing river raptors for hides (400 a pop, easy money) in the river flats in the holy nation territory is probably the easiest start to train skills/get money.

2. Animal hides. (Also to a lesser extent meat, horns and teeth)
Animal hides are worth mentioning, they stack if you have the right pack and it can be very easy to scavenge up a good collection just wandering round and picking up after fights. At time of writing they are about 250 cats a pop, downed animals are a great source of early game food and cats. They will also die the instant you take anyting out of thier inventory so its fairly low risk.

2. Trading/drug running. Ive never gone heavily into trading in any of my games, but the basics are this:
Many items in kenshi have the same buy and sell value, like say, ores (weapons or armour are things that dont). When you go into a trader in town, there will be a percentage number next to the value of the item. Green and <100 means cheaper than the base cost, red and 100+ means it is more expensive. These values are constant for that town and semi randomized each time you start a new game/import. So you go from town to town, buying cheap and selling where things are more expensive. Backpacks that can stack items are a must, probably a few pack animals as well. While the values are generally randomized, different factions automatically give extra weight to certain values. As an example, hemp is always cheaper in the swamps, meatwraps are always more expensive. Selling hashish is an extention on trading, the basics of drug running is that hash will generally be at least twice (sometimes up to 4x) the cost outside the swamps as it is inside them. Hash is illegal in most towns, so none of the normal traders will buy it from you. You need to find the thief in the bar to unload your drugs for a big markup.

3. Crafting. It is entirely possible to set up a crafting station in a town fairly early on (once you have the tech for it) then start buying base goods and selling finished products at a profit.
Probably the simplest way to go about this is to tech up to the point where you can make a clothing crafting bench then set up a skeleton in a town where you can buy a decent amount of cloth.
If you can get a leather tanning bench, then set that up as well.
Send you war squad out to fight animals and collect leather, bring them back and have you skeleton start off on tanning, it ups armor crafting skill and you can use the leather for more crafting later.
Then move the skeleton to the clothing bench and have them start churning out something that can be produced for a very minimal amount of materials, bandanas are a favorite for me at 0.4 fabric per unit.
Leave the skeleton to work with a big pile of fabric and an armor storage for him to dump things in and just leave them too it. Maybe pick him up a pack animal to speed up selling.
Every so often come back and check on things, send the skeleton out in town to sell all of his hats and buy more cloth, all in all its a way to make some pretty good money. A pack animal full of high/specialist grade bandanas can net you 15k cats without many problems.

Mid/late game is mostly about looting more dangerous places or base building which is pretty much just an extention of the crafting as mentioned above with access to unlimited basic materials. The real money is in weapons, even higher tier Wakizashis will sell for 5k and the materials to make them will basically cost you nothing, so its profit all the way. Alcohol and food are also options, but I find that generally by the time I have a decent production line set up for them money isnt a real issue for me. Ill be covering base building properly in another section, so head there for more details.

Ok, so things have changed since I started writing this guide, away from stealing pretty much just being free money early game.
However, theft can still fund your adventures, you just want to be a little more careful.

So first, we want to pick our thief.
I go for a male scorchlander, they are about as close to universally accepted as you can get in kenshi and have pretty good statbuffs. Hive prince has better, but you cant rob the holy nation throne room if every guard in the place is chasing you.

As ive stated earlier, if you want to be smart about it, he might as well be unarmed so you dont accidently get his 100k katana taken away by the cops.

For loadout there are many good options for stealth outfits, best you can find (just check the bonuses, its not hard to get to +50% stealth) with a thieves backpack.

Now your backup team, you are going to want a hauler who can do distraction and a garru for more storage space. The hauler should be as strong as possible and have the biggest backpack you can get, for carrying weapons, armor, stuff that wont stack.

Whenever you go stealing, you want everyone in the town set to passive and block, preferrably just dont have anyone in town who doesnt need to be. If you forget this, then if your thief gets caught, suddenly the rest of your squad will leap to his defese and all end up in jail for attacking the guards.

Ok, so first run your thief around in stealth, train him up a bit and scout the town for what you want to steal, everything you can buy from a merchant you can steal out of the chests in their store, so window shopping is easy. To start off with you want to sneak around to places where nobody can see you then just steal anything you can that is laying around, value doesnt matter, its just the stealing xp you want for now.
Pick any locks you can find where you cant be seen as well, this will also come in handy when you suddenly realise you need a safecracker to get the good loot at some locations in the wasteland.

Doing this seems to be able to get you up to about 20ish stealing, you want about 35 or so to be able to steal from chests reliably, there are a couple of ways to make the jump.
1. You can just steal stuff till you get caught, then do your time when the guards beat you down.
Its slow, but you cant fail and will build toughness as well.
2. Quicksaves, nuff said.
3. Hard to set up, but ive been able to power level stealing a few times in places like cannibal towns. Last few cannibals had no legs, so I could pass things back and forth from their chests, it counted as stealing still and I got the xp, but the only ones who cared where quickly bleeding to death on the ground.
4. Head out to the holy nation farms, you can often steal from their chests, get caught, then run off into the wilds and loose the farmers without getting a bounty, and even if you do get a bounty, you can just avoid the holy towns for a few days and be fine.
5. Its easier to steal when you are further away from the owner, there are a few shops where you can stretch this out a bit further than normal to get higher percentages.

Right, so now you should have plenty of stealth skill from all the sneaking around and enough lockpicking and stealing to be able to get into chests and feel safe pinching stuff. Lets really rob some stores.
Option 1 is go in during the day and wedge yourself in a little corner somewhere that people cant see you then lockpick and loot during the middle of the day. This is a really easy way to pick up large amounts of midtier gear for spare cash later in the game, but isnt a great idea till you have the skills to back it up. Its worth mentioning that robbing military barracks during the day is often the easier option.

Option 2 is the traditional 'break in during the middle of the night and crack the safe' option.
Take your distraction hauler and your thief, wait till midnight (most shopkeepers will sleep midnight till about 5-6am). If there is a guard on the door, then distraction man can stealth off and on infront of him till he has the guards attention, then have him looking away while the thief breaks in and closes the door behind him. Make sure there is nobody still awake from the edge of the door, then head off and loot the best locked container, its usually the safe. Pass your loot onto your Garru through a wall if you need to till you have all you want, rinse and repeat.

Good things to steal for money are top quality weapons, leather shirts/vests/turtlenecks have great cost/space ratio. For stackables food is a good option, if you can find the right spots, you can steal most of the food from many bars. Skeleton repair kits are probably the best thing you can be stealing, they stack nicely and are worth big fat amounts. Higher tier medical items in general are worth picking up. Booze is good early, but it can be hard to find actual stacks of the stuff. Steel is ok, armor plates are a bit better and chainmail sheets are gold at 2k a pop.
Which brings us to the next point, selling the stuff. Its important to be aware of how much cash the places you can sell have, Squin has about 70k it can spend on other peoples goods, the waystation near it has about 30k, average hive village is about 30k by memory. Most holy nation towns have about 50k in total, their shops seem to just have less money. Mongrel is fat with about 150k on a good day, worlds end and black desert are really high as well.
My point is, dont go stealing 200k worth of stuff in Squin unless you are willing to do enough trekking to sell 200k worth of stuff or you will end up with an inventory full of really expesive but functionally worthless heavy stuff.
Later game I usually only try and carry as much loot for selling as I can get rid of in the next town or 2, then as many skeleton repair kits as I can steal as a sort of bank.

Hivers
As ive stated in other places, the hivers are probably the least hostile faction in the world of Kenshi. The only people they are really hostile to are other hivers and they will give fair warning before they swarm you. They live in houses that look like, well... piles of poo. Their settlements are dotted across the map and each one will generally have 2 shops, one that sells general goods and one that sells B grade hiver cyborg parts. Both will buy stolen goods from anywhere else and have a good amount of cash on hand.
The only real downsides of the hive settlements is they have no beds to rest in or places you can find recruits.
Well, that and the fact that their settlements are generally in the middle of beak thing territory.

The Shrek
Noble, honorbound warriors who act pretty much like you would expect, every shrek running about the place carries a massive two handed face smasher and decent stats. Outside of their towns they come in four main flavours:
Solo warriors who will attack your squad to show how badass they are.
Beserkers who roll in small groups who will attack anything on sight.
Kral's chosen, who will often attack you for fun.
And Shrek patrols, which might attack you for fun.

The main saving grace of the shrek is that once you are down, they will leave you alone, so their territory while often rough is generally not overly deadly (by kenshi standards).

The Holy Nation
Racist, sexist and xenophobic the Holy nation actually make for great friends early game. As long as you are human they will leave you alone, their territory is heavily patrolled and well dotted with outposts. Generally you will find bonedogs, dust bandits, wild bulls and hungry bandits wandering their lands, all fairly good enemies to start off fighting against. The main real danger in the holy nation are the infrequent bands of slavers who will wander though.

United cities
The United cities are the greedy bastards of Kenshi, they are big on money, slavery and money.
While they are accepting of all races, the lands of the UC are heavily patrolled by slavers, their patrols will sometimes extort cash from you for just standing near them and the gate guards have been known to slip hashish into your pack then demand a bribe for looking the other way. (Hash is worth big bucks if you can get some of your own into their town though).
I find most of the United towns to be nice places to visit and rob, most will have a noble's house that can have all sorts of nice goodies, slave markets which can have some ok cash and all of the other usual shops you can rip off. Nice places to visit.. But not a good place to hang around. Every time someone goes down in United cities territory it seems the slavers suddenly come crawling out of the woodwork to snatch them up and carry them off. Blargh.

Swampers
Ok, so technically these guys are the least hostile of all of the major factions. You can walk into any town with no stress at all from the locals, people sell fish and drugs from their front porches and the main town, Shark is somewhere you can find recruits of any race. My main problem with the swamps is that it often feels like just about any nutter can and will charge into their towns and start trying to murder your squad or whoever else happens to be around.
If its not Red sabres, its swamp ninjas, if its not swamp ninjas, its blood spiders.
Until your squad gets fairly competent, expect to be attacked on your way into, out of and possibly inside of any swamper town. They also have plenty of manned turrets scattered about their settlements, this sounds good till you realise they will happily shoot into melee and they arent great shots.
Mid to late game the swamps are no real trouble, its more early game where the swamps can be a death by 1000 cuts deal as your party slowly has its legs chewed off by random blood spiders before the band of bones turn up to finish the job when you are stuck in the middle of nowhere.

The Shinobi Thieves
Probably the most important minor faction in kenshi for the average playthrough, ill cover them in more detail elsewhere, but here is the short version:
You can ally the Shinobi by going to their base in the Hub and paying them 10k. This will make their whole faction your allies, so they will attack any enemies that attack you. Mostly this only matters in town, however there are wandering assassins that are very good fighters that you will run into throughout the world who are part of the Shinobi thieves, so occassionally one of them will turn up and back you if you get into a fight. Not a huge perk, but nice enough.
The main benefit of joining the thieves is that pretty much every major town has one of their towers within its walls, joining will give you free access to their beds, training equiptment (low level combat dummies, better thieving training stations and assassination dummies) and their merchants who sell stealth armor, katanas and backpacks mostly at a 50% discount. They will also buy just about anything at a 50% discount, so that isnt bad either.

Slavers
One of the most widespread factions, you can bump into slavers of various stripes just about anywhere in the world of Kenshi. Generally Id rate them as being at the top of bottom tier fighters, they have okish stats, bad weapons and pretty decent armor for what they are. While not a real threat per se, they pretty much never kill anyone, its slaves they are after, it is thier taking of slaves that makes them annoying. They view pretty much anyone who is laying on the ground as free game for enslaving. Again, ill go over slavery more in depth somewhere else but the short version is if you go down and slavers are nearby, they will happily grab your character and try and run off with them.
They also have a couple of outposts that you can check out, they will buy slaves from you and they also make for a good faction to go to war with and raid once you have an ok combat squad going.

Bandits of various stripes
This sort of covers most of the wandering humaniods who are generally hostile to you. From the bottom tier hungry bandits, up through dust bandits, red sabres, swamp ninjas, band of bones, etc.
Pretty much every area will have one or two different types of bandits running around, their threat levels vary, but they are generally on the lower end of the scale. They will generally attack on sight and are a good source of starter gear to use or sell, either from fighting them directly for it or by looting them after they get put down by somebody else.

Bandits are the people you are looking to pick fights with earlier on so you dont annoy any of the major factions as you pick up skills, gear and money.

Nomads and wandering Traders
While they are seperate factions, ive lumped the two in together because they are both openly non hostile to the player and both deserve a little mention.
Nomads will wander the world with their animals, mostly goats, just... Nomading it up really. They wont bother you if you dont bother them and they will happily lead their goats in glorious charges to save your dudes from bandits, cannibals or whoever and kick a surprising amount of ass while doing so. Apart from meat from their goats, Nomads dont have much of anything worth looting (maybe the single medkit that each has?). So generally I leave them be and heal them if I find one laying on the ground.

Wandering traders can be damned useful and are not to be trifled with. Heavily armed and armored, they can roll through most things that come at them without many worries. They will happily buy just about anything and will sell all sorts of useful trade goods and supplies in decent numbers. More than a few times early game ill buy out a wandering traders stock of small medkits just to get the ball rolling, but they also often sell food and research books. You can kill and loot their caravans, but they arent people you want to be messing with generally.

Fogmen
Lowest tier of what I mentally dub the 'swarmer' enemies. Fogmen live in the... fog, whodathunkit?
Always hostile they come in two different flavours, large swarms of low tier guys with low hp, no armour and crappy iron clubs as weapons... but the swarms are large and frequent in their territory. The second type are a smaller group that will usually be a fog prince who carries as ok katana and has a head that can be sold for decent coin who will be accompanied by a small group of fog heavies who are basically a higher tier of fogmen, higher hp and stats, but still no armor and clubs as weapons.
The main worry when fighting fogmen is they have a fun habit of grabbing whoever is knocked down and when they judge the fight is over, dragging them back to one of their camps where they tie them to a pole and then all the fogmen gather round for a nice session of people eating. This can obviously be a real problem, you will have probably been fairly battered in the initial fight and then trying to do the same fight again (more likely double or triple the enemies by the time you get your guy back) is going to be difficult at best, squad killing at worst.

Your combat squads first run to Mongrel (the town in the middle of the fog) can be a real test and you need to be prepared and careful. Trying to just run the thing and making sure everyone is as fast as possible is an option, though dont be surprised if you look back and see 100 fogmen chasing after you, eager for man meats. Keep everyone moving and as together as you can, if anyone takes a leg hit that slows them, just picking them up and running with them is often the best option. Option B is to try and methodically fight your way though, maybe aim to clear out a camp or 2 that is on your route in, then pull back, heal and push futher the next time. You really do need to have a decent combat squad to do it though. If you have 10 fighters and killing a single fogman group ends with somebody going down, you probably arent going to be able to fight your way though.

Cannibals
Basically the next level up from fogmen, cannibals spawn in large groups and one on one are a bit more dangerous than fogmen, they have the same 'grab anyone laying on the ground and drag them back to the lair' shtick that fogmen do. Their areas are heavily patroled and large, if you have an ok combat squad then poking about at the edges can be a good way to train up your guys.
Later on rolling though and stomping everything flat is a good way to really start to bulk up your squads stats.

Unlike the fogmen, cannibals have a few towns that can be wiped out and looted for some pretty good gear and cash as well as some boss characters that have decent bounties on them. Nice targets for testing out the effectiveness of your fighters.

Shrieking Bandits
Swarmers Level 3.
Ugh. Well, lets just say their territory is patrolled by masses of fast, decent statted naked people who will just. keep. coming. Either a fun place or terrifying depending on what you are into. Either way, messing with them is not something to do till much later in the game.

Semi spoiler:
Sometimes you will have a shrieking bandit come and talk to you when you enter their territory, if you shriek back at them when they shriek at you, they will leave you be, for a while. Mostly. This can be a damn trap as if you think everything is hunky dory and move futher into their lands, suddenly one group will turn hostile and you will look around and realise there are 2 more groups nearby and you are far, far, far from safe lands.

This is a big one and what you *should* be doing in terms of base building will really depend on how good your combat skill/financial situation is.

You *can* totally build a base almost anywhere on the map on day 1 if you have the stuff, then make that your primary hub, do all your researching and storage there.
Its not always certain death, mercenaries will get you through the local wandering horrors in many locales as well as beat off some of the lower level town invasions (if you find the invasions annoying, you can just turn them off, there is no shame in not wanting tinfist and his 50 cannibals to drop in on your 2 shacks). With a little trading for science books and a few other supplies, you can scrape out an existance and slowly build up using mostly just stuff you make. This is reallllllllllllllly hard though.

I would advise not thinking about a base till you have most of tech 2 researched, just buy a house somewhere with power and set someone up while everyone else goes and kills stuff.
To give you a decent start id say you at least want bigger housing shells, small wind turbines, level 2 walls, level 2 well, all the different kinds of farming, cooking, beds and all of the first level of iron/building material production before you should start thinking you are near ready on the tech front.
A good stockpile of cash is also a good idea, 20k would be ok, but 100 would be better, mercs arent cheap and they are amazing at keeping the riffraff at bay while you build up.

Next think about what area you want to be in, as a rule of thumb, if your squad cant wipe whatever is walking around without problems, then dont live there yet.
Generally you want some friendly traders nearby, if you can get multiple that sell building supplies then that is better.

Look for an area where you can grow what you want, if you want a base that can supply all of your needs, you will want to be able to get fuel (greenfruit, hemp), cloth (hemp, cotton) and food (wheat+one other is best, but any will work). If you have found a location you like, then open up the building menu and use the build farms bit to check the fertility of the ground around you. Above 70 is preferred, but really anything about 40 will do the job.
Next check water, lower levels just make your wells slower, as long as it isnt 0%. Level 2 wells also run off power, so in theory you could just have 10 5% wells if you need to, if not, 50% or so on a single well is plenty to carry you through to a decent sized base.

Next you want stone, again to the build menu and pick the stone mine, you are going to burn through massive piles of building materials with a big base, so its worth looking for something high if you dont want to do big trade runs to buy more building materials.

If you plan on crafting then you are going to want masses of iron, so you want a nearby surface iron deposit, 2 is better.
Copper nearby is a bonus, but you dont actually need much of the stuff so if you can get a perfect farming/mining/iron location then dont stress having to send a few people off for 5 mintues to grab you 10 copper from 2 screens away.

Once you have all that, check around the local area a bit, its not uncommon to find that places close to each other can have oddly different resource values.

Now look for a spot that has all of these things that you can get a wall around without going to crazy. Try and avoid walling over a road, it seems to annoy the AI and be aware that if you have crops growing anywhere there are raptors, they will come and try and eat your harvest once it ripens.

Once you have your spot, bring as many building mats, metal plates, farming supplies and cloth as you can get your hands on. Build a wind turbine to see if you have power.
Find another spot that has power. (Working totally off fuel powered generators is possible, it just takes a few more workers/resources, for a first base id reccommend running off just wind power).

As a base for starting you want to have iron and building mat supplies going, then get 2 decent sized buildings up, one as a barracks full of beds and the other further back near your farms for cooking, storage and research. I centralize my storage and refining, people can run back from the mines fine as long as they are within the walls.

Keep things ticking along and send someone out for some more workers and mercs if you want them (seriously, mercs are amazing if you dont have a great compliment of fighters). Load a garru up with whatever trade bait you have laying around, do a trade run for whatever supplies you need, early on it will be building materials and fabric, later it will be iron.
I generally keep my fighters seperate then have about 10 more chuckleheads to do base stuff.
4 for farming, whoever you need for your mines and forges and then a few spare to carry corpses.
Depending on where you live, you may need 4 people just burning the dead.

I like to build my bases in the big craters up high in the fog, there are some great ones there that have all you need as well as fertilities above 100%. Burning corpses takes a lot of work but it does mean that my home crew all have strength above 40 from body disposal and smiting the locals with frag axes.

Walls and farms should go up next. As of time of writing, gates barely even slow enemies down, they are more of a funnel unless you play with them modded. So if you are playing unmodded, then the best you can expect to do is have everyone fighting just inside your gate, make sure you have a few crossbow turrets covering this, preferrebly operated by people with decent precision shooting.
If you do play modded (or the gates get changed) then build your walls into a V shape with your gate at the bottom, put crossbow turrets on each side of the V, they have a 180 degree fire arc, so unlike a flat wall, you will cover the entire area inside the V, including the gate.

As early as possible I try and set up a third large building, just for crafting. Get at least the basics up then have someone start making hides into leather for armorsmithing, later on once you have iron plates to burn, start someone else on weapons. Just make sure they have stuff to make things with and a que on repeat to keep them crafting, sell off a few loads of garbage and soon enough you will be crafting yellow quality gear.

Lighting is also very important, many crafting and labouring skills get a large debuff from a lack of light. I try and put 4 farms into a big square with room for a big lightpost in the middle, that seems to cover them. Keep an eye on where your miners end up after they come back from dropping off resources and then put up torches there as well. Any sort of crafting bench HAS to have lighting, the roof one is good, but doesnt work as well for some of the larger buildings. Light posts are great, but they do take up what can be valuable floor space.

How you want to deal with the locals will depend on your preferences and your playstyle, but if you have things turned on, expect large attacks and/or demands for cats on a regular basis.
Just remember if things do go to tits up, you always have the option of just leaving, heading out to a few towns and sending back all the mercs you can find to retake your home.

Later on setting up some of those nice tall towers with high powered harpoon turrets mounted at the top are good, there is a button in the AI settings which will make all of your characters fire wildly at anything that passes by that might possibly be hostile, the good turrets have a decent rage but there are a few bows that are better if you want to fire at some live targets. I call this button the fun button.

If you ever get bored, just import the game and EVERYTHING that lives in the local area will attack you at once.

As ive said earlier you really want a mix of everything so when you find that perfect spear randomly in an armoury, you have someone who has a few stats behind them when you give it to them.
So try and take a mix and as a rough guide you want things that do blunt damage to upgrade strength and cutting to upgrade dex, most will do both but lean more one way or the other.

Katanas are great early game, but lack punch against armor later on, sabres are a pretty good all round weapon, hackers lean more towards killing armor and skeletons and spears to killing animals, you get the idea. Katanas can be a bit of a noob trap though, if you get a good one, it will do all cutting damage, so you will get no strength xp from hitting stuff with it. So no strength gains apart from what you get from just carrying heavy stuff. It wont matter till you want to upgrade your katana gods armor and realize that they only have 5 strength when everyone else has 30.

For all that noise, there really are 2 standouts for weapon choice in my opinion.
The falling sun is probably the best weapon in the game, you start off training a shrek up on a big frag axe till they have 50 strength, then change them over to a falling sun, pretty soon they will be doing 200 damage to everything they hit and pulling off the wide AOE swing on a regular basis. Wiping out things like fogmen mobs with 2 swings is pretty common for a beast shrek with a falling sun.
Other things will get high, but nothing seems to be as good for just raw damage output as a falling sun, they are stupid expensive but well worth the cost.
Other standout option is martial arts, where the falling sun is a beast against mobs, martial arts is deadly against single targets, it has some AOE attacks that do big damage, but the ninjas seem to struggle to get them off against big mobs. Once you have a bit of skill, martial arts unlocks a combo punch attack that seems to blow the arms off many enemies and blow the stomach out of those who get to keep their arms, there is a jump kick attack that seems to hit the head more often and not for a big chunk of damage, even just the standard punch can do about 70 damage once you get a few stats behind you.
If you plan on playing a long game, start training a martial artist early, they start slow, but end up star performers.

A few other random tidbits:
Bleed damage is something that you often dont notice too much in kenshi, it only seems to really become important when you are in long fights with boss type creatures that will take many hits to bring down. There are a few weapons that do great bleed damage (the spiked club does 2x bleed, if you can get a high tier spiked club, its totally viable as a primary weapon). Some of the higher tier crossbows are also very good at it, killing starving bandits by shooting all of their blood out is a good chuckle and you can totally take a few people out hunting for leviathans with some good crossbows, decent athletics and lots of ammo.
Iron clubs are possibly the most useless weapon as a weapon imo. However I always have a few of the highest tier of them I can find, good iron clubs can weigh 20, so they are great for training strength without taking up much room.
You can upgrade your weapon but actually downgrade your DPS for a while if the new weapon is a lot heavier than the old, some of the higher tier blunt/heavy weapons can bet a bit impractical in how heavy they are so they will really slow down a fighter in combat. If you get lucky enough to get a edgewalker frag axe early game, its probably best to put it in a box till you have someone who can lift the thing properly.

Crossbows are a bit of an odd one, they all seem to do bleed damage so they can be surprisingly effective against big targets, as long as you can run faster than something and you have bolts, in theory you can kill anything (there is a video up somewhere of someone killing the bugmaster with just a toothpick bow).
You really have to just accept a lot of friendly fire from crossbow users early on though, till they get their precision skill up do not under any circumstances hand out a 100 damage sniper bow to some greenhorn unless you have a squad that can tank 100 damage sniper shots in the back over and over.
Start your shooters off with toothpick bows and just let them spray into combat till they get enough skill to be trusted not to shoot your own people.

Armor is again, a touch complicated.
Coverage shows how much of each part the armor protects, the other values for how much.
As a very rough one line guide, Id say you want the best armor you can get that wont debuff you too much up till you have enough stats that it doesnt matter. But if you got this far, here is another wall of text.

It can broadly be broken down into 3 types:

Light.
Light armor is mostly cloth with a little bit of leather. Many of the larger light armor parts come with some really nice buffs to all sorts of things, athletics, combat speed, stealth. So even if it has zero protection, it can be worth picking up things like garbage tier ninja rags just to give an early character an edge. Some light armor will also give coverage to extra parts of the body like the head and legs, so its also a pretty good choice on hivers up to about midgame just to get them a little extra leg protection.

Medium.
Leather with a bit of metal worked in, actual armor rather than just clothes. Medium armor can come with some some debuffs that can be pretty nasty for a new character. Look hard before you change up, its not worth taking a few extra % points of protection for a combat speed debuff early game.
I generally wouldnt advise changing over to medium armor till you can get at least high grade gear, light armor you can scavange up will probably be better till then.

Heavy.
Good old full plate.
Heavy as all get out, expensive and coming with some serious debuffs, heavy armor has a lot going against it.
Balanced up against that is the fact that a character in full masterwork grade heavy armor is pretty close to invicible. I generally dont run heavy armor till towards the end game and even then its only on a few picked warriors, I find that being able to outrun enemies and pick my fights is the better option up till im sure I can win all the fights.
This is still the Jimbob school of kenshi as well so... we want our people to take damage anyway.

Things to look out for:
Leather turtlenecks are amazing but not easy to find or make, they provide pretty great coverage and give no debuffs. Later on you may want to start switching out some people for black chain but for your average trooper, a high grade leather turtleneck is still decent protection at end game.
If you plan on ever running hivers, try and grab at least a blue tier hiver vest if you see them, they arent common and any extra protection you can get for hivers is gold.
Ninja rags are pretty decent early game, you can get lucky and find a highgrade from the thief fence very early on and it will probably be the best armor you will have for a while. All the extra coverage on the head and legs mean that ninja rags or coats make decent armor for hive soldiers who wont wear helmets or shoes.
My first armor upgrades are usually to plate jackets once I can steal or buy them, but really what you are looking to do is deck out everyone in high grade medium torso armor as soon as you can.
My pick for best pants are samurai clothpants. The extra stomach coverage is the clincher, a hell of a lot of blows to the gut are handed out in kenshi. Generally though any of the lighter pants will do you for most of the game if you can find at least high quality.
Shoes early on you want to do whatever you can to make sure that everyone has sandals, start switching out to green drifters boots when you start to get the money. If you manage to spot any, specialist or masterwork plated boots are my pick for endgame footware.
Headgear again, its high grade as a base line of what you want, most of the headgear will work well enough, avoid the ones with debuffs that might be a problem, you dont take many hits to the head anyway, so id avoid the really heavy ones.

As soon as you can you are going to want to start collecting your endgame armor, whenever you can afford to, try and steal or buy any masterwork or specialist armor you think might be useful, specialist level armor isnt common and masterwork can only be found in a few places, so try and start collecting the really good stuff as soon as you can.

Robot limbs are one of the larger changes to the game, early on loosing a limb can increase the difficulty of the game exponentially, but once you have the funds, having your bits cut off is actually an upgrade. Anything apart from hiver limbs are basically and upgrade on your flesh sticks, they all give nice buffs and generally only debuff stealth (not great, but worth it) and swimming (pffffffffffffffffffft) while providing anything for a decent upgrade on hp to almost triple. They will make any character with equipped with them kill on sight for the holy nation, but who cares when you have robot legs?
Fairly early in the game you are going to want to start carrying around a few survival supplies, food, spare medkits, sleeping bags, stuff to help you survive in the harsh lands of kenshi that you will just carry everywhere.
Once you get a little bit into the game and have a small squad, that gear is going to want to include 2 spare arms and 2 spare legs. Dont leave home without them. Early on hiver parts are cheap but later you want the best appendages that money can buy (probably steal, they are damn expensive)

Like top tier armor, you want to start collecting masterwork limbs any time you can. All of the legs are pretty good, the standard editions are nicely tanky with a little bit of buff, the tank legs are... really tanky. Get yourself two of those and some masterwork metal pants if you want to go troll blood spiders in the swamps. Masterwork scout legs though are god teir items and if I was building a perfect squad everyone except the thief would have them and he would have them in his backpack.
Do whatever you can to get your hands on any that you can find, any character with 2 is faster than anything else in the game.

All of the arms are good, they are also pretty self explanatory in what they are for, xbowers get the shootng arms, Thieves get the thief arms. Again, grab any really good ones that are found as you go so you can pick and choose what you want once you get to the endgame.

I generally let people loose limbs naturally in my games, if you play fairly carefully you will loose a few on the normal settings, you can speed up this process by going and playing with bloodspiders or beakthings. If you have some fancy cyborg parts you want to try there are a couple of ways to speed up the process though.
The raging chad way to do this is to send someone off to find some animals that eat people, river raptors are good. Go fight em till they take you down, then send someone fast and strong in to grab the poor goon with the missing limbs and carry them off before they bleed out. This is very dangerous and can also be a very amusing baptism of fire for brand new characters.
The semi cheesy way is to head out to the fog and go and solo a swarm of fogmen. Go down, get captured then pick your lock and let the foggies start their supper. Once you get a few limbs chewed off, you slap your scout legs on, jump off the pole and then speed off into the sunset.
You *can* get away with loosing 3 limbs this way, the bloodloss from 4 will kill you though. 3 is right on the edge of what is safe, if things go slightly wrong, you can still die easily.
Full cheese option is to just heal people selectively, it doesnt take long for someone to get a bad wound on the right area, then you just stand around and wait for it to drop off.

TLDR: Cyborg limbs are better, unless you are roleplaying, you want as many equipped as you can find.

Whole pile of random things that didnt really fit elsewhere.

Most people know about having everyone set to medic (shift click the medic button, sets the medic job to be done when the character is idle forever), very useful. I also have my best doctor set to splint rigging all the time, really cuts down on micro and with a decent doctor will keep people jogging who would otherwise be limping.
Pick a couple of strengh or speed based characters and also shift click 'rescue'. if you just leave them be they will scoop up anyone who goes down after a fight, this can be really handy anywhere you want to keep moving or you can be enslaved in for sleeping on the ground. They will also automatically drop off unconscious characters in beds within a pretty wide radius, so you can cut out a lot of micro buy just clicking nearby your base on the map when rescue is set permenantly.

If you set up a base in an area with roaming hostiles, you will slowly drain off the nearby camps till you empty them. You can speed up the process by going out and stomping some face if you have the skills, it depends on the skills you have and how annoying you find the attacks.
You can completely wipe out some sorts of spawns in your local area but not all, some enemies spawn because of the camps/nests, others will always spawn on the map. The local camps will send out attacks to your base, while the wanderers mostly seem content to move past if you arent directly in their way.

Shark (well, many swamp towns) in the swamps and a few other towns in the south east arent well defended enough at time of writing to survive if you spend a lot of time on screen there. The locals will slowlyhave their medkits drained then they will slowly be overrun. Ive also found that shark has a surprising tendency to break out into civil war, triggered often it seems by a fight in one of the bars. Once it starts it doesnt seem possible to stop short of just running away.

Ctrl+Shift+F11 will fix many movement bugs/stuck in building type things. Moving close to someone who is stuck in a wall then picking them up will also save them from being trapped forever.

Pulling any single item out of an animal or robot kills it instantly.

From what I can tell, unless you have insane amounts of money the easiest way to get engame weapons is by killing the bosses of various minor factions. Most groups like the red sabres have a base somewhere that will have about 20 guys and a boss with a big fat bounty on his head. Try not to loose track of that guy during the fight, he will generally have fairly decent armor and a very good weapon.

Boss animals can be cheesed with micro and decent crossbows that do bleed damage.

At time of writing there is already a reasonable catalogue of mods for kenshi, all sorts of quality of life things, starts that give you mid, late or end games stats if you dont feel like grinding up, etc.
Check them out and pick and choose what you want after you have played enough vanilla. There is one that gives you the option to instant kill downed characters by pulling out their hearts if not having the option of killing downed npcs drives you up the wall.

If you dont want to do that, once you start attacking towns unless you are just wiping the floor with them and hacking off limbs left and right, you want to steal the medkit at least (weapon is probably also a good idea) off anyone who goes down so they wont go crawling around and healing the whole town up while you arent looking.

If you want to start warring early, you can start by raiding the holy nation mines if you have a few stats and patience. You can kite off single guards on the outskirts, beat them down, strip them and leave them to die. if they arent too far away other guards will eventually wander out to heal them. Rinse and repeat to clear a path, if you want more recruits, you can free some slaves, otherwise the best money is in the storage shed.

Going to the AI settings and turning on healing allies can have your guys running around and healing all sorts of people, it can be a good way to grind up some medical skills and a few reputation points in exchange for a few medkits.

Before I tried it, I had thought that a solo challenge would be an exercise in frustration, but after checking it out its mostly fairly simple once you get over the initial hump.
The key is toughness and keeping an eye on the amount of damage the enemies you are fighting can do. If they can do enough to get you below your ko point, then its pretty much game over.
So you want to start off by running into enemies and getting hit once or twice, then going and healing up while you mine or something till you get enough toughness to survive being beaten down by hungry bandits.
Then go fight hungry bandits for a long while. As long as they cant do enough damage to get you below that threshold, its impossible for them to kill you, so you can go ham.
The big kicker on this strategy is that every time you get up rather than playing dead, you get a massive toughness boost, early on it can be multiple points at a time and every time your toughness gets higher you stay ko'ed for less time. The amount of time you stay down seems to depend on how far below zero your hp is so if you are fighting low damage enemies like hungry bandits, you can very quickly grind up to very high levels of toughness.
Once that toughness is up the world is pretty much your oyster, by fighting solo your stats will fly up, every attack is directed at you and you do all the damage that goes out.
You only need one set of armor, one god tier weapon of your choosing so you quickly run out of things to spend money on. Basic storage and small shacks is all the research that might be useful to you and beds in inns are cheap.
So yeah, all in all dont be afraid of trying a solo playthrough.

MERCS ARE INSANELY USEFUL
Deserves the all caps. And a second mention. Mercs are enough protection to travel in most places and they arent insanely expensive. My usual cheese strats for getting decent weapons, armor and a pile of cats early is to pick up a bunch of tech hunters from a waystation and then to throw them at stuff till they die then rob them blind. Each one with have a verrrrrry nice weapon and some pretty nice armor. For 1000 cats a day, 3 tech hunters can wipe out a full camp of dust bandits maybe 20% of the time. Wandering them into a holy nation patrol usually works pretty well too.

Some towns have more than one faction living in them, especially in the united cities it seems possible to spark off civil wars mostly due to them trying to enslave each other and the like. Its not the easiest thing to pull off, but it is funny.

With enough skills a thief can lockpick and empty a safe while standing right behind the shopkeeper. Thief arms and stealth legs mean you can do this at much lower skills.

Really simple basic start I often use, sets you up nicely for very little risk or effort.
Spawn in at the hub, get hobbs, fight the bar guys (the shop guards and the robo spider will join in on your side, sometimes they dont even get time to land a hit), get their gear.
Head out to Squin, kite some dust bandits into the gate guards if there are any nearby.
Grab Ruka, sell off stuff, get backpacks.
Sneak someone around and steal whatever you can that is just laying around out of sight.
Head due west to the Shek ruins, grab all the loot (ration packs, high quality rusty chainmail, steel, its a nice haul often up to 8k worth), then back to the waystation nearby and sell off extra.
Grab a crew of merc tech hunters and go south to the nearby exile camp.
Send in the mercs, they are enough to wipe out the band of bones that are around.
Sell everything you can from the band of bones at the waystation, make sure you grab Torah the fearless and take her back to Squin for an easy 10k bounty.
Take the mercs and run them into a dust bandit camp.
If they live, loot it all then do it again.
Rinse and repeat until you can get into a postion to loot them without getting caught (-25 reputation with the tech hunters is not something you want).
Roll back to the hub and join the thieves, check out the trader for gear.

Done.

I can generally pull this off in just a few ingame days, by the end of it all its not wild to expect to have 30k or so in cats. With luck you will have both ruka and hobbs for nothing, plus anyone else you found along the way (kang and Rane the giant are both possibilities, the odd skeleton can also show up in the bars in the hub). Everyone should have a mid level katanas plus a few extra for more squad members or just to sell for some very nice early game cats. Also probably a few bits of standard grade armor, maybe even a highgrade or 2.