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30+ TIPS & TRICKS I Wish I Knew Before

By Caedo Genesis

Didn't do much with the doc (yet), so here's a bunch of helpful notes I took!

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Caedo Genesis
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Category: Achievements, Characters, Classes, Crafting, Game Modes, Gameplay Basics, Loot, Secrets, Story or Lore, Walkthroughs, Weapons

Languages: English

Posted

Updated

30 Aug, 2023 @ 4:52am

8 Nov, 2023 @ 5:38am

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Guide Index

Overview

Intro & Housekeepy Junk

Controls & Interface

Attributes

Skills

General & Job Tricks

Factions

Got Any Tips Of Your Own?

Comments

Intro & Housekeepy Junk

Originally, I had plans to make a video guide at some point but haven't quite had the motivation for that whole process. Instead, I'm doing the next best thing and making a Steam guide on it, with pictures!

The tips you find here will range from beginner stuff, to more advanced min-maxing stuff. I'm hoping there's a little something for everyone here! This is definitely messier than how I usually do things, but I'm mainly hoping you won't notice.

Controls & Interface

In a complex game like this, there's all kinds of little fun button combos and interface tricks that can slip through the cracks, here's a few that I found super helpful!

Right clicking takes an item from a container, while Shift+Right Click takes the whole stack.
Shift+Left Clicking vital parts in animal or robot inventory when they're unconscious will drop the items on the ground, killing them instantly. This is particularly useful during a fight, when you just want to make sure the beast or mech won't get up again.
If you’re already accustomed to using the middle mouse button for camera rotation, the Q and E button will be functionally useless. I chose to rebind Q and E to speed controls since they’re used so frequently in normal gameplay. If you’ve got injuries from playing at your desk like a goblin for years, and now have shoulder/wrist pain, you may benefit from changing Q to NORMAL speed, and E to FASTEST speed instead. Another option for this would be to bind these to combat jobs like Medic and Rescue. Either way, I figured it worth knowing that there’s control redundancies so close to the WASD so you can customize as you see fit!
The portraits in your squad tab are also set to the number keys, so pressing 1-9 will select those units, and double tapping a number will center the camera on that unit. Double clicking will have the same result if you wish to center on a unit that way.
Something you probably know already is that Space Bar is the pause button. However, did you know that you can pause while looting containers, managing inventory, and trading with merchants? This will afford you as much time as you need without surprises happening outside your field of view.
Starting a new game while already in a world has a chance of simply reusing the world you were already in. That means you can have multiple settlements from separate saves from the same playthrough. It is awesome, coming across your old bases, but this can also cause some unwanted technical issues.

Attributes

You have FOUR attributes in Kenshi, each with different methods of increasing and some needing much more attention than others when it comes to your survival.

STRENGTH: Trader’s backpacks, that is to say the ones that let you stack trade goods, are great for training strength. A good way to set up a strength trainer job is to fill up this bag with iron or Generator Cores, and put it into a character's base inventory, not in their backpack slot. After their encumbrance is showing above 90%, send them on a walk! If the risk feels too high, you can give them a job to haul water from your well to your water tanks, and they'll have a decent amount of strength in a short time!
TOUGHNESS: [See Martial Arts Section For Training Method] The higher your character's toughness, the longer they'll be able to ward off falling into a coma when they take hard hits. You probably already noticed that characters have multiple health bars! Limbs can be lost without losing consciousness if you’re tough enough; however, having your head, chest, or stomach go far enough into the negative can cause your character to go into a coma, forcing them to stay unconscious until their vitals are back to zero. Pay attention to your character's toughness when you choose to train it, as the tooltip will tell you what that character's KO point is.

Skills

There's tons of stats and skills to keep track of in Kenshi, and many ways to train up in this brutal wasteland. Here are my methods to utilize and level some of these things!

HEAVY WEAPONS: Heavy weapons are devastating to groups in the right hands, but often require a lot of strength training to be effective. If a character is wielding a weapon incredibly slowly that usually means their strength is lacking and needs training. A quick calculation you can do is a weapon's Blunt damage x40. This will tell you if your character is strong enough to wield it, or needs to train up with some heavy bags. Hilariously even Ruka, the Shek recruit you can find in Squin who carries a Plank by default, doesn't start with the strength requirements to be proficient with it.
THIEVERY SKILLS: In Kenshi, the world is SO brutal, that becoming a slave or prisoner is viable for leveling certain skills before deciding to set out on your own. You can more easily level stealth, thievery, assassination, and lockpick skills with minimal consequence even when caught, so long as you run back to a cage when you do. You’ll gain Labouring also in the case of the ‘Obedient Slave’ job. Labour during the day, then at nightfall you can steal, lockpick and knockout your fellow prisoners. Anything that helps for when you finally escape!
THIEVERY (JUST STEALING): If you're trying to steal things from a shop, once guards see you, they'll automatically turn your direction for a decent amount of time. If they're keeping eyes on you, you'll need a way to break line of sight to steal safely. Remember that you need a window of a few seconds after stealing to not get caught as well, indicated right above your thief's name once you steal an item. Items in containers have a percentage chance of failure depending on skill, but items laying out in the open don't. So the easiest and safest way to level Thievery is to steal items lying around on tables and shelves. If you're traveling in a group of at least two or more and feel like stealing from shops, you can use one unit to keep the shopkeeper distracted while the other rummages through their things. A mild exploit you can do, is stolen items can be laundered in their respective storage containers. For example, if you've stolen Fabric and would like it to stack properly, store it in a General Storage Chest or a Fabric Chest and it will no longer display as stolen. This can become a bit of an exploit if you have a house in town with weapon and armor storages, since you can steal valuable gear from merchants, store it in your armory, take it out, then sell it back to the merchant you stole from.
LABOURING: Mining nodes have a capacity of 5 ores, which you either need to manually take from the deposit once it's full, or automate it via job and have an ore storage nearby so it can be emptied. When I first played this was the first thing I looked up, because my character was leveling their skill, but I couldn't figure out how to pick up the ore. Also, to have your units work and level effectively through the night, you'll need sources of light nearby if you don't want a massive darkness penalty. Standing torches at the very least can be used for this, if you also get a chance to find a hiver settlement, you can get some lamps that you can fasten to your workers' belts so it won't matter where they are. Light is also valuable to crossbow users, since they also get a skill penalty at night.
CROSSBOWS: Outfitting at least one unit with a crossbow can give you some lovely ranged stopping power. The main challenge of using a crossbow is first, keeping it supplied with ammunition. There are no quivers for crossbow users, but you can still keep your inventory clear by using Trade Backpacks for your bolts. Using a Trade Backpack will let you stack bolts up to 9, so you won’t have to worry about ammo for a long while! Outside of needing to keep the crossbow supplied with bolts, a novice crossbow user will also have a high chance of hitting allies accidentally until their precision shooting skill goes up. Don't worry though, as expected in a game like Kenshi, your precision shooting will go up when you do hit allies by accident. Finally, if you're having trouble wrangling your crossbowmen, set them to hold position so they don't run off to the next fight when the first one is finished. Slow moving critters, like River Raptors are great target practice for Crossbow users, so if you find yourself in farmlands, look around for these slow moving pests!
MARTIAL ARTS: Martial Arts can make a character incredibly powerful and is the only combat skill that learns new attacks as you improve. The downside is that the training for Martial Arts is also the most difficult, since nearly every foe you encounter will be armed and/or armored. Unfortunately, training Martial Arts is the best way to increase the dodge skill too. At the beginning you won't only be fighting at a disadvantage, but dealing damage to yourself if your toughness isn't very high, since you'll often be punching armor bare-fisted. I've found that in the region of Skinner's Roam, at the south end of Holy Nation territory, training risk is far lower because the majority of enemies there are starving bandits; giant groups of them. Starving bandits are much less of a threat than most enemies since they mainly do blunt damage, and they're only after your food. Generally most of this isn't an issue, and to protect your food you can store it in a backpack and just unequip it if you go down. If you train Martial Arts in this way, there's no threat of being enslaved or eaten by wildlife because even the wild bulls here aren't a threat until you attack them. Surprisingly, unless you willingly go into the nearby Holy Nation camp, you won't run into any Holy Nation patrols if you stay in this flat southern section of Skinner's Roam. Once you've taken quite a bit of punishment, there's thankfully a Waystation just west of that area, that's run by the neutral Tech Hunters, so you won't have too far to limp if quality bed rest is needed.

General & Job Tricks

HOUSING: You can purchase houses in cities to guarantee no raids on your home while you're inside of city walls.
BONEDOG FOOD: This tip is especially for those of you who want a Bonedog pet or choose the Guy With A Dog Beginning. Bonedog pets have a voracious appetite and are finicky when it comes to feeding, especially if you don't have a backpack. Bonedogs will however, eat RAW meat if placed on the ground when they're hungry. Once you do get a backpack and have Share Food and Feed Animals AI boxes checked, they'll automatically eat just about any food from allies' backpacks when in range.
BED QUALITY: Camp beds give a x4 recovery rate, while proper beds will give a x8 recovery rate
RACES: Picking a race for your starting character or squad can be crucial to the style of play you want. Hivers and their subraces have a wide skill bonus. Hivers are also immune to environmental acid, but they can't wear certain armor pieces and their limbs are brittle. Skeletons are immune to acid rain but also can't wear any helmets or boots. As a huge benefit though, Skeletons don't need to eat, but keeping their robotic bodies maintained with repair kits and repair beds can be expensive when starting out. Shek make great brutish warriors that can take more punishment than other organics, but lack bonuses in non-combat skills. The human variants, greenlanders and scorchlanders, both have benefits to crafting skills, and farming oriented professions, with well rounded stats alongside. As I said, there's pros and cons to each, and even if you change your mind about your characters late into the game, there's plenty of recruits throughout the world of Kenshi to specialize in the direction you want.
BOUNTIES: You can check the bounty of a target by clicking on them and checking if there's a cat bounty above their name. Even though the bounty value will be visible, it's worth checking which factions put out the bounty to ensure that you're not bringing the target to a city that won't pay you for it.
INFAMOUS: If you yourself have accumulated a bounty, you can check how high it’s gotten just like an NPC, by hovering over the status above your character’s name. Be warned that if your bounty goes higher than 10,000 cats, that person will be infamous, and the bounty will never expire over time. The only way to get rid of it at that point, is to turn that character in to the authorities and let them serve their sentence, or pay their bail amount.
FOLLOW VS BODYGUARD: Follow is temporary if shift isn’t held, while Bodyguard is a job task. Both of these are helpful in different situations. I think the most important note here though is that followers primarily protect themselves, while bodyguards of course, fight both when the person they're guarding is attacked and when they are. I found follow to be easier to work with when it comes to micro-managing a larger team, since you can just tell everyone to follow your slowest unit, and use them to control the whole group, until a fight happens of course, then just select everyone and attack.
COOKING: Placing down a campfire has no requirements, and if the jobs button is toggled on, your character will automatically start cooking raw meat in said fire.
HEALER JOBS: Rescue and Medic are both buttons on the lower right of the hud which you can click to protect and heal wounded units. Clicking this constantly can be tedious though, so instead, you can hold shift then left click these buttons to make them into jobs. I usually put medic/robotics jobs on everyone, since there's no such thing as too much healing. I then have one character dedicated as a rescuer, who will take unconscious units to nearby beds if able.
CONTAINER MAX WORKAROUND: If you don’t have storage for a particular gathering point, it can eventually reach max capacity and your labourer/farmer will cease working since they have nowhere to take the resources. To grab items manually from the worksite, you can select the farm, mining node, or gathering point then shift+left click and drag the stack to go into your inventory or the ground nearby. This will allow work to continue, even if you don’t have storage just yet.
RESEARCH: Research benches share their inventories, jobs, and progress as long as you own them. So if you have a higher level research bench, it will share inventory with the basic bench, and grant you access to higher level tech from either bench too!
STORAGE TRICKS: Staggering storage containers will help prevent your workers from getting stuck in a loop trying to pick up and drop materials. So instead of creating a lineup of one kind of storage, add different storage containers in between. For example, consider setting up a line of iron plates, then building materials, then iron plates, etc...

Factions

Kenshi is FULL of factions, but the three main powers in this world are the Shek Kingdom, The Holy Nation, and the United Cities. The Shek Kingdom is the most tolerant of the three, and while they can harass the player if they don’t have a Shek in their squad, they’ll still be passive unless provoked with thievery or violence. The Holy Nation on the other hand is full of xenophobic zealots, and outright attacks anyone who isn’t human or simply has prosthetics equipped. The Holy Nation will fight, arrest and/or enslave anyone who’s not a Greenlander or Scorchlander. Finally there’s the United Cities who are more classist. The United Cities are a full on slave economy with several sub-factions dedicated to enslaving wanderers of any race. As long as you’re wearing more than rags and are able to outrun or fight off manhunters, you’ll generally be able to sidestep the most problematic feature of the United Cities.
The SHINOBI THIEVES are the general thievery and smuggling guild who can be found in several of the major cities. With a small down payment of 10,000 cats you’ll be able to rest in their beds, use their training apparati, and trade stolen and smuggled goods with them that other merchants wouldn’t normally buy.
Each faction usually has its own uniform, and you can steal those uniforms to disguise yourself as one of them. However, if you are disguised as an enemy of the place you’re visiting, you could suffer some jail time (or worse) just by playing dress-up in the wrong place.

Got Any Tips Of Your Own?

Thanks for giving this mess of tips and tricks a look, and if you like my style, you'll find lots of other in-depth guides in my profile, and on YouTube.

If you've got your own tips or additions to the things I listed, go ahead and leave them below!

9 Comments

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Ashes_111 17 Nov, 2023 @ 8:22am

OUTRUN BEAKTHINGS!!!!!!!!! if you have 1-3 characters selected (too many people causes your people to actually stop). so as youre holding right click to run away from gutters press the R key once they get close. R is the reset button for your characters job list and the constant move order youre inputting is one of those jobs. pressing R while holding right click will cause the gutter to think youre resetting to fight so they enter combat which slows them down a bunch and if you continue to press R every 5 seconds or so you can outrun anything in the game including elder beak things.

Existential Bread 7 Nov, 2023 @ 1:19pm

A great, easily digestible guide for newer players, nice work.

As far as key binds go, another handy one is using the tab key to switch squads on the bottom panel. It's pretty handy when used in conjunction with the number keys if you have a lot of different people spread across multiple zones.

Knowing that armor storage and weapon racks can remove the stolen tags from equipment placed inside them can be a handy tip for new players attempting to outfit squad members in a new start. Unlike the item furnace (which does the same thing but can hold any item type) they can be built inside any owned building in a town, and require very little materials to research and build.

Dragonflyre 3 Nov, 2023 @ 6:10pm

Awesome work creating this guide! Thanks for making it.
Another beginner tip:
The easiest way to train athletics (besides running your level 1 character across the map) is to give a permanent "Follow" job to each of your crew. Assign each one to follow the next character over. It works best with 4 or more connected.
They will follow each other in a circle indefinitely. You can have them stealth at the same time and leave the crew alone until they are ready to leave the city and be able to outrun dangers.
Just make sure to have food in one of their backpacks!

vx9seneca 29 Oct, 2023 @ 2:40pm

Add some permanent, semi-permanent NPC's to your outpost... Hire Tech Hunters/Mercenary's to guard your base, at least 2 regions away. When the job's over, there's a chance, if far enough from where they started, they'll stay in your outpost and "Patrol Town" for free, even shopping in your town.

jbtanker64 17 Oct, 2023 @ 6:48pm

moving furniture

bean boy 4 Oct, 2023 @ 10:33pm

Pressing ~ will select all characters in a squad, and additionally if you reach at least 10 units, you can use 0 to select the 10th one!

Nerkles 24 Sep, 2023 @ 2:10pm

Good tips! I like that they're helpful without spoiling anything. Just simple tips for newbies

FooseFlare 10 Sep, 2023 @ 9:45am

When leveling a weapon skill, try to use the worst possible weapon of that type. Weapons with low damage means your opponent stays alive longer, means you get more EXP out of it before having to search for another punching bag to grind on.

Combat EXP is based on the difficulty vs your level in a stat. Fighting starving bandits will only get you so far! However, a neat trick is to reduce your stat levels before fighting. Wear backpacks that reduce your combat skills, armor that makes it harder to attack, and weapons that do the same! By artificially reducing your stats, the difference between your opponent's levels and your own increases, meaning you get more EXP out of it!

Orbit 2 Sep, 2023 @ 7:11am

and dont forget to NEVER shit yourself

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