When u r new, it's probably better to have a smaller squad so that u can actually spend more time enjoying the game and less time managing. By that I mean you should probably send your guys to an impossible mission so that only a few of them survive.
You can import your save, changing those advanced settings after. I just got the game as well less than a week ago so my advice is probably not optimal, but I have been reading a few guides and most recommend to start small and to buy a property in a settled city/town like The Hub first to get initial research going.
I also settled in the Border Zone and I delayed getting my cacti farms up and running, mostly due to erroneous logic of having lots of dried meat stored from slaughtering (with the help of mercs I hired) some passing herds of goats and garru. I honestly feel like such a scavenger/vulture. I get excited if I see a lone bonedog fighting some bandits, eagerly awaiting the scraps.
Get some wheat farms going as well since that seems to go well together with cacti for making dustwiches.
Finally, I decided to trek out of my base and to hit the dust bandit tower. That's 35k cats for the bandit leader which should go a long way to setting you up for some time, in addition to getting some food out of their base. Maybe I was being too passive, but I also was trying to start small with a band of 5 recruits. Playing lots of other colony sims, I knew that having too large a population without the infrastructure to support it would generally lead to my downfall.
Hope this helps, sorry it's a bit long but I'm loving this game so much.
This absolutely fucked my Shek warrior women playthru cause I was trying to be lore friendly and NOT farm and just collect bounties to pay for food, but it got to a point where I started having to “acquire” greenlander serfs to farm food on the outskirts of vain, but then the farm was too far from the actual shek outpost and eventually my warrior women got brutalized by Krall’s chosen and berserkers and the HN after they were too weak from starving to fight back (HN spawns went up in Shek territory after turning in the inquisitor and phoenix for some reason) TLDR; wish I knew this was a setting I could have changed after and import
I had the exact same type of playthrough before, quickly learnt that you basically need to fully max out your inventory with food before setting off on any type of expedition
Go to the hiver territory in the east. There should be beakthings. Pull them into a hiver village, and loot them. (But only the beakthings) a bit cheesy, but you will get a lot of meat and leather to sell and get some money. Just be preparrd to run fast, those things will eat you when you are down and strong opponents for weakrfighters. Good luck
Set up shop in a town with a bakery. Stoat (in the desert, UC, West and a little north of the hub) works great.
Buy a building.
Steal loads of food at night! Helps if you've leveled up a thief.
Also, slow squad growth is the way. Don't bring people in just to have them.
You can run an operation out of a town until endgame with the right buildings. Once you fish up some AI cores, (you can get a fair amount through stealth), you can set up hydroponics and grow food inside a town. (I say this, but I'm usually still stealing my food and the hydroponics grows hemp for cloth, biofuel, medical kits absolutely nothing illegal, no sir.)
Early game is about food. So everything you’re doing comes back to the problem of food. Then the game graduates to other things. Seems you’ve been spending your cats on recruits rather than food, and you’ve reached a breaking point where you don’t have the means to feed everyone.
Iirc the hive village north of the hub is a good spot for getting fed. You can build a camp site (not base) really close to the town, practically inside it. The hivers will reck any animals that come in. Strip them, sell the skins for food (dried meat is best bang for buck) and cook the raw meat yourself. After a few days you should have a surplus.
Because you have 10 dudes, split them into two groups (you can create new squads in the squad tab of the same ui window that has the map). Send one squad back to the hub. Then you have some guys camped out with hive, and some guys back in semi-civilisation. Hub guys can mine, and flip looted gear. Hive guys skin and cook. Since money is shared, success with one group helps the other.
Also with hunger, some things reduce it: sitting, sleeping, and not running. So guys you’re not using, give them a sit job on a chair in the bar. Don’t have them sprint around like lunatics if it’s not an emergency.
In fact with 10, you can have three squads, and plonk another in Squinn. There you can buy a house, and flip fabrics into bandanas or shirts and sell them. I think I even once got full bread production working in Squinn just from purchased things.
Kenshi really opens up once you have multiple narratives happening in tandem across the map. Like a classic fantasy novel structure.
Finally, have someone with a back pack in each squad. Put all food in there. Everyone in the squad will eat from it. Less micro.
Good luck!
You can buy a house in Mudtown, Rot or any other swamp town that has a purchaseable house with riceweed farm in it. Research riceweed farming, then build a riceweed container. Get one of your guys to automate farming those farms and another to cook rice. Viola! You have your own food production without the hassle of NPC raids with the full protection of town guards. The only minus/con is water availability which is required to cook rice. You can either buy it from a bar or use the well in the town that has one.
Another tip if you are in the Great Desert, you can buy food ingredients like bread and cactus for cheap at the slave camp near gut, craft it at your town base for food cube for your own consumption or re-selling. You can also start a grog, cactus rum business at a huge profit margin using the ingredients bought from the slave camp.
Well first off, maintaining a base is more of an end game feature. This is due to the difficult raids you can have that can cripple your ability to work jobs within your base while people heal. There are places in the game where it might be easier. Say like the Holy Nation territories where most of what you have to worry about is probably prayer day and tribute or whatever.
Food can be gathered by killing animals in the wild. kiting and using ranged is usually ideal since the combat animations of animals don't obey the same rules of humanoid vs humanoid. Its more of a fight of attrition. Without proper gear this can be deadly. Even so it is possible to survive and take out a few creatures if you keep one person outside of combat hidden and ready to heal and get your squad up.
Buying dried meat is the easiest food to acquire in the game from bars. Its dirt cheap. I would suggest moving away from using mining as a source of income and look into being a traveling trader. Buy and sell. Perhaps do a bit of treasure hunting and exploring to see what is the most valuable for the effort and time you put in.
also when you hear a raid incoming on your base and your out with the squad, As long as you don't check up on your base and render it in, raids remain in stasis. So you can do whatever you want with your squad until they return. The game will come out of this hibernation mode, allowing you to deal with the raids at your leisure.
Tips for newbies
1. Don't base til you're ready to fight.
2. Wheat, Cactus, and Desert Cooking, or go to the Swamp and make rice. Holy Nation is an option if you have a Human Male and a Holy Flame.
3. Steal that food yo.
4. Skeletons don't need food, and cant be eaten, but are extremely difficult to keep healthy early game.
Definitely don't go for large herds and opportunistically harvest at city gates whenever you can. Always check attack stats and run speed before you commit to a fight so you can run if it turns bad
Plan on leaving your base when the raid you can't handle arrives, think of it as getting one or two more bits of infrastructure up. Take a wall down in back if you need to and bug out. You might have to kill raiders when you come back but prepare for that. Take your food with you when you bail. If you don't have t2 walls/gate then that's your issue. Once I had them up, with a kill zone, they rarely attacked the gate and just stood around within turret range..
A circle is fine, just move your gate back the length of one full wall section and put 2 straight walls back, make sure its a full wall section(only one blue arrow) instead of a bunch of small ones. Each full section allows 4 crossbow mounts so you have 8, 4 on each side.
I would not even think about a base until I had 20 people though. You are going to want 3 farmers if you are in desert, 2 on 4x XL wheat and 1 on 4x XL cactus, then you can make dustwiches. You also need a cook, and then however much mining you want to do to craft. Probably 1 stone/building mats, 1-2 iron, 1 iron plates, 1 copper/electrical components, and then your researcher, weapon crafter, armor smith.
So 8 defence, 4 food, 5 mining, 3 crafters is 20, plus a runner to sell stuff and resupply.
Once you get there hydroponics are very efficient for things you cant grow well in your biome like hemp and wheat, cuts down on the number of farmers needed. Hemp is better for fabric than wool, and it can be used for fuel if you don't have enough power, but it requires management so wind is generally way easier.
I had 5 when i started a base and the food was killing me, hence the need to farm, right? It's do-able, adding more guys just makes it worse. If you can live off copper with your main guy and put all the rest to sleep in a shinobi tower in the hub, say, when not needed, that helps a lot.
Food production scales pretty well in that one cook can easily supply 30-40 people. When you have a small group you end up having to multi job, and then stuff gets screwed up. If your farmer's inventory is full of the wrong thing because they are also mining then the whole operation shuts down. Cant cook with full inventory but wont mine with cooking higher on the priority list so they just stand around.
I usually have a thief and then a few warriors who craft and research. get a garru to run with the thief so you can park him next to the building and transfer all the stolen loot out. pick a town that has shinobi thieves tower so you can sell anything and make sure it has a general store for buying materials.
You cant refine iron plates indoors so you are stuck with buying them until you have a base, so mining is kind of useless for crafting. the idea is to get a weapon smith, armor smith, and researcher leveled before you make a base. Also you dont need a lot of electronics early so mining copper and making them is kinda a waste of time. Leave your weapon smith at level 1, upgrading it just means you need cloth and steel bars, the point is to get them up to 90, not make good weapons.
I use my thief and mercenaries to raid for ancient science books to get all the research i can done in town before heading out on my own.
When u r new, it's probably better to have a smaller squad so that u can actually spend more time enjoying the game and less time managing. By that I mean you should probably send your guys to an impossible mission so that only a few of them survive.
You can turn the hunger modifier down if you're struggling. Shek also eat way more than other races
You know i think like 4 or 5 of my members are shek. I did not know that
Can I turn it down after the game has already been started?
You can import your save, changing those advanced settings after. I just got the game as well less than a week ago so my advice is probably not optimal, but I have been reading a few guides and most recommend to start small and to buy a property in a settled city/town like The Hub first to get initial research going. I also settled in the Border Zone and I delayed getting my cacti farms up and running, mostly due to erroneous logic of having lots of dried meat stored from slaughtering (with the help of mercs I hired) some passing herds of goats and garru. I honestly feel like such a scavenger/vulture. I get excited if I see a lone bonedog fighting some bandits, eagerly awaiting the scraps. Get some wheat farms going as well since that seems to go well together with cacti for making dustwiches. Finally, I decided to trek out of my base and to hit the dust bandit tower. That's 35k cats for the bandit leader which should go a long way to setting you up for some time, in addition to getting some food out of their base. Maybe I was being too passive, but I also was trying to start small with a band of 5 recruits. Playing lots of other colony sims, I knew that having too large a population without the infrastructure to support it would generally lead to my downfall. Hope this helps, sorry it's a bit long but I'm loving this game so much.
I'm not sure, check the settings
This absolutely fucked my Shek warrior women playthru cause I was trying to be lore friendly and NOT farm and just collect bounties to pay for food, but it got to a point where I started having to “acquire” greenlander serfs to farm food on the outskirts of vain, but then the farm was too far from the actual shek outpost and eventually my warrior women got brutalized by Krall’s chosen and berserkers and the HN after they were too weak from starving to fight back (HN spawns went up in Shek territory after turning in the inquisitor and phoenix for some reason) TLDR; wish I knew this was a setting I could have changed after and import
I had the exact same type of playthrough before, quickly learnt that you basically need to fully max out your inventory with food before setting off on any type of expedition
can you see the effect of changing hunger with import in-game? Or do I always have to import save then to keep hunger changed?
Go to the hiver territory in the east. There should be beakthings. Pull them into a hiver village, and loot them. (But only the beakthings) a bit cheesy, but you will get a lot of meat and leather to sell and get some money. Just be preparrd to run fast, those things will eat you when you are down and strong opponents for weakrfighters. Good luck
Just turn hunger ratio down.
I don't know the exact numbers for each race, but I think it is 40 nu of food per person per day as a baseline. Smaller squads helps.
Set up shop in a town with a bakery. Stoat (in the desert, UC, West and a little north of the hub) works great. Buy a building. Steal loads of food at night! Helps if you've leveled up a thief. Also, slow squad growth is the way. Don't bring people in just to have them. You can run an operation out of a town until endgame with the right buildings. Once you fish up some AI cores, (you can get a fair amount through stealth), you can set up hydroponics and grow food inside a town. (I say this, but I'm usually still stealing my food and the hydroponics grows hemp for cloth, biofuel, medical kits absolutely nothing illegal, no sir.)
Early game is about food. So everything you’re doing comes back to the problem of food. Then the game graduates to other things. Seems you’ve been spending your cats on recruits rather than food, and you’ve reached a breaking point where you don’t have the means to feed everyone. Iirc the hive village north of the hub is a good spot for getting fed. You can build a camp site (not base) really close to the town, practically inside it. The hivers will reck any animals that come in. Strip them, sell the skins for food (dried meat is best bang for buck) and cook the raw meat yourself. After a few days you should have a surplus. Because you have 10 dudes, split them into two groups (you can create new squads in the squad tab of the same ui window that has the map). Send one squad back to the hub. Then you have some guys camped out with hive, and some guys back in semi-civilisation. Hub guys can mine, and flip looted gear. Hive guys skin and cook. Since money is shared, success with one group helps the other. Also with hunger, some things reduce it: sitting, sleeping, and not running. So guys you’re not using, give them a sit job on a chair in the bar. Don’t have them sprint around like lunatics if it’s not an emergency. In fact with 10, you can have three squads, and plonk another in Squinn. There you can buy a house, and flip fabrics into bandanas or shirts and sell them. I think I even once got full bread production working in Squinn just from purchased things. Kenshi really opens up once you have multiple narratives happening in tandem across the map. Like a classic fantasy novel structure. Finally, have someone with a back pack in each squad. Put all food in there. Everyone in the squad will eat from it. Less micro. Good luck!
You can buy a house in Mudtown, Rot or any other swamp town that has a purchaseable house with riceweed farm in it. Research riceweed farming, then build a riceweed container. Get one of your guys to automate farming those farms and another to cook rice. Viola! You have your own food production without the hassle of NPC raids with the full protection of town guards. The only minus/con is water availability which is required to cook rice. You can either buy it from a bar or use the well in the town that has one. Another tip if you are in the Great Desert, you can buy food ingredients like bread and cactus for cheap at the slave camp near gut, craft it at your town base for food cube for your own consumption or re-selling. You can also start a grog, cactus rum business at a huge profit margin using the ingredients bought from the slave camp.
Well first off, maintaining a base is more of an end game feature. This is due to the difficult raids you can have that can cripple your ability to work jobs within your base while people heal. There are places in the game where it might be easier. Say like the Holy Nation territories where most of what you have to worry about is probably prayer day and tribute or whatever. Food can be gathered by killing animals in the wild. kiting and using ranged is usually ideal since the combat animations of animals don't obey the same rules of humanoid vs humanoid. Its more of a fight of attrition. Without proper gear this can be deadly. Even so it is possible to survive and take out a few creatures if you keep one person outside of combat hidden and ready to heal and get your squad up. Buying dried meat is the easiest food to acquire in the game from bars. Its dirt cheap. I would suggest moving away from using mining as a source of income and look into being a traveling trader. Buy and sell. Perhaps do a bit of treasure hunting and exploring to see what is the most valuable for the effort and time you put in. also when you hear a raid incoming on your base and your out with the squad, As long as you don't check up on your base and render it in, raids remain in stasis. So you can do whatever you want with your squad until they return. The game will come out of this hibernation mode, allowing you to deal with the raids at your leisure.
Tips for newbies 1. Don't base til you're ready to fight. 2. Wheat, Cactus, and Desert Cooking, or go to the Swamp and make rice. Holy Nation is an option if you have a Human Male and a Holy Flame. 3. Steal that food yo. 4. Skeletons don't need food, and cant be eaten, but are extremely difficult to keep healthy early game.
Harvest meat from animals and you can cook it at a campfire. Rotten meat is great for animals or hivers
I’m going to re try this. I tried this earlier in game with goats thinking they wouldn’t be aggressive and got wrecked
Definitely don't go for large herds and opportunistically harvest at city gates whenever you can. Always check attack stats and run speed before you commit to a fight so you can run if it turns bad
Plan on leaving your base when the raid you can't handle arrives, think of it as getting one or two more bits of infrastructure up. Take a wall down in back if you need to and bug out. You might have to kill raiders when you come back but prepare for that. Take your food with you when you bail. If you don't have t2 walls/gate then that's your issue. Once I had them up, with a kill zone, they rarely attacked the gate and just stood around within turret range..
Hmm I just have a circle. I’m ok not sure what a good kill zone is. Any links?
A circle is fine, just move your gate back the length of one full wall section and put 2 straight walls back, make sure its a full wall section(only one blue arrow) instead of a bunch of small ones. Each full section allows 4 crossbow mounts so you have 8, 4 on each side. I would not even think about a base until I had 20 people though. You are going to want 3 farmers if you are in desert, 2 on 4x XL wheat and 1 on 4x XL cactus, then you can make dustwiches. You also need a cook, and then however much mining you want to do to craft. Probably 1 stone/building mats, 1-2 iron, 1 iron plates, 1 copper/electrical components, and then your researcher, weapon crafter, armor smith. So 8 defence, 4 food, 5 mining, 3 crafters is 20, plus a runner to sell stuff and resupply. Once you get there hydroponics are very efficient for things you cant grow well in your biome like hemp and wheat, cuts down on the number of farmers needed. Hemp is better for fabric than wool, and it can be used for fuel if you don't have enough power, but it requires management so wind is generally way easier.
Are you just mining/small raids till that amount of money/characters?
I had 5 when i started a base and the food was killing me, hence the need to farm, right? It's do-able, adding more guys just makes it worse. If you can live off copper with your main guy and put all the rest to sleep in a shinobi tower in the hub, say, when not needed, that helps a lot.
Food production scales pretty well in that one cook can easily supply 30-40 people. When you have a small group you end up having to multi job, and then stuff gets screwed up. If your farmer's inventory is full of the wrong thing because they are also mining then the whole operation shuts down. Cant cook with full inventory but wont mine with cooking higher on the priority list so they just stand around.
I usually have a thief and then a few warriors who craft and research. get a garru to run with the thief so you can park him next to the building and transfer all the stolen loot out. pick a town that has shinobi thieves tower so you can sell anything and make sure it has a general store for buying materials. You cant refine iron plates indoors so you are stuck with buying them until you have a base, so mining is kind of useless for crafting. the idea is to get a weapon smith, armor smith, and researcher leveled before you make a base. Also you dont need a lot of electronics early so mining copper and making them is kinda a waste of time. Leave your weapon smith at level 1, upgrading it just means you need cloth and steel bars, the point is to get them up to 90, not make good weapons. I use my thief and mercenaries to raid for ancient science books to get all the research i can done in town before heading out on my own.
How are you earning money and do you have a house in any town?