Getting StartedReport

English：Getting Started　·　Game Mechanics

The first ten hours of Kenshi are not about killing things and levelling up; they are about learning not to die - the numbers behind hunger and wounds, farming experience off town guards, and making sure somebody is left to bandage you after you go down.

You are not the chosen one. You are not great, you are not powerful, and you do not have more health than anybody else. You are not the centre of the universe, and you are not special at all — unless you go and earn it.

That opening line is Kenshi's design manifesto, and the one thing a new player has to accept first: the world will not scale itself to you. You run on the same experience rules as the NPCs, take the same wounds that get worse if untreated, and pass out from hunger just like they do.

The first hour: do not fight

A new player's first mistake is almost always "trying to win a fight". What the first hour is actually for:

1. Check what your start gave you — cash, weapon, whether you are malnourished (see Game Starts)
2. Walk into the nearest town and note where the bar, the shops and the police station are
3. Buy a backpack and Wooden Sandals. Most footwear slows you down, and run speed is life in the early game
4. Buy the cheapest light armour you can find; Prototype or Shoddy grade is fine

What your race decides

Racial differences are not decoration; they are survival parameters.

Hunger and wounds: two sets of numbers to memorise

Hunger (300 max):

• Below 250: automatically eats the lowest-nutrition food in the backpack, up to 50 at a time
• Below 200: malnourished, stats begin to fall
• Below 100: periodic blackouts, increasingly frequent, ending in starvation
• Sleeping in a bed reduces hunger drain to 0.4x

Slavers keep slaves at around 100 to hold their combat ability down, using exactly this mechanic.

Wounds:

• Once cut damage on a body part reaches 20% of that part's max health it starts to deteriorate, and a < appears next to the health bar
• Past 100% cut damage a << appears and deterioration runs roughly 4x faster; a part below −100% means death
• An unbandaged wound never heals on its own, no matter how long you sleep; sleep only stops it getting worse
• Healing rate: a proper bed is 8x, a Camp Bed 4x

The Camp Bed can be carried and set up anywhere, and is the most underrated early item in the game.

Your first money

From lowest risk to highest:

• Mining — use the prospecting overlay to find the nearest copper or iron node, fill a backpack, sell it. Zero risk and it trains Labouring
• Looting battlefields — after bandits attack a town and the guards win, the bodies are yours. Only loot bandits; looting unconscious townsfolk counts as theft
• Bounties — wild bandits often carry random bounties of around 2,000 Cats. Bandage first, then carry them off (a corpse does not pay full price) and deliver them to the relevant faction's police station cage
• Inter-town trade — buy whatever has the lowest markup in your starting town and sell it in a town where the markup is high

The second person matters more than any piece of gear

Death in Kenshi is not decided by "health reaching zero" but by "nobody coming to help after you go down". The highest-value early investment is therefore recruiting a second character — a bar recruit, one of the unique characters who joins for free, or a mercenary at 2,000 Cats a day.

The classic tactic is the "secret medic": keep one character on Passive, hiding at the edge of the fight, and send them in to bandage once the enemy disperses. Stealth gear makes it better.

Watch out for a side effect of the First Aid job: when the whole squad is down, Passive plus Stealth lets you play dead until the enemy leaves — but if the First Aid job is enabled, your character will get up to treat someone and give the game away.

Levelling off the guards

This is the only safe source of combat experience in the early game: leave town, find a weak bandit squad (Dust Bandits, Hungry Bandits, Rebel Farmers), lead them back to the gate, let the guards take over and then join in for the finishing blows; afterwards bandage the wounded on both sides, which trains Field Medic and earns faction relations goodwill on the side. Every major town except The Hub has guards.

One streamer states the principle more broadly: the most practical early tactic is really borrowing someone else's blade — the anvil does not have to be a town garrison; manhunters or even a rival bandit gang will do. Drive your enemies into them, wait for both sides to finish, then move in to collect weapons and haul off any wounded with a bounty on them; going in yourself usually ends with the whole squad flat on the ground^{[V1 0:03:17]}.

Other training notes:

• Strength: carrying heavy loads plus walking around with another character on your shoulder is fastest; right-clicking to follow a patrolling NPC is the least effort
• Stealth: gives almost no experience next to neutrals — the more enemies around, the faster it climbs
• Thievery: stealing from a sleeping person gives experience, an unconscious one does not; neither does a success rate above 98%
• Lockpicking: locking a character or a body in a cage and picking it again is infinitely repeatable; a level-100 lock requires 58.31
• Training dummies: they train attack, but they hold back your Dexterity growth later on, so do not overdo it

Common ways to die, and what to do about them

Crime and hostility are two different systems

• Crime flags: triggered by being witnessed. Minor offences (trespassing, brawling) are clean if you get away unseen, and resisting arrest adds another charge; the serious ones are theft and kidnapping — kidnapping or freeing a slave is a flat 5,000-Cat bounty
• Hostility flags: nothing to do with crime. Anybody you have fought turns red toward you, will not necessarily attack but might, and it fades after about 5 hours

Nobody out in the wilderness can report you, but attacking people still costs you faction goodwill in full.

Ten-hour checklist

• At least 2 first aid kits, 300+ nutrition of food and a Camp Bed on your person
• A squad of at least 2, one of them set to Passive as the medic
• Wooden Sandals or other footwear that does not slow you down
• One town with guards and shops as your base of operations
• Strength and Athletics high enough to run while loaded
• No outpost of your own yet

Tick those off and you have moved from "could die at any moment" to "can afford to make mistakes". Where to go next, who to ally with, whether to start a rebellion — Kenshi will not offer a single hint. That is exactly the point.

See also

• Game Starts
• Faction Relations
• Import
• Game Mechanics overview
• World overview

Video citations

1. Kenshi | WE ARE DWARVES!! | Let's Play Kenshi Genesis (Ep. 1)HeroInHisHead