The GWJ cRPG Club Game 22 - Kenshi

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For more information on the GWJ CRPG Club, go here.

Kenshi is the GWJ cRPG Club's 22nd winner, running out just ahead of Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous in a close final round. There was a large surge for Wrath, but some late voting saw Kenshi over the line.

Kenshi is an open world role-playing video game with real-time strategy elements that has no linear narrative. It takes place in a post-apocalyptic setting, where it is incredibly difficult for life to survive. The player starts out with no skills and struggles to survive in the early stages of the game. Skills are levelled up through doing actions, such as levelling up thievery by stealing items, various combat skills by fighting, and the player can recruit other units to grow their squad. The player can recruit characters from numerous different factions and species to join their squad, and can eventually build a town themselves. As part of the damage system, limbs can be severed or damaged individually, with the option to replace them with prosthetic limbs if available. Kenshi has many non-player locations, of sizes ranging from a single building to large cities. The game includes a world states system which creates reactions to deaths of notable people. These reactions to power vacuums can result in new locations spawning or in towns being taken over by new factions. Zones in Kenshi are not just aesthetic, as they have specific qualities, such as soil types, terrain, and resource availability. These factors come into play when players are constructing outposts. Weather is a constant concern whether or not the player decides to construct an outpost, with some types (such as acid rain) causing ill effects.

Kenshi was developed initially by a single developer, Chris Hunt, who started in the mid 2000s. He was able to form a small team in 2013 and establish Lo-Fi GAmes studio.

We'll be playing this game until September 31st, 2023. This thread is for friendly discussion as we play through the game. Share your reflections, successes, defeats, tactics, wishes, impressions, and whatever here! The more conversation the better, so post away.

For BIG spoilers, please use the spoiler tag. (No! I am your father!) Tactics, strategies, general story progression likely won't need them.

Anyone and everyone is welcome to participate, and can start at any time, so join the fun! One quick favor: If you decide to play, make a post here along the lines of "I'm in!" to let us know. If you start and finish the game before the end, you'll level up your GWJ CRPG Membership.

Links to the Game:
Steam - £10.34 / 13.49 (sale)
GoG - £22.99 / $29.99 (not in the sale)
Greenman Gaming - £22.99 / $29.99
Humble Bundle - £22.98 / $29.98

Metacritic
HowLongToBeat - 85Hours (be warned, "completionist" clocks in at 276 hours)
Almars Guides
Kenshi Wiki: Getting Started

I'm not sure what's going to class as "completed" here and I'm wide open to suggestions. Despite what "howlongtobeat" thinks, I'm not sure there is an actual story as such. I'm tempted to say that so long as you put at least 20 hours in, I'll tick you as completed. this will operate on an honesty policy, so please, be honest. If there are profound disagreements to this, or I'm just plain wrong then please let me know.

Members Complete
Legion
AUs_TBirD
Stele
Farscry
Gewy

Members Playing
Sundown
Neutrino
Shadout
Math
Ubrakto
SpaceDog

Some more getting started tips from Before I Play:

* Strength is trained by having a full load of items, up to 25%, and carrying bodies, up to a separate 25%. So if you want to train it easily you should fill your bag up and then pick up a friend, then run around.

* Toughness is achieved by getting the sh*t beaten out of you. Humanoids will not kill you if they can avoid it, so picking fights with them is a good way to train that. You're supposed to lose, and if you aren't bleeding to death it is wise to get back up when playing dead which gives you a massive bonus to toughness each time you do it. Hungry Bandits are the best for this because they don't do much damage and will only steal your food when they knock you out. Try not to fight slavers, because they will enslave you and steal your stuff if they beat you, which is far from a game over but it is a pain.

* Do NOT pick fights with animals for XP because some of them will eat you once you go down. Stay out of the swamps especially, since they have strong, aggressive, and meat eating red spiders in them.

* The early bars have some people you can hire for only 2000 bucks.

* Health is a bit arcane. Your body parts can go as far negative as their max, so if you have 150 health for that part then you can go -150 before the part fails and you lose it/die. Different races have different thresholds. Damaged parts will have a section that must be bandaged and will continuously tick down until they are, then they will heal over time, which can only be sped up by resting in beds. If you are in a dying state then you will tick down health until you die, you cannot recover unless tended to. If you are in a "recovery coma" then you are stable and will slowly regain function until you are healthy enough to stand up again.

* Never go around fighting with your entire squad. Always hold at least one person back to stealth in after the fight to stabilize and transport injured people to beds. If everyone in your squad gets put into a dying state then you basically have to reload.

* There are two different types of backpacks, regular and trader (the square ones). Regular backpacks tend to be larger and are better for things that cannot stack, like equipment. Trader backpacks can stack items and therefore are far better for transporting trade items.

* Automining copper is the easiest and most boring way to get quick cash. This is done by turning "jobs" on and shift-clicking on a copper resource. Pawns will mine it until the rock's inventory fills, then take it into their inventory. If you have a building with a copper storage box in it, they will also fill the box if they have a job for it, but otherwise they will just stand there waiting for a new order, so keep an eye on them. Squin has some copper resources right next to the town that let's you run to the guards if you start getting harassed.

* In my personal opinion, there is no shame in modding in some training cheats if you want to. Things like weight bench and sparring mat mods are out there that can make your life a lot easier and aren't game breaking since they only train you so far. It's a single player game, get whatever mods make the game more fun for you

Fired this up after work to try it out for a bit before I needed to start dinner going, and ouch.

So, first I got ganged up on by a gang of Hangry Men, had to crawl (quite literally) back to town which now I know I shouldn't have explored quite so far yet. Couldn't find a store (tutorial tip said "hold ALT to see store signs" but the only one I can find in my starting town is the town bar) so I bought a bandage from the bar, bandaged my bleeding crippled self on the floor, limped up to the roof and slept for a day to heal up.

Decided to find a copper deposit to mine close to town; turns out there was one out the other town entrance (not the one I spawned next to, thanks game!) pretty close. I was happily mining away when I spot an ugly dog-thing very purposefully coming my way. There wasn't anything or anyone else nearby looking to jump me so I figured what the heck, let's see how I do in combat.

Well... I did at least kill the dog-thing.

Took me a while to limp back to town and passed out twice along the way (or I did something wrong, not entirely sure). Barkeep probably gave me a funny look and muttered "this dumbass again? WTF". I bought out the other two bandages, found a spot on the floor not already covered by my blood, and bandaged myself up again, then slept for another day to heal up.

Not sure what I'm going to do next. I mean, I need money, so I guess it'll be keep trying to mine copper, but I was at it for a few hours and didn't get any, so that's a bit concerning. Also, I can't figure out how to eat my dried rations. Will have to google that.

Sorbicol wrote:

I'm not sure what's going to class as "completed" here and I'm wide open to suggestions. Despite what "howlongtobeat" thinks, I'm not sure there is an actual story as such. I'm tempted to say that so long as you put at least 20 hours in, I'll tick you as completed. this will operate on an honesty policy, so please, be honest. If there are profound disagreements to this, or I'm just plain wrong then please let me know.

I think it should be up to each player to set a "victory" condition for themselves. Because of how open-ended the game is, there's a lot of room for RP.

There do seem to be some common goals that come up in Kenshi "win condition" discussions, like the Bugmaster and Mad Cat-Lon bounties, or eliminating a major faction. For some players, though, it's just something like becoming completely self-sufficient, ie. able to produce everything you need to survive, and able to protect yourself from outside threats.

Kenshi seems to be all about creating stories. If you've played beyond X number of hours and you feel like you've played your story out to a sensible conclusion, that's good enough for me.

Thanks for the tips. Was going to look for a 10 things to know article or something.

Also saw a mod recommended on Twitter. Are there some key QoL mods recommended from Steam workshop or anything?

Sure, I'm in. It's bought and downloading, although it'll be a few weeks before I can fire it up for real.

I'm aware of Kenshi from a distance, since people seem to either find it to be brilliant or impenetrable. This seems like a good chance to try to dive in.

Bought it just now in case I get around to it in the next months, but I'm not comitting to it yet. Will be reading others stories though.

I'm in! I'll likely start my Kenshi journey in a week or two once I've wrapped up a couple of other games.

Bought and installed. Looked a bit on mods on steam, but it sounds like it is a bit complicated to make those work correctly (load order shenanigans).

Bought and installed. Played 15 minutes and I started in a town where literally every building except the Bar and Thieves Guild was destroyed. If there's a mod that gives the game more color I would dearly love to know about it...

I'm in. No idea what to expect from this one (other than a lot of getting beat up and slow progress). Should be fun!

You're all mad. I think probably I'll be sitting this one out, but we'll how my mood takes me over the next couple of months

*Legion* wrote:

I think it should be up to each player to set a "victory" condition for themselves. Because of how open-ended the game is, there's a lot of room for RP.

There do seem to be some common goals that come up in Kenshi "win condition" discussions, like the Bugmaster and Mad Cat-Lon bounties, or eliminating a major faction. For some players, though, it's just something like becoming completely self-sufficient, ie. able to produce everything you need to survive, and able to protect yourself from outside threats.

Kenshi seems to be all about creating stories. If you've played beyond X number of hours and you feel like you've played your story out to a sensible conclusion, that's good enough for me.

OK that sounds far.

To be marked as "complete", just let me know when you're done and I'll tick this one off. I can see this is a game about what you make of it rather than any specific objectives and that sounds fair enough.

Best of luck to you all!

My concern was how to finish the game, but that sounds good to me. I'm in.

I bought it during the sale, so I'm in. But given the various descriptions of it, I suspect that this game is a bit too much on the do-what-you-want-to-make-your-own-fun end of the spectrum for me to get much out of it. You never know though!

So I've encountered my first big bummer with Kenshi, and that is a lack of cloud saves.

Apparently that is because Kenshi's nature of an always-running (not just what's near you) full world simulation, which eventually results in the savegame files being too large to fit within Steam Cloud limits.

Understandable, but it hurts the ability to switch from desktop to Steam Deck and back.

Now that Steam supports LAN-based P2P game downloads, I wish they would support automatic over-LAN savegame sync too.

Probably just going to roll my own savegame sync setup.

EDIT: Oh yeah, gonna set up SyncThing for this. Since I have a home server, I can run SyncThing on that and so my other systems will have an always-on computer to send to/receive from, but if I didn't have a server, I could easily just SyncThing between the two of them. Here's a howto on Reddit for using Syncthing between a Deck and another PC for savegame purposes.

So my first attempt ended when I wound up not realizing that it's against the law to loot bandit corpses in town (corpses of bandits that I didn't even kill!) and the whole bar dogpiled me and I bled out to death.

I debated reloading, but honestly only had an hour or so in and was more interested in starting anew with lessons learned.

Started a new character, actually ended up starting in that same "town" again (but it sounds like that's somewhat random?). Ended up having to search online to figure out how to mine -- I had no idea that the ore you mine piled up in the ore deposit and needs to be manually picked up from there into your inventory!

Used that to get a little shack up and going, but had to go to the only other town I see on the map for now in order to buy a sleeping bag, a backpack, and some more building materials so I could build a research table and bed in my shack. I almost didn't make it back to the Hub (that's the town I've started in twice now) because as I got close, a gang of those damn Hangry Boys took up chase and came after me. I fortunately got to town and they got in trouble that peeled them off of me before I wound up crippled. Woot!

So... now I have some research done, a bed in my shack, and need to figure out what I should/could do next!

Farscry wrote:

Started a new character, actually ended up starting in that same "town" again (but it sounds like that's somewhat random?).

Starting location is determined by which "beginning" you pick, eg. if you pick Wanderer (the default option), you start in The Hub. Some game starts have a fixed starting location, others choose randomly from a set (eg. if you pick Cannibal Hunter, you start in a random cannibal village).

I'm 7 hours in, have bought a shack and a small house inside the Hub, hired my first party member, and have been bouncing between mining for $$$, using the money for buy stuff for research, building training dummies from that research, whacking at the training dummies to build melee levels, and goading passing-by mobs to chase me into town and punch my teeth in before the Trade Ninjas clobber them (after which I scoop-and-sell the left behind weapons and armor off the mob corpses)

Well, first impression could have been better. The camera frustrated me enough to quit last night, though to be fair, I’d had enough beer that doing anything requiring any amount of precision was a definite no-go, so I’ll give it another chance sometime this week.

The Hangry Boys flew through the gates of The Hub, like a singular wave of malnutrition and desperation.

My two-person party joined the Trade Ninjas in putting down the attack. Broken bodies strewn down the thoroughfare.

As my party looted the broken bodies for their clothing scraps, we discovered one of the guys wasn't dead or unconscious at all, but was faking! He "caught" us looting him, but he continued to lay there, faking incapacitation.

Hmm. We're not allowed to clobber him the rest of the way. How about you get on your feet and finish this fight?

But the hangry boy refused.

OK, how about if I first aid up your body? Nope. He laid there, silently healing, but refusing to stand.

Maybe you think you're protected in here. So we dragged him outside the city walls. But the boy continued to play possum.

You sonofab-... I've got teeth marks in my ass from you. We're going to finish this.

So we dragged his ass to our shack and put him in bed.

Apparently, once they're in bed, they're target-able again.

...

Spoiler:

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/YiWPTF9.png)

YOU HEAR ME TALKIN', HILLBILLY BOY? I AIN'T THROUGH WITH YOU BY A DAMN SIGHT!

Things got medieval. Hangry Boys have lost their Hub privileges.

My party has grown from two to six. I took on a scorchlander named Molly, whose one pre-existing skill was Cooking, but since scorchlanders have a -20% to Cooking, even that skill was below what it would normally be. Ah well, collecting misfit toys soon became a theme for my little band of ne'er-do-wells.

We poked our head outside of the Hub bubble for the first time, and visited the nearby Shek city of Squin. There we were insulted for our flatskin appearance and harassed to peek at our stuff like we were entering an NFL stadium, but otherwise allowed to enter.

At the bar, we found not one, but three Sheks looking to join our party. Two for only 3K Kenshimoleans each, and one hornless, disgraced warrior lady named Ruka who joined for free (unique recruit).

And now, day and night, the six of us train, and train, and train some more.

IMAGE(https://media.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPTc5MGI3NjExZWZjZTM4YjJiOWNiYjQwY2IwMzJhZGFhZTk3ZDAyZDEzODkyZjI1NiZjdD1n/e2nYWcTk0s8TK/giphy.gif)

IMAGE(https://media.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPTc5MGI3NjExZDI0NGUyM2FkZWMzMjM1ZTRmNjk4MmZiMTk2ZTVmNWQ5ZmM4NDBlNCZjdD1n/26tPrcX6EfSj5N0HK/giphy.gif)

IMAGE(https://media.giphy.com/media/26tPkINmJHvdfanGU/giphy.gif)

IMAGE(https://media.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPTc5MGI3NjExNzI1MjE4YmIyMjdkNjY1MjhiYWFhZmJmOTA0NWUyYzY2MDY1NGY4ZSZjdD1n/Q3mkfoatPNuco/giphy.gif)

We train so hard that, when a group of us split off to mine copper, the heavy labor is almost a reprieve.

We venture forth soon. We bought many maps, and know of places near and far, outside of the small localized existence we have lived until now.

I did the character creator as a wanderer. Takes me forever to get a person I'm happy looking at. Then I entered a village, did the movement tutorial, saved and quit.

Maybe a deeper dive soon

I'm in. So far I just dipped my feet in to check it out. I need to finish what I'm playing before I commit. First impressions:

Yeah, this UI and camera feels like it's from 20 years ago when developers were still experimenting with what works and doesn't.

Graphics are pretty old school as well. Not too bad, since we're dealing with sparse wilderness areas (at least where I started).

The pseudo-Asian, postapocalyptic, fantasy character design kind of reminds me of Zeno Clash. That's a good thing, since that was probably the best aspect of that game.

I went with the default Wanderer origin. Picked hive worker as my race. Why? Well, the stats look good (I have no idea really). The backstory of being that rare individual worker who actually survives separation from its hive seems interesting (not sure if that actually influences anything though- kinda doubt it).

The main reason though? Hive workers look ridiculous- like some extra we see for 2 seconds in a Star Wars bar scene. It's almost endearing. The hive warrior is even better in this regard, but I'm not gonna play as a tough, mindless lunk.

I'm debating whether or not to play around with the sliders to impose maximum ridiculousness on my character.

Couple UI mods I recommend:

Dark UI - cleaner, easier to read. From watching Kenshi videos, it sure seems like basically everyone uses this.

Nice Map - the second most highly used Kenshi UI mod on Steam Workshop, adds zone names and roads

Camera is something you get used to, but I do disable edge scrolling, because I only ever did it accidentally. WASD scrolling is superior IMO.

I figured out how to automate mining tasks. Through research, I unlocked being able to build containers, and I didn't know why you would need type-specific containers when you can just put everything into general containers. Well, automation is why!

Build a Copper container. Shift-right-click on a Copper resource to assign mining as a Job to a party member, then Shift-right-click on the Copper container to assign Hauling to that container as a job. The party member will mine until the resource's container is full (5 items), then will haul those 5 to the container, and come back and resume mining.

Better, if the resource supports being mined by multiple people simultaneously, you can do this with multiple party members. Only one of them will do the hauling when it gets full, while the other(s) dutifully continue mining.

Best, if you assign multiple mining resources to party members, they'll move down their list and mine whichever one isn't being fully mined at the time. So when I pull someone away for another task (or to convalesce after a fight), the gap gets filled and work continues.

It's less complicated than it looks when written out. Now that I've poked at it, I can see how an entire settlement can be run with some simple job assignment.

After a period of discovering areas outside of The Hub, my group decided it was time to find a place to call home for real.

Soon, we stumbled upon a peculiar area. It had resources to mine, and all the space we would need. It sat in a valley, and despite ostensibly being desert, the soil's fertility was off the charts.

There was only one possible name for such a place. And thus, New Fresno was born.

The founding did not come easily. Before completed buildings (let alone walls) could even go up, the settlement drew the ire of the Holy Nation. We had long since thrown their silly book away, and sent their prayer mongers packing.

Days later, the Nation invaded. We scrambled to bring in some mercenary reinforcements prior to the attack, and despite seemingly grim odds, we repulsed the attack with minimal casualties.

Yet the battle had hardly ended before a wave of Hangry Boys decided to attack before we could even patch ourselves up. Usually they're not a problem, but the fight with the Holy Nation had taken a toll.

As we put down the Hangry Boy attack, a smaller, splinter group of Holy Nation fighters swooped in from the west, striking our flank out of nowhere. They weren't part of the original fighting force. We never saw them coming, and though we had the numbers, we had to pull back our wounded and scramble to bring people to the front that were in any shape to fight.

Finally, the fighting was over... we thought. As we patched ourselves up and ferried the most severely wounded to beds, a group of Holy Nation Outlaws walked through our camp. Usually we have no issue with them, they're former slaves and servants who escaped the Holy Nation, and we all coexisted in the Hub. But I guess being far enough away from the Hub changes things, because one of them shouted, "out here, it's every man for himself!", and the group attacked.

Four battles fought consecutively, each subsequent one with no warning. By the end, everyone in the group was hanging on by a thread, but miraculously avoided death or permanent disfigurement. The mercenaries earned their money, and the fighters who had to repeatedly get up off the mat to face another wave of attackers saw their Toughness reach new heights.

The battle became known as the Rally in the Valley, and the charter for New Fresno was signed in the blood of those who sought to crush it at inception.

*Legion* wrote:

After a period of discovering areas outside of The Hub, my group decided it was time to find a place to call home for real. [Redacted]

See it's stuff like this that makes me think about wanting to play this game.

Good grief.

Sorbicol wrote:
*Legion* wrote:

After a period of discovering areas outside of The Hub, my group decided it was time to find a place to call home for real. [Redacted]

See it's stuff like this that makes me think about wanting to play this game.

And only really the last paragraph of that was out-of-game editorializing.

Like, the Outlaw really did yell "out here, it's every man for himself!" and surprise attack, which was cool, because it communicated exactly why people from a faction we lived alongside in the Hub was suddenly attacking my people.

And the Holy Nation did indeed attack because we spurned them on Prayer Day. You can appease them instead and participate in Prayer Day if you have the right conditions.

I love games that lean harder on simulation and interacting systems over heavily scripted content.

I hate those damn Hangry Boys. I'm really trying to play this without reloads, but they've made it very difficult to do so.

On my current run, I am probably playing VERY suboptimally, but I'm playing very cautiously along with avoiding spoilers as much as I reasonably can. Spent some time around the hub getting some basic skill-ups (Athletics, mainly), bought and fixed up a shanty so I could stash my meager stuff, then made a run to the only known city on the map other than the Hub (city to the south-southeast, I forget the name.

Spent a lot of time there mining to make money as well as build up Strength, brought stuff back to The Hub to build a science table & bed in my shack and do some initial research, went back down south again for more mining fundraising and finally got my first recruit, spent time building up their athletics & strength a bit, and then traveled back to The Hub again where I'm trying to figure out what to do next that isn't more mining to earn more money, because that's getting dull with how slow the progress is.

And we got the sh*t kicked out of us on the way back to the Hub so badly by Hangry Boys that I had to reload so my new recruit wouldn't be dead.

I like this game's concepts, and there's so much to explore, and I am very interested in settlement building, but the initial hump to become reasonably self-sufficient and resilient is really damn rough.

Farscry wrote:

And we got the sh*t kicked out of us on the way back to the Hub so badly by Hangry Boys that I had to reload so my new recruit wouldn't be dead.

If you get caught out in the open in a combat scenario you're not ready for, run! Make them chase you into town, where the town's security forces can help you put down the attack.

A good way to train up your people is to bait this exact situation. When you see a hostile group that would otherwise pass by the town you're in, send someone out to bait them, and have them chase you into town. But be sure your people are there to greet them at the door so that your guys part of the melee, and it's not just the hostiles vs. town security.

Get another couple recruits, then send all but one guy out to bait bandits into a fight. Fight 'em and kite 'em back to the Hub entrance. As you get braver, let them fight longer before kiting. Let your guys get downed. The one guy you hold back is your medic, to swoop in there and fix them up after the bandits walk off.

And once you have a few more people, you can set a couple people to automate the copper mining, so that you no longer have to actively give it attention. Mining is MUCH less tedious when you research containers and can build a copper container, allowing you to assign a person or two to mine + haul to container.

Then the only manual part left is selling the ore off. Make sure you buy at least one wooden backpack (which lets items stack, unlike normal backpacks), so that one person can haul off a large amount of ore and sell it off in one run.

Just a reminder that I'm in

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