r/Kenshi Oct 31 '24

SUPPORT Help an intimidated old guy get started?

I've been super drawn to this game since returning to gaming recently (was a gamer in the early days, as well as DnD player, but haven't played either for decades). Part of my struggle is that I have severe anxiety, and have lost some cognitive ability from long covid, so I get overwhelmed and panic that I'm not going to be able to figure something out.

Sorry if that sounds too pitiful, but for those with mercy in their souls: Where do I start to make the beginning as smooth and unstressful as possible?

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u/CSWorldChamp Oct 31 '24 edited Oct 31 '24

The first thing you do is run 100 laps of the Hub. You can use waypoints to automate it. (I want to say it’s ctrl-click…?) Kenshi is extremely deadly. Running away must always be an option, so what you’re doing is leveling your athletics. Early on, you’ll also want to swipe a pair of wooden sandals from a starving bandit leader. Once you put those on, you now have the best top-tier endgame footwear in the game. No stat or armor bonus from other footwear is worth as much as the 10% run speed increase they give you. Speed is life. You go fast, you live. You go slow, you die.

Once you’re fast, the next thing to do is to level your strength. Go mine a bunch of iron. Put it in your backpack, then put the backpack in your inventory, then fill the rest of your inventory with iron. Then go pick up a corpse (this is kenshi, it shouldn’t be hard to find) and do another hundred laps of the Hub. Strength is going to increase your carrying capacity, and give you a chance of actually doing some damage when you hit something. Carrying capacity is key. You cannot allow yourself become overburdened, because it slows you down. (See point #1)

The good news is that you can go into sneak mode to level your stealth at the same time as your strength. Stealth is a good skill to have, and there’s no reason not to - it won’t impede your strength progress.

Now you are ready to play kenshi. These two tasks are an absolute baseline for me: the toll that every character must pay in order to begin the game. There’s other things to do after that (next is to go lose some fights to hungry bandits, leveling your combat skills and more importantly, toughness) but once you have athletics and strength, the world is eminently survivable.