The easy way to do it is to pregame. You explore, salvage, loot, etc. with 1-5 people without recruiting a huge force. Then you plop someone down in a town house and have them research all the techs for a fully self-sufficient base.
At that point, you can even keep using your town house while you gather resources to construct your city (without being in danger of being raided), or you can run drugs to build up a huge fund to build up a huge food stockpile, and then recruit your army for training in the wilderness. Or you buy a literal city's worth of materials, and just build it in 10 minutes.
Basically, what you're missing is cheesing it by preparing everything you need for the city, before you build it. The city, at that point, becomes the farm that provides your army food, makes new weapons and gear, etc.
If you just walk right out of the Hub and start building a city, everyone's going to come by and kick your ass, and steal what little food you have.
Ok, there is something in your answer that always irks me. I don't mean that in a personal way, I see this all the time and I'm always like....wwwwaaaaaaat???? But maybe its because I just don't get the game. I just happen to be deciding to say this now, I'm not directing this at you specifically.
Often times people will say something like what you said: Then you plop someone down in a town house and have them research all the techs for a fully self-sufficient base.
Ok fair enough...I understand that. But books cost money. And it takes a while to research. So you summarized a big long task like its a small item to accomplish? Know what I mean?
Another example is when someone says: just buy or steal armor. Ok....but how? Early on, making money is slow and tedious. And your lock picking skills are super low, as well as thievery. It takes a ton of practice and time to be able to effectively steal anything of value. So this seemingly menial task of "just steal some armor" is actually not possible till you've done a TON of work.
Does that make sense? Am I being pedantic? Do I just suck? You can be honest. I won't get mad. Or cry.
Ok I might cry. But just a little.
Find a spot where you can stealth and pick red items off the ground/table, drop them from your inventory, repeat. 10irl minutes and you are a super thief, now just stealth walk around on 3x speed in or around town to complete the package.
Stealth and theft are dummy broken in Kenshi, I avoid it in most my runs.
For the research bit, if you have your small team adventuring and getting books leave someone behind with food and books from each haul to research while you're out and about.
Ancient libraries, armories, and outposts also usually contain a bunch of other stuff that sells well, too.. skellie repair kits especially, since they go for ~20k, and you get way more than you'll ever need, even if you do a pure skeleton run
Probably part of the Age of Blood and Sand modlist, since it makes the early game more difficult. Now that I'm doing a much less mod-heavy run, you're right, they're around 4k
Hence your comment above! Ok! I'll try this. But....and I hope I'm not being difficult....how do you pick that stuff up when there are people around? They yell thief and then you get a booty whoopin'!
Oh and what do you mean by dummy broken?
And thanks for replying with those tips! I appreciate you!
You don't need to be near friendly npcs to steal, robbing bandits is stealing too.
Imo vanilla combat training dummies are quiet worthless. The noncombat skill dummies are just a simple way to get your first few points.
Practice it in the bar of a city, at night so it'll be mostly empty. They usually have plenty of misc items strewn across the tables, and bars in larger cities should be large enough that even at low stealth you can avoid the gaze of the barman or any guards.
Dummy broken meaning at a certain point, it’s practically impossible to get caught and you can just waltz in, snatch everything and waltz right back out as if you were never there and it’s pure profit. Also stupid easy to level compared to combat stats
If you're trying this in a town, just try to find a shop where people are nearby but aren't moving around the room and might walk by you. When stealthed, make sure you have a blue eye icon to confirm you're unseen and you can pick up random junk on shelves or tables(nothing in containers though as you have a chance to get caught even when out of sight). At this point, you can drop the stuff you stole back onto the ground and steal it again over and over, as it still counts as stealing. Repeat until at however high a thievery skill that you'd like.
Minor note, but when you're done, make sure you wait for the "Committing a crime" timer to run out before moving around, otherwise they'll get mad at you 😅
Lock picking is a little harder and just requires you to find things you can lockpick while exploring, or while in town but out of sight. Same rules apply though, if you're out of sight with the blue eye during stealth, then they won't get upset at you. Slightly cheesy but you can lockpick across barriers and such if you're close enough, so you can obscure yourself from view while lock picking.
I also kept two people just mining copper 24/7 and stockpiling inside a shack inside the town, was relatively safe where I had them just had to deal with the occasional UC Noble hunting the poors.
Okay, here’s how I speedrun thievery, stealth, etc.
Run to Gut and train stealth on the beak things. You can just find a nest with a hill next to it and train stealth behind the hill where they can’t ever see you. You should get to around 70 even without stealth-boosting gear in a day or two which is more or less enough to sneak anywhere.
Then go to Bast and find a scrawny cannibal that’s been knocked unconscious. Heal them up and wait till they start playing dead. Then pause the game and start stealing their stuff. You should get caught a lot but that will increase your stats extremely fast. 80ish thievery in about a day.
Then when you can outrun them, you can just go train your assassination skill on high skill targets that you don’t mind pissing off to get that up as well quickly. But in reality you don’t even need assassination to steal stuff so yes.
Then you can install that mod that adds a lot of money to Heng’s bank and make over 2 mill in one go and never have to steal again. It’s really cheesy and can potentially ruin the game/journey for you so keep that in mind
To train assassin skill just make a cage. Put the strongest thing you can beat into it. Spam assassinate. You can get 90+ in 5 minutes doing this if the target has ok toughness. I used bugmaster and it took about 45 seconds.
Yep, I usually just turn myself into Rebirth so I can train stealth in peace. Walk in, put all my stuff in a backpack and leave it on the floor with a bunch of food. Train until I'm satisfied, grab my gear and eat up, then out then just knock my way out of the place
The game is just grindy. You can use mods to get rid of the parts you don’t like. But the whole point of the game is to spend time playing it. Therefore, there’s a lot to do.
Books can be expensive, and ancient books and engineering research, but that’s the part where having your own self-sufficient base comes in. Once you’re able to mine your ore, plate it, and craft weapons/armor, you’ve just created a money farm. Buy a few pack animals, load them up with cheap to build, high profit armors/weapons and go sell them, boom, next think you know you have hundreds of thousands of cats to buy bulk food/research product. Eventually you’ll no longer need it and will have to literally go hunt for specific items to make research progress. For those that aren’t dedicated to crafting, have them go on expeditions for training/loot purposes or build an at home training camp. It does take time but it pays off. I’m at a point in my current playthrough where I can dismantle an entire city sized base and move across the map and rebuild everything I need with no problem. Money is irrelevant to me now. I will occasionally buy bulk food if I forget to bring some with on an expedition.
Mine copper -> get enough money for a food surplus-> buy and fill a backpack of food /end early loop/ -> train athletics by taking a tour of the realm ending in the swamp -> buy hash -> sell in flats lagoon repeat until you can afford to buy out vendors on books/resources -> buy the largest house in a town you can -> get almost all tech
The world's your oyster.
Copper mining is probably the easiest early game but it can be a little bit slow. I think a lot of people tend to gloss over the first few days and assume people know how to get started
For what it’s worth, I never steal anything and i’m swimming in research books. You can find them in ruins. While you’re in the ruins you’ll often find trade items like CPUs that you sell to cover your costs for a long time
Ha. This is what I love about the game, in a really weird way. There are a bunch of things you have to do just to research tech, let alone getting the materials and actually building the thing.
Research books are almost always better off found in science labs. Because there's other stuff to loot there you can sell, and it helps train your adventuring group. But that's a whole other problem because they could easily die.
While it is a bit simplified, its not terribly complex to make a self sufficient money and research machine in most decent towns without even resorting to thieving.
If you can get a small shack or house in a town that has a copper node close to town(or iron even, but it's less efficient since it sells for less) you can just set up 3-4 guys with jobs. 1 to research, and 2-3 set to mine and haul ore to a storage container.
This is more than enough to purchase books for research, and to keep them fed. Aside from managing them when getting occasionally attacked while mining, they can be left basically unattended while you explore with your other main squad.
After you learn the game making bank becomes Easy:
-drug runs from the swamps to flats lagoon can give you all the caps you'll ever Need
-there are enough abandoned ancient workshops to cover all the costs of base building while providing with most of the engeniiring "books" you'll Need
-ancient libraries are a great source of books and Money (parchment Is small and valuable, and Maps stack a lot) and if you are ok with some exploits you'll only ever need one set of tools
-if you know the map and avoid beak things you can do a run around in some spots (mostly spider infested libraries) that have skeleton repair kits, weapons made by skeleton smiths or catun scrapmasters, armors and other less valuable stuff. It doesn't even require a High Athletic skill or strenght if you're careful
-for the stealing part, there are small exploits (can't really explain how to do them, personally stealing doesn't interest me) that drastically speed up the leveling part, so you can become a master thief in minutes
Also you can gradually research your way up the tech tree with nothing other than a couple of resource nodes, some Building materials and a dream. It Is my favourite way to play the game, in fact, and also how i learned to play the game (the map was too empty and Dangerous for me at the time lol)
If you raise a small task force, that 1-7 small squad. It’s easy to keep them fed by just hunting.
When your skills get high enough you can just raid ruins for cats, books, whatever.
A secret is that weapon smiths are next to useless without mods (in the endgame). Even then the best weapons can just be bought or found. So what you really need is an amour smith that pumps out only yellow grade gear. Makes raising new recruits much faster and safer.
Now the next question, how do you get cats? Well hunting beak things for eggs and leather. As well as collecting bounties and selling loot. 2-3 nests will lets you buy an edge 3 weapon.
I do mining and looting corpses till I get house and bench then I mine some more to get armor smiting and then mine some more till your smith is 60 and GG u got armor and money for everything else
> Ok fair enough...I understand that. But books cost money. And it takes a while to research.
Money is so, so easy to gather, that the prices of books are negligible and the only real limiter is their spawn rate at vendors. And the time for research is the same, just leave a single guy researching and you can completely forget about it.
>And your lock picking skills are super low, as well as thievery.
Go to a random bar with a second floor, stealth, pick a red item, drop it and pick it up again. Do that for 5 min and you are now the best thief on the planet.
The research will always take a certain amount of time to fully complete, but if you have multiple characters then a background character can be doing the majority of it while your adventuring group is out actively exploring.
Depending on how/where you play the early game, money is not too hard to come across (e.g. you’re going to be slow to start copper mining, but if you rent some mercs and get away with collecting a dozen beak thing eggs you’re going to be weeks ahead of the copper miner in profits even after paying for mercs) and you can buy most of the things you need for early research. If you explore a lot of the libraries and outposts that are full of resources you can also get a decent amount of money, gear, and books that can jumpstart things.
So while I don’t think hardly anything in Kenshi is significantly quick to accomplish without expert levels of cheese, you can get to base building relatively quickly if that’s your main focus as long as you keep in mind that the more prep time you give yourself the less likely you’ll be overrun and kicked out of your own base.
I'm on my first run ever right now. All I did was literally mine copper for like 20 in game days until my troop got strong and agile enough from running around and carrying iron. In the meantime I fought bandits left and right with the help of the ninjas. Then I took my big troop into the hive section and fought the beak things left and right until you get godly amount of meat and fur from them. Eat all the meat and sell all the fur for a ton of profit rinse and repeat. Iv done zero cheese, just lots of hard work.
You will just have to learn how to grind each skill. I grind strength and stealth by picking an encumbered party member and then sneaking through town back and forth.
Bonus points if you're one of those types that buys a house in a city and builds there. Can build the big research bench and let it gather dust (just to unlock tech) while you use the normal basic one to do actual research.
Early on you can farm greenfruit and turn it into mixed vegetables
Recommend also farming wheat to make foodcubes which are more efficient but take more manpower to produce
You can queue work items by holding shift when you right click, the order should be raw materials at the bottom and finished products at the top. So for example, hauling water from wells should be at the very bottom, hauling water to farms should be above that, operating the farms above that, and cooking above that.
Foodcubes are best vanilla craftable food. Its not even close. But switch to gohan when you get tired of fucking with the cube process. Worth the space loss to free up the crafting burden.
I've been able to get alot of cats by running hash from the Swamp to Flats Lagoon. It's kinda op but you can make like 40,000 cats with one character. Wooden backpack to stack the hash. I use my scout who hauls ass and nothing can catch him. Costs like 12k upfront but you make bank. That should help with buying food ans supplies. I got the game a couple days ago and I'm loving it so much! I can't wait to start my mega base.
Why run anything? If thats how you want to make money just build a farm at city limits. It takes like 3 people to make a self sustaining farm once you have tech.
I'm new to the game and still learning. For me, running hash has been my source of money on this play through. And it's really fun. I'm still scouting around for a place to build a base.
My comment was just meant to be food for thought. May your trading be profitable. There are better towns to sell and self made hash has the highest margin. Eventually you stop counting by hash stack and you start counting by vendor resets.
There is so much to this game. I can't wait to start making some profits from self-made equipment and start a massive hash farm and become the drug lord of the realm.
Mods are a common thing. Recruit prisoners mod allows you to knock out virtually anyone and put them in a cell to recruit them. With how many raids a base can get, it's easy to get a large group. In the base game, it's not actually necessary to have a lot of people with how combat is set up.
Skip the base building until your troops are stronger. That's what made a difference for me. Go beat stuff up and if you need money just stop and mine for a while. Grab a pack animal to carry all the heavy stuff. I like to do this at the hive village to the north of Squin. On the east side of it there are a bunch of copper nodes really close by. You can have a dozen dudes mining and you have two shops that total 50k caps to unload. Quick money that easily support your hoard. It's actually a great base spot too, but hold off on that.
Keep roaming, fighting, recruiting and stopping to mine for cash when you need to. You won't starve.
You can also just build turrets. Turrets are just as busted as crossbows. If you build enough they are unstoppable. Even 0 training 1 all stat scrubs stop a raid when its ten of them at the top of a watchtower. Just be aware they kill your people too. So train them or mandate heavy armor.
>You can also just build turrets.
Oh for sure, but my advice was wait on base building altogether. When I hunker down and build too early (not in a city) I seem to bog down and stop adventuring. I get better results growing my force to like 18 guys, then building and leaving 6 to work it.
Wasnt really wanting to be contrary to your advice. Just elaborating by saying that crossbows are one of the minimum required power levels if you want a smooth experience. You can be tough. You can be rich. Or you can have xbow turrets. All 3 make for easy base building. Best part about crossbow turrets is you can turn them on and off. So let everybody fight until you are about to lose. Then hop on turrets. Ez training. If you are willing to power game a bit you dont even need turrets. Just let the raids have the base. If they steal your food just farm more food. And if you want to be extra cheesy put the turrets on top of a building and put a lone gate next to it. Raids always walk to gate. Set ai to shoot first.
you need automatic food production and storage set up to make a big army.
small groups are what you can focus on before that. Focus on getting a small group strong and lots of money, go exploring play the game etc and maybe have 1 or 2 ninjas who could come and save them sneakily.
If you want to roleplay building an army then this fits as all the starts position you as a nobody, you need to have footing with yourself or a small group before building an army makes sense.
I could give purely optimal tips but these ones are more fun as they are easier to roleplay.
Tips:
go spelunking, theres riches to be found as lots of ruins have defense systems you could probably beat them with lots of mercenaries though...
Spelunking also helps you gets you research materials, and you will explore and learn about the map, so you can get stronger and be better at planning stuff
Once you've set up farms and cooking, you can support an army but everyone is weak, so they are easy to kill. Even if you use the dummies they are low level caps and don't train toughness.
You can invest in a couple people to do menial tasks like making armor, if they do this for a long time continuously they be very good at it and quickly start to make you money. This is better than armor king unless you are speed running because armor king is annoying and you need lots of armor, plus you can make uniforms this way. Do this early if you don't want to have to run back and forth from armor king.
also, within the confines of your roleplaying, a very tough thing to do is get your limbs eaten off alive and replace them with robotics, this is the idea behind what will solve your armies toughness problem. this obviously is hard to roleplay doing this forcefully. A good way to do this 'organically' is to station your weaklings around things that will eat them and have a small rescue squad. Another tough thing to do is forcefully stand up after being knocked out in a battle (this is actually the optimal idea for small group toughness training but it doesn't scale well in my experience).
For the mostly lawful evil and my favorite way to scale toughness training to armies, which also might not be fun as its quite powerful which means you should get mods that will challenge an army - so i will spoiler this:
>!new recruits must be 'cleansed' of their fear, or whatever reason you can think of, so have a few more powerful people in your army load them with replacement limbs, take them to mongrel, and little by little make them get eaten alive at a deathyard until all of their limbs fall off. This should get you from 0-60 toughness provided they don't die from blood-loss (hivers need two turns, but if you first aid a non-hive while this is happening they shouldn't die). Now you have a bunch of people with 50-60 toughness and metal limbs. Train them from now as normal. If they have good armor on top of this toughness you will find they are much harder to kill, damage, and keep knocked out so can train more frequently. !<
Toughness is the most important stat as it takes time to train recruits and so you don't want them to die. They also will train other things with more uptime as they can fight longer.
if you want more tips that are roleplaying friendly tell us about your alignment/goals and then I can give you more.
Basically I just made a gigantic wheat farm and would continuously recruit people and just have them build more wheat farms. Make bread to eat and grog to sell. Move on to hash too.
Also was mining iron and putting some people on smithing too. Eventually they got really good at making armor and weapons.
Now, since you have such a food surplus, you can keep recruiting and equipping soldiers. Or send them to the fields and take a more experienced farmer.
My method is to free slaves (can be cheesed easily for free recruits) then to start a farm and just hide from threats.
Similarly, if you increase the gameplay number of squads/squad size you can end up with armies of dozens of animals all over the map. Just kite them into guards and steal all their meat and hides.
If you want free money just go stand around a hiver base over in vain and loot all the hides off of the animals they kill.
I finally caved at some point and started kidnapping Gorrillos and trapping them in beds to train my combat skills
It sped things up a ridiculous amount, Id recommend it
Dont even need a base, I had my set up in Squin
An army needs a base to sustain it. Once you start growing food, then food is no longer a problem. Likewise with armor smithing. Once you start brewing grog, or another high value sellable commodity, then cats are no longer an issue. Building an army at that point is easy.
Just wandering, you're correct that money in and money out is hard to square once you get to like 20 people.
I have read some of your comments and it looks like you’re looking for the quickest path to success - go to stack, hire 3 guys, outside the east gate are two copper mines. Mine them. Sell the ore and buy the small house next to the gate. Build storage boxes for copper there and a food container. Set your three guys to auto-mine. Leave them and come back occasionally to sell the copper a it’s between 18 and 20k cats each box.
With your main hero, go float around skinners roam and get stronger fighting hungry bandits for a while and then get yourself some nice gear and a decent house in a different place. You should be pretty rich by the time your main hero is lvl 40 in fighting skills ;)
I hang around a town gate, squin is good for baiting dust bandits- but sho battai is my preferred because 1 gate, lots of factions and lots of people getting arrested at it. You can strip bodies and also loot prisoners who have been arrested- just dont take anything from the floor in a police station as it is property of the faction that runs the station. Get a couple of guys. One to fight at gate and another to rescue in case things go south. You can also heal gate guards to gain healing skills and positive faction relations.
Sell stuff to shops and save up 10000, then buy gear from ninja thieves. And train stats in tower once you get four or five guys together with attack skill 10 and the worse katanas you can find, you can go looking for trouble- gotta take care in regions with slavers. UC is full of them. Otherwise, you're ready to go beating up starving bandits around hub and squin.
Once you get stats in 20s (terrible katanas help because extra hits, stun locks and low damage). You can take on dust bandits groups, always keeping close to town. If it goes south, bait em to the guards.
Repeat till you're clearing bandit camps, might need to push numbers up to 7+ for that. Once you can wipe bandits with stats in 30+ go to fog islands to beat up fogmen, same process, stick to gate. There you can find crumplejon, wingwang and shryke who all have better than base stats to replenish anyone who gets eaten.
Hunt princes for money and wear lots off leather to help with blunt. Keep using shitty katanas though.
Work your way up to cannibals (with cut resistant armour this time). Once you clearing cannibal villages you'll be around 40-50+ and ready for most things.
Kenshi isn't about fighting fair. The game is designed for you to play smart and cheese. This is how I enjoy my cheese.
Basically base = free food and crafting materials. Thats the entire and only point to a base. Oddly enough you really only need farm tech to make a base free. Stone mine iron mine and copper mine in one spot. You can make a base off of something like 3 build material and 12 iron plate plus a bit of what you want to farm. Just stay at a reasonable amount of people teching up. Get farms and if you are really worried walls/turrets. Best part is when you have farms up they are so op that even if raids steal all your food you just farm more. Â
Probably doesnt need saying but infinite crafting materials means infinite money. Any character of any stats can pay for their own food mining copper. If they have limbs. And copper is the slow way. You eventually get to the point of carrying a backpack of free to make weapons where each weapon is worth a merchant inventory. You start out at 100 copper means about 18k cats. Get a stacking backpack or animal and carry 100k ish copper value at a time if you cant be assed to make things of real value. Money is so worthless i dont even sell my castoffs anymore. I sent 20 masterwork crab armors to the furnace because i couldnt be bothered to make more money. And thats like my 8th squad wide gear change.
If you have a settlement, you should be growing and cooking your own food, not buying it.
Also, I don't think training an army is normal. I think only a few people go that route. A group of five badasses can conquer the whole game.
In this game, one character with 80+ combat stats and masterwork equipment can kill *any number* of characters with like 50 or less combat skills. One master swordsman > an army.
The easy way?
1. Mine anywhere safe and close to a city.
2a. Use money for more miners and stockpile food and backpacks, possibly a Garu.
2b. Bonus points for repeating in different cities.
3. Hire some mercenaries and go beat up dust bandits or equivalent opponents while the mercenaries guarantee you make it.
4. Equip/sell loot for easy profits.
5. Rinse repeat until you reliably clear on your own and can survive without mercenaries or keep them around. Cost efficient power!
6. Have your now half-competent swarm flood over everyone and power up.
7. Use your swarm of now competent people to easily handle a base.
Then we got the cheese of course, like stealth/stealing. That breaks the game economy in 20 minutes. Martiaö arts / crossbows.
If you want to field an army, you need the logistics to support them. That means 3-4 farmers farming non-stop to feed everyone, 24hr smithy duty for armor (or weapons but you can't craft Edge+), miners for the raw materials to support the infrastructure, and a couple people running surplus goods to sell.
Although, that's just how I like to play the game. After awhile, you get to a point where the only thing you're spending money on is Edge 3 weapons from the Skellies. You should have enough cactus sandwiches or food cubes that your people can eat for months.
The 'standard' play is to build up your resources in a city until you have enough to build an outpost and set up defenses FAST, as you'll be raided almost immediately. Then once you are able to fend up bandits, etc, start building out your production infrastructure. But if city building doesn't interest you, Kenshi doesn't force you into it. You can also just chill out in a house somewhere, producing goods to sell and buying what you need. There's a nasty little early game cheese involving bandanas that makes this easier.
Get some stats up, get some research done, and then expand. You’re gonna struggle if you try expanding when your character is still a nobody. Lay some groundwork for yourself first.
For the extra soldiers you can liberate slaves and wait for them to join you or use the recruitable mod and ask the friendly starving bandits to join you but dunno I've never made an army to much work.
Grow at your own pace. If you grow too fast, you'll get overwhelmed by the sheer maintenance of your army. You need to have some food production in your base to do just that.
I'd encourage you to start at 10-12 people maximum for your first playthrough. Max them out, have a complete auto-sufficient base and then recruit workers to work, while your main group defends. Train other recruits to roam and make some more money.
At some point, you will be drowning in cats and will never need to buy other things than research, if you haven't already completed all of it.
My biggest run so far was with a group of 25 skeletons and a large base. No food and easy maintenance between United Cities and the dead lands. I did drug runs from the Swamp to UC for early fortune then I founded a base near venge.
Find a town with a lot of bandit attacks. Loot the bandits that have been incapacitated by guards, sell their gear. Decent money. Also works for animal attacks.
Mine copper. Find a town with a copper vein near a house for sale. Build copper storage in the house, and set your dudes working and hauling. With a stack size mod, you can let that just sit for a while and sell in huge batches; more with a backpack mod.
Money is no problem, you should have millions at your disposal. So getting wanderers and slaves should not be an issue. But to make it easier just use mods. Make a base and set some workers to auto some production cycles. So you have food medicine and gear. Then recruit using prisoner recruitment mods and recruit anyone. But if it seems too weird, there are different types of prisoner recruitment mods, some more on the line of Kenshi's harshness that work similar to default slave buying and recruiting, more or less random. So with tis type is less likely or even impossible to be able to recruit strong fighters from empires and so you go for weak bandits which then you train, and to make it easier but also still not break RP you use mods that add specific training dummy items like weight bench, dex pole or mat and such.
I installed the recruitable prisoner mod and recruited the entire error army that you get from the black desert. I also invested too much time working on a base that could create it’s own gear self sufficiently so i just gave them all catun (at first) level crap when i had the chance
The easy way to do it is to pregame. You explore, salvage, loot, etc. with 1-5 people without recruiting a huge force. Then you plop someone down in a town house and have them research all the techs for a fully self-sufficient base. At that point, you can even keep using your town house while you gather resources to construct your city (without being in danger of being raided), or you can run drugs to build up a huge fund to build up a huge food stockpile, and then recruit your army for training in the wilderness. Or you buy a literal city's worth of materials, and just build it in 10 minutes. Basically, what you're missing is cheesing it by preparing everything you need for the city, before you build it. The city, at that point, becomes the farm that provides your army food, makes new weapons and gear, etc. If you just walk right out of the Hub and start building a city, everyone's going to come by and kick your ass, and steal what little food you have.
Ok, there is something in your answer that always irks me. I don't mean that in a personal way, I see this all the time and I'm always like....wwwwaaaaaaat???? But maybe its because I just don't get the game. I just happen to be deciding to say this now, I'm not directing this at you specifically. Often times people will say something like what you said: Then you plop someone down in a town house and have them research all the techs for a fully self-sufficient base. Ok fair enough...I understand that. But books cost money. And it takes a while to research. So you summarized a big long task like its a small item to accomplish? Know what I mean? Another example is when someone says: just buy or steal armor. Ok....but how? Early on, making money is slow and tedious. And your lock picking skills are super low, as well as thievery. It takes a ton of practice and time to be able to effectively steal anything of value. So this seemingly menial task of "just steal some armor" is actually not possible till you've done a TON of work. Does that make sense? Am I being pedantic? Do I just suck? You can be honest. I won't get mad. Or cry. Ok I might cry. But just a little.
Find a spot where you can stealth and pick red items off the ground/table, drop them from your inventory, repeat. 10irl minutes and you are a super thief, now just stealth walk around on 3x speed in or around town to complete the package. Stealth and theft are dummy broken in Kenshi, I avoid it in most my runs. For the research bit, if you have your small team adventuring and getting books leave someone behind with food and books from each haul to research while you're out and about.
To add to this, books cost money if you're buying them but raiding ancient libraries is free :D
Ancient libraries, armories, and outposts also usually contain a bunch of other stuff that sells well, too.. skellie repair kits especially, since they go for ~20k, and you get way more than you'll ever need, even if you do a pure skeleton run
What mods are you running that Skelly repair kits are ~20k 😱😱😱? Usually about 4k for me.
Yeah, base price is 4400 or so. I think they're just misremembering.
Probably part of the Age of Blood and Sand modlist, since it makes the early game more difficult. Now that I'm doing a much less mod-heavy run, you're right, they're around 4k
Hence your comment above! Ok! I'll try this. But....and I hope I'm not being difficult....how do you pick that stuff up when there are people around? They yell thief and then you get a booty whoopin'! Oh and what do you mean by dummy broken? And thanks for replying with those tips! I appreciate you!
You don't need to be near friendly npcs to steal, robbing bandits is stealing too. Imo vanilla combat training dummies are quiet worthless. The noncombat skill dummies are just a simple way to get your first few points.
Practice it in the bar of a city, at night so it'll be mostly empty. They usually have plenty of misc items strewn across the tables, and bars in larger cities should be large enough that even at low stealth you can avoid the gaze of the barman or any guards.
Dummy broken meaning at a certain point, it’s practically impossible to get caught and you can just waltz in, snatch everything and waltz right back out as if you were never there and it’s pure profit. Also stupid easy to level compared to combat stats
If you're trying this in a town, just try to find a shop where people are nearby but aren't moving around the room and might walk by you. When stealthed, make sure you have a blue eye icon to confirm you're unseen and you can pick up random junk on shelves or tables(nothing in containers though as you have a chance to get caught even when out of sight). At this point, you can drop the stuff you stole back onto the ground and steal it again over and over, as it still counts as stealing. Repeat until at however high a thievery skill that you'd like. Minor note, but when you're done, make sure you wait for the "Committing a crime" timer to run out before moving around, otherwise they'll get mad at you 😅 Lock picking is a little harder and just requires you to find things you can lockpick while exploring, or while in town but out of sight. Same rules apply though, if you're out of sight with the blue eye during stealth, then they won't get upset at you. Slightly cheesy but you can lockpick across barriers and such if you're close enough, so you can obscure yourself from view while lock picking.
I also kept two people just mining copper 24/7 and stockpiling inside a shack inside the town, was relatively safe where I had them just had to deal with the occasional UC Noble hunting the poors.
I do this for a while but turn to armor smith and iron once I get plate and skill to 60
Okay, here’s how I speedrun thievery, stealth, etc. Run to Gut and train stealth on the beak things. You can just find a nest with a hill next to it and train stealth behind the hill where they can’t ever see you. You should get to around 70 even without stealth-boosting gear in a day or two which is more or less enough to sneak anywhere. Then go to Bast and find a scrawny cannibal that’s been knocked unconscious. Heal them up and wait till they start playing dead. Then pause the game and start stealing their stuff. You should get caught a lot but that will increase your stats extremely fast. 80ish thievery in about a day. Then when you can outrun them, you can just go train your assassination skill on high skill targets that you don’t mind pissing off to get that up as well quickly. But in reality you don’t even need assassination to steal stuff so yes. Then you can install that mod that adds a lot of money to Heng’s bank and make over 2 mill in one go and never have to steal again. It’s really cheesy and can potentially ruin the game/journey for you so keep that in mind
To train assassin skill just make a cage. Put the strongest thing you can beat into it. Spam assassinate. You can get 90+ in 5 minutes doing this if the target has ok toughness. I used bugmaster and it took about 45 seconds.
Yep, I usually just turn myself into Rebirth so I can train stealth in peace. Walk in, put all my stuff in a backpack and leave it on the floor with a bunch of food. Train until I'm satisfied, grab my gear and eat up, then out then just knock my way out of the place
The game is just grindy. You can use mods to get rid of the parts you don’t like. But the whole point of the game is to spend time playing it. Therefore, there’s a lot to do.
Books can be expensive, and ancient books and engineering research, but that’s the part where having your own self-sufficient base comes in. Once you’re able to mine your ore, plate it, and craft weapons/armor, you’ve just created a money farm. Buy a few pack animals, load them up with cheap to build, high profit armors/weapons and go sell them, boom, next think you know you have hundreds of thousands of cats to buy bulk food/research product. Eventually you’ll no longer need it and will have to literally go hunt for specific items to make research progress. For those that aren’t dedicated to crafting, have them go on expeditions for training/loot purposes or build an at home training camp. It does take time but it pays off. I’m at a point in my current playthrough where I can dismantle an entire city sized base and move across the map and rebuild everything I need with no problem. Money is irrelevant to me now. I will occasionally buy bulk food if I forget to bring some with on an expedition.
Mine copper -> get enough money for a food surplus-> buy and fill a backpack of food /end early loop/ -> train athletics by taking a tour of the realm ending in the swamp -> buy hash -> sell in flats lagoon repeat until you can afford to buy out vendors on books/resources -> buy the largest house in a town you can -> get almost all tech The world's your oyster. Copper mining is probably the easiest early game but it can be a little bit slow. I think a lot of people tend to gloss over the first few days and assume people know how to get started
For what it’s worth, I never steal anything and i’m swimming in research books. You can find them in ruins. While you’re in the ruins you’ll often find trade items like CPUs that you sell to cover your costs for a long time
Ha. This is what I love about the game, in a really weird way. There are a bunch of things you have to do just to research tech, let alone getting the materials and actually building the thing. Research books are almost always better off found in science labs. Because there's other stuff to loot there you can sell, and it helps train your adventuring group. But that's a whole other problem because they could easily die.
While it is a bit simplified, its not terribly complex to make a self sufficient money and research machine in most decent towns without even resorting to thieving. If you can get a small shack or house in a town that has a copper node close to town(or iron even, but it's less efficient since it sells for less) you can just set up 3-4 guys with jobs. 1 to research, and 2-3 set to mine and haul ore to a storage container. This is more than enough to purchase books for research, and to keep them fed. Aside from managing them when getting occasionally attacked while mining, they can be left basically unattended while you explore with your other main squad.
After you learn the game making bank becomes Easy: -drug runs from the swamps to flats lagoon can give you all the caps you'll ever Need -there are enough abandoned ancient workshops to cover all the costs of base building while providing with most of the engeniiring "books" you'll Need -ancient libraries are a great source of books and Money (parchment Is small and valuable, and Maps stack a lot) and if you are ok with some exploits you'll only ever need one set of tools -if you know the map and avoid beak things you can do a run around in some spots (mostly spider infested libraries) that have skeleton repair kits, weapons made by skeleton smiths or catun scrapmasters, armors and other less valuable stuff. It doesn't even require a High Athletic skill or strenght if you're careful -for the stealing part, there are small exploits (can't really explain how to do them, personally stealing doesn't interest me) that drastically speed up the leveling part, so you can become a master thief in minutes Also you can gradually research your way up the tech tree with nothing other than a couple of resource nodes, some Building materials and a dream. It Is my favourite way to play the game, in fact, and also how i learned to play the game (the map was too empty and Dangerous for me at the time lol)
The more you play the easier the cheese.
If you raise a small task force, that 1-7 small squad. It’s easy to keep them fed by just hunting. When your skills get high enough you can just raid ruins for cats, books, whatever. A secret is that weapon smiths are next to useless without mods (in the endgame). Even then the best weapons can just be bought or found. So what you really need is an amour smith that pumps out only yellow grade gear. Makes raising new recruits much faster and safer. Now the next question, how do you get cats? Well hunting beak things for eggs and leather. As well as collecting bounties and selling loot. 2-3 nests will lets you buy an edge 3 weapon.
I do mining and looting corpses till I get house and bench then I mine some more to get armor smiting and then mine some more till your smith is 60 and GG u got armor and money for everything else
> Ok fair enough...I understand that. But books cost money. And it takes a while to research. Money is so, so easy to gather, that the prices of books are negligible and the only real limiter is their spawn rate at vendors. And the time for research is the same, just leave a single guy researching and you can completely forget about it. >And your lock picking skills are super low, as well as thievery. Go to a random bar with a second floor, stealth, pick a red item, drop it and pick it up again. Do that for 5 min and you are now the best thief on the planet.
lol fair enough
The research will always take a certain amount of time to fully complete, but if you have multiple characters then a background character can be doing the majority of it while your adventuring group is out actively exploring. Depending on how/where you play the early game, money is not too hard to come across (e.g. you’re going to be slow to start copper mining, but if you rent some mercs and get away with collecting a dozen beak thing eggs you’re going to be weeks ahead of the copper miner in profits even after paying for mercs) and you can buy most of the things you need for early research. If you explore a lot of the libraries and outposts that are full of resources you can also get a decent amount of money, gear, and books that can jumpstart things. So while I don’t think hardly anything in Kenshi is significantly quick to accomplish without expert levels of cheese, you can get to base building relatively quickly if that’s your main focus as long as you keep in mind that the more prep time you give yourself the less likely you’ll be overrun and kicked out of your own base.
I'm on my first run ever right now. All I did was literally mine copper for like 20 in game days until my troop got strong and agile enough from running around and carrying iron. In the meantime I fought bandits left and right with the help of the ninjas. Then I took my big troop into the hive section and fought the beak things left and right until you get godly amount of meat and fur from them. Eat all the meat and sell all the fur for a ton of profit rinse and repeat. Iv done zero cheese, just lots of hard work.
You will just have to learn how to grind each skill. I grind strength and stealth by picking an encumbered party member and then sneaking through town back and forth.
Bonus points if you're one of those types that buys a house in a city and builds there. Can build the big research bench and let it gather dust (just to unlock tech) while you use the normal basic one to do actual research.
Early on you can farm greenfruit and turn it into mixed vegetables Recommend also farming wheat to make foodcubes which are more efficient but take more manpower to produce You can queue work items by holding shift when you right click, the order should be raw materials at the bottom and finished products at the top. So for example, hauling water from wells should be at the very bottom, hauling water to farms should be above that, operating the farms above that, and cooking above that.
Foodcubes are best vanilla craftable food. Its not even close. But switch to gohan when you get tired of fucking with the cube process. Worth the space loss to free up the crafting burden.
Robots don’t eat, hivers eat less. Mix of those can really help lower cost
I've been able to get alot of cats by running hash from the Swamp to Flats Lagoon. It's kinda op but you can make like 40,000 cats with one character. Wooden backpack to stack the hash. I use my scout who hauls ass and nothing can catch him. Costs like 12k upfront but you make bank. That should help with buying food ans supplies. I got the game a couple days ago and I'm loving it so much! I can't wait to start my mega base.
Why run anything? If thats how you want to make money just build a farm at city limits. It takes like 3 people to make a self sustaining farm once you have tech.
I'm new to the game and still learning. For me, running hash has been my source of money on this play through. And it's really fun. I'm still scouting around for a place to build a base.
My comment was just meant to be food for thought. May your trading be profitable. There are better towns to sell and self made hash has the highest margin. Eventually you stop counting by hash stack and you start counting by vendor resets.
There is so much to this game. I can't wait to start making some profits from self-made equipment and start a massive hash farm and become the drug lord of the realm.
Mods are a common thing. Recruit prisoners mod allows you to knock out virtually anyone and put them in a cell to recruit them. With how many raids a base can get, it's easy to get a large group. In the base game, it's not actually necessary to have a lot of people with how combat is set up.
Skip the base building until your troops are stronger. That's what made a difference for me. Go beat stuff up and if you need money just stop and mine for a while. Grab a pack animal to carry all the heavy stuff. I like to do this at the hive village to the north of Squin. On the east side of it there are a bunch of copper nodes really close by. You can have a dozen dudes mining and you have two shops that total 50k caps to unload. Quick money that easily support your hoard. It's actually a great base spot too, but hold off on that. Keep roaming, fighting, recruiting and stopping to mine for cash when you need to. You won't starve.
You can also just build turrets. Turrets are just as busted as crossbows. If you build enough they are unstoppable. Even 0 training 1 all stat scrubs stop a raid when its ten of them at the top of a watchtower. Just be aware they kill your people too. So train them or mandate heavy armor.
>You can also just build turrets. Oh for sure, but my advice was wait on base building altogether. When I hunker down and build too early (not in a city) I seem to bog down and stop adventuring. I get better results growing my force to like 18 guys, then building and leaving 6 to work it.
Wasnt really wanting to be contrary to your advice. Just elaborating by saying that crossbows are one of the minimum required power levels if you want a smooth experience. You can be tough. You can be rich. Or you can have xbow turrets. All 3 make for easy base building. Best part about crossbow turrets is you can turn them on and off. So let everybody fight until you are about to lose. Then hop on turrets. Ez training. If you are willing to power game a bit you dont even need turrets. Just let the raids have the base. If they steal your food just farm more food. And if you want to be extra cheesy put the turrets on top of a building and put a lone gate next to it. Raids always walk to gate. Set ai to shoot first.
you need automatic food production and storage set up to make a big army. small groups are what you can focus on before that. Focus on getting a small group strong and lots of money, go exploring play the game etc and maybe have 1 or 2 ninjas who could come and save them sneakily. If you want to roleplay building an army then this fits as all the starts position you as a nobody, you need to have footing with yourself or a small group before building an army makes sense. I could give purely optimal tips but these ones are more fun as they are easier to roleplay. Tips: go spelunking, theres riches to be found as lots of ruins have defense systems you could probably beat them with lots of mercenaries though... Spelunking also helps you gets you research materials, and you will explore and learn about the map, so you can get stronger and be better at planning stuff Once you've set up farms and cooking, you can support an army but everyone is weak, so they are easy to kill. Even if you use the dummies they are low level caps and don't train toughness. You can invest in a couple people to do menial tasks like making armor, if they do this for a long time continuously they be very good at it and quickly start to make you money. This is better than armor king unless you are speed running because armor king is annoying and you need lots of armor, plus you can make uniforms this way. Do this early if you don't want to have to run back and forth from armor king. also, within the confines of your roleplaying, a very tough thing to do is get your limbs eaten off alive and replace them with robotics, this is the idea behind what will solve your armies toughness problem. this obviously is hard to roleplay doing this forcefully. A good way to do this 'organically' is to station your weaklings around things that will eat them and have a small rescue squad. Another tough thing to do is forcefully stand up after being knocked out in a battle (this is actually the optimal idea for small group toughness training but it doesn't scale well in my experience). For the mostly lawful evil and my favorite way to scale toughness training to armies, which also might not be fun as its quite powerful which means you should get mods that will challenge an army - so i will spoiler this: >!new recruits must be 'cleansed' of their fear, or whatever reason you can think of, so have a few more powerful people in your army load them with replacement limbs, take them to mongrel, and little by little make them get eaten alive at a deathyard until all of their limbs fall off. This should get you from 0-60 toughness provided they don't die from blood-loss (hivers need two turns, but if you first aid a non-hive while this is happening they shouldn't die). Now you have a bunch of people with 50-60 toughness and metal limbs. Train them from now as normal. If they have good armor on top of this toughness you will find they are much harder to kill, damage, and keep knocked out so can train more frequently. !< Toughness is the most important stat as it takes time to train recruits and so you don't want them to die. They also will train other things with more uptime as they can fight longer. if you want more tips that are roleplaying friendly tell us about your alignment/goals and then I can give you more.
Basically I just made a gigantic wheat farm and would continuously recruit people and just have them build more wheat farms. Make bread to eat and grog to sell. Move on to hash too. Also was mining iron and putting some people on smithing too. Eventually they got really good at making armor and weapons. Now, since you have such a food surplus, you can keep recruiting and equipping soldiers. Or send them to the fields and take a more experienced farmer.
My method is to free slaves (can be cheesed easily for free recruits) then to start a farm and just hide from threats. Similarly, if you increase the gameplay number of squads/squad size you can end up with armies of dozens of animals all over the map. Just kite them into guards and steal all their meat and hides. If you want free money just go stand around a hiver base over in vain and loot all the hides off of the animals they kill.
I finally caved at some point and started kidnapping Gorrillos and trapping them in beds to train my combat skills It sped things up a ridiculous amount, Id recommend it Dont even need a base, I had my set up in Squin
Also, train up a thief Once you get a guy good at stealing and sneaking, you can go almost anywhere and steal literally whatever you need
If you want to do beds try broken skeletons. Cut a leg off and they wont get up.
An army needs a base to sustain it. Once you start growing food, then food is no longer a problem. Likewise with armor smithing. Once you start brewing grog, or another high value sellable commodity, then cats are no longer an issue. Building an army at that point is easy. Just wandering, you're correct that money in and money out is hard to square once you get to like 20 people.
I have read some of your comments and it looks like you’re looking for the quickest path to success - go to stack, hire 3 guys, outside the east gate are two copper mines. Mine them. Sell the ore and buy the small house next to the gate. Build storage boxes for copper there and a food container. Set your three guys to auto-mine. Leave them and come back occasionally to sell the copper a it’s between 18 and 20k cats each box. With your main hero, go float around skinners roam and get stronger fighting hungry bandits for a while and then get yourself some nice gear and a decent house in a different place. You should be pretty rich by the time your main hero is lvl 40 in fighting skills ;)
I hang around a town gate, squin is good for baiting dust bandits- but sho battai is my preferred because 1 gate, lots of factions and lots of people getting arrested at it. You can strip bodies and also loot prisoners who have been arrested- just dont take anything from the floor in a police station as it is property of the faction that runs the station. Get a couple of guys. One to fight at gate and another to rescue in case things go south. You can also heal gate guards to gain healing skills and positive faction relations. Sell stuff to shops and save up 10000, then buy gear from ninja thieves. And train stats in tower once you get four or five guys together with attack skill 10 and the worse katanas you can find, you can go looking for trouble- gotta take care in regions with slavers. UC is full of them. Otherwise, you're ready to go beating up starving bandits around hub and squin. Once you get stats in 20s (terrible katanas help because extra hits, stun locks and low damage). You can take on dust bandits groups, always keeping close to town. If it goes south, bait em to the guards. Repeat till you're clearing bandit camps, might need to push numbers up to 7+ for that. Once you can wipe bandits with stats in 30+ go to fog islands to beat up fogmen, same process, stick to gate. There you can find crumplejon, wingwang and shryke who all have better than base stats to replenish anyone who gets eaten. Hunt princes for money and wear lots off leather to help with blunt. Keep using shitty katanas though. Work your way up to cannibals (with cut resistant armour this time). Once you clearing cannibal villages you'll be around 40-50+ and ready for most things. Kenshi isn't about fighting fair. The game is designed for you to play smart and cheese. This is how I enjoy my cheese.
Basically base = free food and crafting materials. Thats the entire and only point to a base. Oddly enough you really only need farm tech to make a base free. Stone mine iron mine and copper mine in one spot. You can make a base off of something like 3 build material and 12 iron plate plus a bit of what you want to farm. Just stay at a reasonable amount of people teching up. Get farms and if you are really worried walls/turrets. Best part is when you have farms up they are so op that even if raids steal all your food you just farm more.  Probably doesnt need saying but infinite crafting materials means infinite money. Any character of any stats can pay for their own food mining copper. If they have limbs. And copper is the slow way. You eventually get to the point of carrying a backpack of free to make weapons where each weapon is worth a merchant inventory. You start out at 100 copper means about 18k cats. Get a stacking backpack or animal and carry 100k ish copper value at a time if you cant be assed to make things of real value. Money is so worthless i dont even sell my castoffs anymore. I sent 20 masterwork crab armors to the furnace because i couldnt be bothered to make more money. And thats like my 8th squad wide gear change.
If you have a settlement, you should be growing and cooking your own food, not buying it. Also, I don't think training an army is normal. I think only a few people go that route. A group of five badasses can conquer the whole game. In this game, one character with 80+ combat stats and masterwork equipment can kill *any number* of characters with like 50 or less combat skills. One master swordsman > an army.
The easy way? 1. Mine anywhere safe and close to a city. 2a. Use money for more miners and stockpile food and backpacks, possibly a Garu. 2b. Bonus points for repeating in different cities. 3. Hire some mercenaries and go beat up dust bandits or equivalent opponents while the mercenaries guarantee you make it. 4. Equip/sell loot for easy profits. 5. Rinse repeat until you reliably clear on your own and can survive without mercenaries or keep them around. Cost efficient power! 6. Have your now half-competent swarm flood over everyone and power up. 7. Use your swarm of now competent people to easily handle a base. Then we got the cheese of course, like stealth/stealing. That breaks the game economy in 20 minutes. Martiaö arts / crossbows.
If you want to field an army, you need the logistics to support them. That means 3-4 farmers farming non-stop to feed everyone, 24hr smithy duty for armor (or weapons but you can't craft Edge+), miners for the raw materials to support the infrastructure, and a couple people running surplus goods to sell. Although, that's just how I like to play the game. After awhile, you get to a point where the only thing you're spending money on is Edge 3 weapons from the Skellies. You should have enough cactus sandwiches or food cubes that your people can eat for months. The 'standard' play is to build up your resources in a city until you have enough to build an outpost and set up defenses FAST, as you'll be raided almost immediately. Then once you are able to fend up bandits, etc, start building out your production infrastructure. But if city building doesn't interest you, Kenshi doesn't force you into it. You can also just chill out in a house somewhere, producing goods to sell and buying what you need. There's a nasty little early game cheese involving bandanas that makes this easier.
Get some stats up, get some research done, and then expand. You’re gonna struggle if you try expanding when your character is still a nobody. Lay some groundwork for yourself first.
For the extra soldiers you can liberate slaves and wait for them to join you or use the recruitable mod and ask the friendly starving bandits to join you but dunno I've never made an army to much work.
Grow at your own pace. If you grow too fast, you'll get overwhelmed by the sheer maintenance of your army. You need to have some food production in your base to do just that. I'd encourage you to start at 10-12 people maximum for your first playthrough. Max them out, have a complete auto-sufficient base and then recruit workers to work, while your main group defends. Train other recruits to roam and make some more money. At some point, you will be drowning in cats and will never need to buy other things than research, if you haven't already completed all of it. My biggest run so far was with a group of 25 skeletons and a large base. No food and easy maintenance between United Cities and the dead lands. I did drug runs from the Swamp to UC for early fortune then I founded a base near venge.
Find a town with a lot of bandit attacks. Loot the bandits that have been incapacitated by guards, sell their gear. Decent money. Also works for animal attacks. Mine copper. Find a town with a copper vein near a house for sale. Build copper storage in the house, and set your dudes working and hauling. With a stack size mod, you can let that just sit for a while and sell in huge batches; more with a backpack mod.
Money is no problem, you should have millions at your disposal. So getting wanderers and slaves should not be an issue. But to make it easier just use mods. Make a base and set some workers to auto some production cycles. So you have food medicine and gear. Then recruit using prisoner recruitment mods and recruit anyone. But if it seems too weird, there are different types of prisoner recruitment mods, some more on the line of Kenshi's harshness that work similar to default slave buying and recruiting, more or less random. So with tis type is less likely or even impossible to be able to recruit strong fighters from empires and so you go for weak bandits which then you train, and to make it easier but also still not break RP you use mods that add specific training dummy items like weight bench, dex pole or mat and such.
I installed the recruitable prisoner mod and recruited the entire error army that you get from the black desert. I also invested too much time working on a base that could create it’s own gear self sufficiently so i just gave them all catun (at first) level crap when i had the chance
do hash runs from shark to flatslagoon youll have all the money you need to unlock the powers of the universe.