GlitchMaker's General Guide

(WARNING: This guide will be edited and changed on the future, as I play more and discover more about the game)
Welcome, Wanderer
In this General Guide, you'll find some information about the general strategies of your average Kenshi player, including some side notes regarding a couple of game mechanics that you may use for your advantage.
== Starting at Kenshi ==
=== What should I do? ===
Your main approach, goals and milestones will depend completely on what kind of backstory you'll make for your character. Keep in mind that in Kenshi, you're not a character, you're the narrator, and ultimately, it'll be up to YOU what kind of story you wish to tell.
Some people prefer an easier game, and might choose an easy life as a farmer or a merchant in one of the major cities, where your worries regarding your own safety can be handled by the faction's guards. Some others may prefer a hardcore approach, building up an empire from scratch, and might choose to start as a beggar or perhaps a wanted criminal. And there's those who want a white canvas, starting as a Wanderer and building up their tale as they play. Whatever your approach is, each have their own gameplay style, and I cannot describe what you SHOULD do, but rather what you CAN do.
=== What can I do? ===
In Kenshi, like I said, there's multiple approaches to what kind of gameplay you want to try out. You can build your own outpost, hire drifters to help you out, enslave and recruit random people to work for you, travel through cities as a caravan trader, or simply build up an army of misfits and cause chaos alongside other raider factions. Regardless of what you choose, keep in mind that your success regarding that depends plenty on your skill.
=== What's the best place to start? ===
In Kenshi you don't select where you start, but rather how you start. Each part of the map have their own pros and cons, having their own way of building up from scratch. Some places are fertile and rich in water, great for farming, but greatly lacking in mineral resources, which means you'll rely a lot on vendors if you are to build up our outpost from scratch. Meanwhile, there's others where you'll find plenty of minerals such as Copper and Iron, but due to the arid nature, it'll be harder to conduct activities like farming. The same logic can be applied to the many factions at Kenshi, where each of them have their own philosophy, and it relies on you whether you'll comply to them, or reject them.
=== How do I finish the game? ===
The game has no ending. There's no cutscene, and despite having many bosses, none of them can be considered the "Final Boss". The game ends whenever you close it, and starts whenever you open it.
== Chapter 1 - Survival ==
Whenever you start at Kenshi, you'll have to keep in mind some core concepts that will help you survive in the aggressive wastelands of Kenshi. Some of them are concepts that are taught in the game, while others are "Custom Concepts" that I ended up experiencing during my gameplay of Kenshi, both Vanilla and Modded.
There's 5 main concepts you should be aware of: Health, Food, Combat, Crime and Reputation.
=== Health - "The bleeding is internal, that's where the blood's supposed to be!" ===
During your time at Kenshi, you'll quickly realize that the most important part of staying alive at Kenshi, is staying alive at Kenshi. You're prone to take a LOT of damage while playing the game, and the damage you take usually takes some time to treat and heal, so the best way of surviving in Kenshi is keeping your eye on the damage you take.
The health at Kenshi works differently than most games, and instead of having a single bar representing your health as a whole, you'll have multiple bars, each of them representing a section of your body that will take the damage, each with a different kind of effect on your health. There's 4 colors for the bars, and 1 effect that represent what is happening to that section:
* Green Bar - Solid Health: This is the health your limb effectively has. Every time you take damage, it'll lower and reduce the health of the body part.
* Yellow Bar - Temporary Health: This is the health your limb is currently regenerating. Whenever it's patched up, you'll gain a "Temporary Health" that can help you escape a couple of death blows, but unlike the "Solid Health", they'll lower way quicker from the damage taken and quickly put you in danger.
* Red Bar - Lingering Health: This is the health your limb is lacking from the damage taken, but don't worry, because this health can be regained by using medical items to heal it. Once you're healing the missing health, it'll be replaced by a yellow bar, and will allow to keep the limb relatively functional for long enough for it to recover properly.
* Black Bar - No Health: This is the health your limb is lacking from the heavy damage taken. Once you're hit too much in a certain part, eventually, you'll run out of places to patch it up, therefore effectively lowering your max health in order to force you to rest and recover. The only way of recovering from the black bar is forcing your character to rest, letting your body naturally heal. 
The damage taken can also be separated into many different groups, but for the time being, I'll simplify them by only saying 2: Minor Wounds and Major Wounds.
==== Minor Wounds - "Tis' but a scratch!" ====
A wound can be called a "Minor Wound" when the body part's health is still a POSITIVE number. As long as the section's health is above 0, the damage taken can still be considered a Minor Wound, and easily recovered by using medical items. They provide some debuffs to your character, lowering his combat speed or strength depending on how badly damaged the section is (Ex. If your arm is heavily damaged, you cannot wield two-handed weapons. And if your leg is heavily damaged, you may become crippled and will have to drag yourself across the field).
==== Major Wounds - "My greatest weakness! Dying!" ====
A wound can be called a "Major Wound" when the body part's health is a NEGATIVE number. Whenever the part reaches a number below 0, that body part is going critical, and may start causing problems that can lead your character to a "Dying" or "Critical" state. When your wounds reach this scenario, it's better to enter "Sneak" mode and fake death, leaving your character immobile until the enemy is away, so you can properly patch yourself up and leave that place (if you're the only character available and nearby). Some problematic side effects that may come from this are:
===== Blood Loss KO =====
When your blood reaches a negative level, you may find your character unconscious due to a "Blood Loss KO". This condition will force them to remain unconscious until their body start to naturally recover it all the way to a positive level, leaving them unavailable to be used.
===== Crippled =====
When your limbs reach a negative health, they'll be rendered useless and you might become crippled. While crippled, you'll face restrictions regarding what kind of equipment you can use, forcing you to wield one-handed weapons, or even debilitating you to the point where you cannot fight back, either by breaking both your arms, or breaking your legs and forcing you to drag yourself on the ground.
===== Malnourishment =====
When your hunger gets to a critical state, you'll suffer a great debuff on ALL your stats. This will affect your combat skills and can even get you killed by making you too slow to block an enemy, or too weak to actually cause any significant damage.
=== Food - "Only those who starve know the true value of food" ===
In order to keep yourself healthy, it is important to always keep you and your crew stocked up and well fed. During long journeys, it's good to keep your inventory stacked with at least a couple portions of Dried Meat or Dried Fish, which are easier to find and stock up (just hunt a couple of animals and cook the meat in a campfire). If you neglect your hunger for too long, you'll end up facing plenty of long-term problems that will bring the character into a painful demise.
=== Combat - ===
Category:Guides