Thanks for the videos on Kenshi, they all are very helpful. After testing this method out, I found out some nuances that might be the reason why some folks are not getting it to work correctly (including myself). First of all my squad was not getting any experience when waking up automatically and then falling down again playing dead. If they were in a "playing dead" state and I manually told them to get up, then they got the huge chunk of toughness experience. So you have to manually make a unit move from "playing dead" state to get the chunk of experience, or basically a move order. 2nd is the confusing way Kenshi defines a squad. The squad you "aggro" is the squad that gives you exp. If you happen to have a bunch of other Dust Bandits in the area aggro you while you're fighting the original squad you chose - you won't get experience from them. They kinda count as a general faction assist in your battle if that makes any sense, and the toughness won't go up from these units. This is for those folks who find 2 Dust Bandits camps side by side and may be wondering why your exp is low or something seems off if you end up dead by the assisting squad and not the original squad you picked a fight with. The difficulty in terms of limb dismemberment will cause your Bandit Camp to dry out quicker since the crossbow folks will blast each other in the arms or legs and bleed them out. If you lower the limb dismemberment to "Rare", this will cause the bandits to live a little bit longer from accidental friendly fire bolt shots. Finally Kenshi is a giant buggy mess and that's what makes the game charming. If you find your experience isn't going up as you would like, just find another camp and try again. Some camps just bug out and this trick does not work at all. Other camps it works flawlessly on first attempt. Good luck everyone!
Fantastic Comment! thank you so much for going so in depth on this. I'm going to Pin you so that everyone that checks comments see's this aswell and hopefully it'll help people even further. To Elaborate on the 2nd point aswell: This is likely due to them not actually being hostile to you and simply assisting their allies, once you're down they go back to their neutral position and aren't counted as hostiles to you! super useful to know and I definitely should have included it. if only my memory was better haha. If you also have an Assassin you can bonk the crossbow boys and force them not to use their crossbows by stealing their ammo, which will also keep things alive a bit longer, though if they see you that's another can of worms to deal with. May you find many P4's and Southern Hive recruits, and may your days be as wonderful as you are.
the same hilariously funny logic applies to precision, since the skill primarily rises through hitting your teammates with ranged weapons. the heavier you hit them, the more precision exp you gain. 🤡
One method I found for training toughness later on is to have one person to to fight Beak Things. you need at least 1 other person capable of fighting multiple beak things to do this method. You need to have one person run in and fight them, get downed, and start getting eaten. The person getting eaten will try to get up, take damage, go down, and repeat. If you're lucky they will do this multiple times. I discovered this method by accident when trying to make my characters lose limbs for bionics and I ended up training Beep's toughness from low 20s all the way up to 70 in about an hour.
I like crab nests to exploit toughness, they never leave, they pretty weak to instakill character. They live away from roads, so it's rare event that someone interrupt cheesing. Get blue/green quality set of heavy armor, some food and first aid kits. Rush into nest with "block" on, get beaten, try get up, repeat.
Step one: Find/build robobed. Step two: Put a robot in in, the stronger the better Step three: Put on assassin rags, a few backpacks of ore for 100%encumberance and pick up someone/something on your shoulder Step four: Start punching the robot in bed, training strenght, dexterity, toughness and martial arts at the same time.
You can do similar in rebirth vs the holy nation guards. I got one of my Greenlanders up to 88 toughness very quickly. The interval between ko and getting back on your feet goes down significantly the tougher you are. Rebirth is also great for martial, dodge, lock pick, sneak, assassination training. Just make sure the guard stops to heal you which is why it is always good to have 2 characters there, as the other can pick up the one bleeding out and drop them near guards to heal.
@@jonahhughes8197 That is a long guide I'm afraid. Pick the prisoners start, try and get your two prisoners either in a cage or on a prisoner pole but if not, just take the beatings. In fact, just take the beatings a whole lot. One word of warning though, try and save regularly because occasionally the guards may accidentally either hack a limb off or forget you while you are bleeding out. One thing you can do is while you are following the prisoner task and doing your duty of running between mines and processors, you can hit the sneak button. You will be beaten half to death but this will get you on the road to increasing your toughness and sneak. If you are dumped in a cage, pick the locks until you are free. Pick every set of manacles you can and stack them in your Inventory, the guards will replace them over and over. You can quickly increase your strength by overburdening your character with leg irons. Pick fights with lone guards (it's better inside) this will increase your martial skill quicker and you get a martial bonus inside a building. If you are placed in a cage on a roof, there will be barrels and some items to loot on the tables near the stairs. You can rapidly build your thief skills by swapping these items between the barrels and your inventory. Once your thief skill is reliable (50 or so) you can start stealing uniforms off the guards. Hide the uniforms in the chests of the buildings you stay at (the guards never restock their armour), then when you fight them, your martial skills will go up more rapidly as you fighting stronger enemies (HN have way more strength than you). Once your sneak is really high, you can practice assassination on live targets.
@@jackochainsaw thank you so much man, how did you get you character to just play dead all the way up to 88 though mine seem to stop and it takes me hours
Great tutorial! It was a little tricky because the dust bandit camp I chose ended up having tons of hungry bandit patrols but it seems to be working fairly well.
It's a weird point but from my experience camp fires don't seem to affect stealth like other lights and torches do. The sun icon is still dark as if you're in the shade when next to a campfire sneaking.
Oooh nice I retract what I said in the skeleton toughness training vid I watched someone else do this but personally felt as though it wasn't explained properly or wasn't good enough since I always use the starving bandits in skinnerss roam but this is good I now feel as though I can start a toon find a dust bandit camp and have some fun :D
Happy to help! took me a long time to get used to this game aswell, but with over 1300 hours now I'm so glad I put in the hours because man this game is something special.
I love this game so much that sometime I wonder if myself is an M... Already have 500 hrs on Stream, and before moved to Stream, I already play at least twice that amount of times.
You can increase the # of groups, or # of mobs per group any time, if you need bigger groups for toughness training, then decrease it after you are done.
Thanks for freshing up the memory on this one. Anyone who does any tutorial guides for Kenshi deserves a subscribe. I believe though that there is a method to somewhat "force" the play dead to happen. That way they will play dead instead of getting up even while their squad mates are around. Has something to do with using passive/block stances along with sneak. Or I seem to remember having read something along those lines somewhere. Any idea? Might be wrong though. I know that it's possible for them to heal themselves while also playing dead(in case someone wants to use this method on a solo run) Though that happens rather inconsistently with me.
I might have to experiment with that, it sounds plausible? I know you can force it semi consistently with enough enemies around so maybe there's a way to perma force it somehow. Flesh people seem to mostly consistently heal themselves after being down, just give it a second, my problem is usually my skeletons that tend to be fussy about healing themselves sometimes.
Training with dust bandits is dangerous, due to the weaponry they use (sabres, spiked clubs and crossbows). If you want to do this right - pick Skinners Roam and find the 40-ish hobo group. All they have is wooden sticks (theyre not made of wood, but theyre wood-ish color, so i call them that), so they wont bleed you out or deal immense bleeding damage to your body parts. See... bleeding (cut) damage tends to make the wounds go critical fast. Physical (blunt) damage does not. You can get pummeled heavily with sticks without bleeding damage stacking, and you will eventually wake up from the beat up. Not so with bleeding damage. This is particularly important if you set the chance to die to 2.6 or above (which you should do... or do you like to fight the same guys for eternity?). If you can capture a few guys to beat you up in a controlled environment - do so, and give them each a baton (jitte). Those have NO bleeding damage multiplier, so you will never actually die unless they hit you for more damage than you have health on your vitals, which wont be doable for them unless you give them edge level jittes or something. You will end up fairly mangled, though... so make sure you have a bed and someone to bail you out at the ready. Late game you can forget about this BS altogether - just don the heaviest (specialist grade minimum) armor you can lay your hands on and grab a few black gorillos (because racism - also make sure you keep the gorillos until theyre elders first). You can even train dodge with this set up. Might not be useful for a melee fighter with a weapon, but who knows... you might consider mixing it up in hand-to-hand later on? EDIT: @5:51 About that - to avoid this issue, put the two guys in separate squads. The whole "squad thing getting up" only applies to the same squad. Not separate squads. This is also the (faulty/bugged) reason why guys with food in their backpacks wont share with other guys from your crew, because theyre in separate squads.
Dangerous in an uncontrolled environment, yes, but this is a controlled procedure since the dusties are "neutral" at start and won't bother your other squadmate as long as you pay up if they demand cash. The reason I don't use Hungry/Starving bandits is because they roam, you can only play dead once if they roam away from you rather than flop repeatedly in their face like you can with a settled camp. Yes all the other things you described are 1000% faster, but in order to do those you need a controlled environment/your base. This training method literally takes near enough 0 setup (grab a random shit tier recruit, some bandages, and a little bit of spare cash and boom 90 toughness in 3 days tops). Good shout for 5:51, make sure you still don't park your buddy too close though otherwise the dusties will aggro to him and he can't heal your early toughness wounds though.
After many attempts I got this to work once for like 2 minutes but it was enough to go from 20 tough to 60. What I did to make it work? No clue I just kept trying over and over until my guy stopped getting up to fight and started knocking himself out.
Honestly sad there's so much trouble around this, usually my first 2 and in rare cases 3 camps work fine for me. It seems that sometimes Kenshi does not want to abide by its own rules ahahaha, to be fair I should expect it from a game that lets characters walk on air if you load too slow :D
This isnt cheese tutorial, the real cheese is removing your prosthetic leg in front of a hostile group and put it back on again. This method gives you massive toughness EXP, and its easially repeatable becauae when you remove your equipped leg they loose agro, and you gain exp becauae you fainted momenterally during combat. The bigger the group the more exp you get. You can easially gain 90 tougness in half hour, assuming youhave a robotic leg and foumd a large enough group. Just dont do this trickmin front of cannibals and slavers for obvious reasons.
i prefer the hungry bandit at skinners roam method, by the time im at 60 toughness my combat skills are at 40, this only trains toughness, this does however seem better if you have a good training prisoner at your base
Yeah, this won't train combat stats other than block and dodge but is pretty much the fastest way for me to be lazy while leveling fleshies to 90 toughness, only takes 2-3 in game days so it doesn't bother me too much not getting any combat stats, I make those up with some spoder training or stuff of the sort
I was having the same problem as the others with this not working. The person I was trying to train would just keep getting up and wouldn't play dead. My fix was to create a new squad and place that person in it by themselves. Just had to kick that self preservation into high gear by making them think they were alone, lol. Also like to add, you need to make sure the character that is being trained has no healing or items on them, thus the reason for a second toon to heal.
Thank you for the information! Great idea with the seperate squad too, you can do that aswell for recruiting unique recruits that prefer smaller squads to join which seems like it must be intentional.
If it helps, this is technically an intended mechanic which is why the title of the video is labeled without "cheese" so don't feel to guilty taking advantage of it. I'd say for a first time player though, struggle a bit, for the first 100 or so hours I probably spent more time outrunning things than actually fighting them hahahah
Ah yes, the wandering slavemongers, They'll kidnap pretty much anyone. If you've got a second man you can pick up your injured person before they come along, you can also use this opportunity to get free training from your captors by fighting them since they'll always heal you. So kind of a win in a loss?
I managed to take him and unlock his shackles before they took him away, it wasn't that bad. They just took his katana but I quickly replaced it with the meitou ninja blade from Dimak. I entered the black dragon tower and she was the only one chasing my squad of 14 as we left, so I ordered them to fight her and they won. I now have an extra 20,000 cats and my first meitou weapon :P
@@marcn4452 Congrats! that's a huge win early on, now you'll have food for a while and some good gear to boot, the Journey can only go upwards now aslong as you continue that trend, or it might turn into a roller coaster hehe.
I can't remember the name atm but the area where the cannibals, Holy Nation and free cities samurai fight each other, I like to follow a group of samurai around and get beat up by holy Nation and cannibals until I get bored. Unless I'm Greenland than I follow the holy Nation around. If you don't care about making either large faction mad, their high stats give good xp when they beat me.
Kenshi bugginess at its finest, my usual resolution for that is to quick save and quick load just before getting up (while playing dead) don't know if that still works as a fix though
great video , but for some reason my character isnt really keen on self preservation and gets up like usual . he must know what i wanna do with him or its a bug. maybe i am doing something wrong ?
Most I can suggest is quicksaving and quickloading. Tends to fix a lot of problems for me, but then again this game is just buggy as all hell. Mind ya that's why I like it so much, but it is a mess.
Nicely explained but I cant get this to work all my character does it go into recovery coma then get up as normal after healed even though my healer is at squin while the camp im using is near the stack.
It seems for some, you'll have to make a seperate squad completely so your characters are not linked. Also, if you're using Genesis or other complete overhaul mods, this may also not work sadly.
@@kean4218 Best advice then is having him alone in a squad while training, or if necessary importing and finding a new camp. A few people have been struggling with this in the past, the pinned comment says some more but I have no idea why, usually for me it works at the first camp I go to almost every single time. No problem, hopefully it ends up working for ya.
I either get dismemebered, or spend a decade in a coma and they forget about me when I wake up. Thanks for teaching me to not try and exploit this buggy mess.
My character REFUSES to go unconscious for the 10 seconds and will get up and block until downed for 300+ seconds again, i cannot find a way to get them to just feign death again so i dont have to wait for another 300+ seconds
@@s0u7th13f trying on a solo playthrough, tried moving backpack around so meds are inaccessible, clicking on the bandits vs clicking on the ground next to them, maybe my character just has less of a will to be alive than yours LOL
@@s0u7th13f figured it out, i wasn't clicking on my own character to heal. I put meds in their backpack and then in the inventory and then would click on them, now it's working
@@SOTB69 Eyyyyyyyyy! thanks for coming back with an answer, that way if anyone else has issues like it I'll make sure to highlight this convo. Glad you got it working! enjoy the grind friend.
Shouldn't be patched, It's mostly a staple of Kenshi. Make sure your others are far enough and that there's no interruption in the process. The game's just kinda wonk sometimes, it'll work sooner or later.
As in doesn't work for you? if so I think there's a few people that are in a similar boat, it seems to be due to Bandits not really paying attention, not found a fix other than to try and find a different camp where Bandit LOS/attention span is better. If you mean broken as in powerful, then yes, that's the point haha.
Are you hostile with the faction? if not it might just be that the boss aggro'd on to you randomly, either reload to try again or find another camp with Dust Bandits that are more chill, sadly Dust Bandits tend to be rather ambitious.
@@s0u7th13f naw, base -10 relations, tried a couple camps seems to do the same. Does it matter if i approach them in a group or does it have to be one lone guy. At both camps I tried I dont think there was a dust boss, only a bunch with the flickery dialogue and would get hostile when i approached
@@barrybender3377 Hmmm, base -10 might just be some randomly hostile triggers. Sometimes Dust Bandits/Bosses will trigger a dialogue that always leads to them attacking you on sight to "rob" you. I tend to go in alone, I'd keep most of the group away myself but if it works better for you in a group go nuts. Yeah the flickery dialogue is a weird bug, as long as the camp has 1 dude with a regular speech bubble you should be able to do this. I can take another look at this method if it doesn't pan out for you and see if maybe it's broken somehow? if not I'll do my best to help you get it sorted.
@@s0u7th13f Thanks man, could be some mod is getting in the way as I play with Kazio which does some overhauls but its hard to tell whats base and whats modded half the time haha
@@barrybender3377 I feel you man, sometimes I forget what the Vanilla UI looks like cause I've played with Dark UI for so long! I'll give it a test this evening for me and see what happens, Dust Lads are just a bit weird sometimes honestly but when it works oh man it works well.
Yes, and No, it's dependant on whether you reach your KO point or not and whether you'll be able to recover if you have. If you put on full coverage armour so the slash damage doesn't cut you apart so you'll bleed out I'd say "YES" but if you're doing this naked for speed, you'll likely bleed out from the slash damage before you can recover (Not always the case of course, but a lot less reliable)
@@s0u7th13f I'm back and just want to say that my main character finally reached level 100 Toughness. Now they are as durable as Steven Armstrong. I'm having them grind strength next so they can be just as strong as Armstrong as well. It took a long time to reach level 100, and it is such a grind that I'll be looking for good mods to make it easier leveling up all my future followers.
He is an animal and keeps all the behaviour of that (even though he's unique) so nothing will eat him (EX: Cannibals, Fogmen) but Bandits can, and will skin him for meat if he goes down. Best to train him using the fogmen training technique for toughness, and then wandering around the fog for combat skills.
Hey! is it possible to train multiple people like this? or is it hard because they would all have to go down BEFORE the first one that fell recovers and gets up again? what if you put the whole group on passive? would they stay down until they are all knocked out? And does that affect the XP rate when you have more allies around you? :o Oh! and last question lol. do you do this to dust bandits instead of starving bandits because starving bandits would wonder off once you are all knocked out?
The Problem with multiple people is that allies force other allies into helping them, so like you say, they'd all have to go down and then as soon as 1 gets up, they all automatically get up. This seems fine at first until you realize the ones that get up without you forcibly commanding them do not gain the large chunk of Toughness XP. Honestly, you're better off doing this one at a time, because it should only take you about 2 in game days per person for around 90 toughness, which is plenty for the majority of the game. XP rate is unaffected and only matters based on how many enemies/level of enemies around you (As far as I've been able to see) Exactly! anything that has a camp that won't eat you and lets you easily get in to heal your character will do, Dust Bandits are the easiest because they're naturally passive if you pay them off, but with Skeletons for example you can use the fogmen due to them having only blunt weapons (for the basic workers) and being unable to eat metal.
@@s0u7th13f Thanks alot for the reply! :) I'm running into a problem your "Beanhop" character isn't doing tho.. i found a dustbandit camp like you did and asked for the fight. But my character refuses to knock itself out for 10 seconds like Beanhop.. he always gets up to take more damage and ends up being knocked out for about 2 minutes.. what am I doing wrong? :S
@@xxGizmodioxx Sounds like your other squad members are still counting towards being in the squad, are your other members too close by? If so he'll recognize himself as being part of the squad and try to get up to help/acompany his allies.
@@s0u7th13f they really should be far enough away :S my group is currently inside the hub. But its possibly the overhaul mod "Genesis" thats messing with me as it has some animation mods? maybe there are animations for getting up quicker or something? or just because the dust bandits attack animations are different the character doesn't understand he will get hit before getting up so thats why he doesn't knock himself out like beanhop does?
@@xxGizmodioxx I think Genesis shouldn't affect you? but I wouldn't actually know too well since I don't use overhaul mods myself. (tried em, just not a fan of 'em) Have you tried quicksaving/loading? I know sometimes my people get stuck doing something and that helps, if not maybe an import? the import keep in mind will make you lose the bandit camp location though so you'll have to find another. If your char gets knocked out fully it's still possible, you'll just have to mend him with another character and then force him up afterwards... if he continues to just get up by himself without you though this'll be pretty troublesome. Any additional info is helpful aswell. Is he a random recruit or modded recruit?
It seems to be fine for me still, sometimes the Dust Bandits act a bit weird and don't aggro correctly but I'm still able to pull it off. (what's the numbers in your camp like? any mods that completely overhaul the game?) It's definitely looking a bit tougher to do now though, so you may want to try the band of bones, though those are also quite weird sometimes.
@@s0u7th13f im playing vanilla and idk the camp name ^^ jvst tried like 2 times on rnd bandit camps around the hub. ill try again and let yk if i was able to pull it off. thank u for ur time to check on it
So I'm having the issue that even though my character is right in the middle of a dozen dust bandits, all with clear sight lines, he keeps getting up, causing him to get knocked out again rather than just flop for self presevation. It's happened on multiple of my characters, and my healer is far away as well. Any solutions? Edit: found a solution, remove all healing items and put him in a separate squad, but it still took multiple attempts to hit the sweet spot.
Glad you got it to work for you, seems it's a bit finicky overall for a lot of people but it definitely still works, once you're setup and it works for you, just rinse repeat. if Dust Bandits end up dying or getting knocked out you can even give em medpacks to help heal themselves.
The pinned comment kind of answers this, aswell as some other but short version: Character is halfway through animation or does not perceive the threat as life loss.
I like this game, but this is my biggest complaint about the game. You cant really progress naturally I feel. I guess you could always keep a medic hanging out in a town, but even then, I end up dying because when you start, there are no battles that you can win.
Maybe that's what I should make another guide on, because while it's a struggle you can definitely level without farming, it just takes way longer, super satisfying to get a high level character through time and effort though.
@@yourex-wife4259 Sometimes I just end up wandering about, no goal in mind, just taking in the scenery and enjoying myself. the best moments in the game are the moments that surprise you, like the skinfriends!
![F.HERO Ft. JSPKK x ลำไย ไหทองคำ x M-PEE - ไม่สนิทบิดหมด (Thai Riders Anthem) [Official MV]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/kPJZ0UihBfk/mqdefault.jpg)
Thanks for the videos on Kenshi, they all are very helpful. After testing this method out, I found out some nuances that might be the reason why some folks are not getting it to work correctly (including myself). First of all my squad was not getting any experience when waking up automatically and then falling down again playing dead. If they were in a "playing dead" state and I manually told them to get up, then they got the huge chunk of toughness experience. So you have to manually make a unit move from "playing dead" state to get the chunk of experience, or basically a move order.
2nd is the confusing way Kenshi defines a squad. The squad you "aggro" is the squad that gives you exp. If you happen to have a bunch of other Dust Bandits in the area aggro you while you're fighting the original squad you chose - you won't get experience from them. They kinda count as a general faction assist in your battle if that makes any sense, and the toughness won't go up from these units. This is for those folks who find 2 Dust Bandits camps side by side and may be wondering why your exp is low or something seems off if you end up dead by the assisting squad and not the original squad you picked a fight with.
The difficulty in terms of limb dismemberment will cause your Bandit Camp to dry out quicker since the crossbow folks will blast each other in the arms or legs and bleed them out. If you lower the limb dismemberment to "Rare", this will cause the bandits to live a little bit longer from accidental friendly fire bolt shots.
Finally Kenshi is a giant buggy mess and that's what makes the game charming. If you find your experience isn't going up as you would like, just find another camp and try again. Some camps just bug out and this trick does not work at all. Other camps it works flawlessly on first attempt. Good luck everyone!
Fantastic Comment! thank you so much for going so in depth on this. I'm going to Pin you so that everyone that checks comments see's this aswell and hopefully it'll help people even further.
To Elaborate on the 2nd point aswell: This is likely due to them not actually being hostile to you and simply assisting their allies, once you're down they go back to their neutral position and aren't counted as hostiles to you! super useful to know and I definitely should have included it. if only my memory was better haha.
If you also have an Assassin you can bonk the crossbow boys and force them not to use their crossbows by stealing their ammo, which will also keep things alive a bit longer, though if they see you that's another can of worms to deal with.
May you find many P4's and Southern Hive recruits, and may your days be as wonderful as you are.
Nothing says tough like fainting repeatedly at the sight of starving bandits
True toughness truly does come from admitting your weakness
the same hilariously funny logic applies to precision, since the skill primarily rises through hitting your teammates with ranged weapons. the heavier you hit them, the more precision exp you gain. 🤡
@@Bloodhoven precision is basically trauma tjen lol
@@caralho5237 indeed^^
good tutorial for those cursed with flesh
One method I found for training toughness later on is to have one person to to fight Beak Things. you need at least 1 other person capable of fighting multiple beak things to do this method. You need to have one person run in and fight them, get downed, and start getting eaten. The person getting eaten will try to get up, take damage, go down, and repeat. If you're lucky they will do this multiple times. I discovered this method by accident when trying to make my characters lose limbs for bionics and I ended up training Beep's toughness from low 20s all the way up to 70 in about an hour.
I like crab nests to exploit toughness, they never leave, they pretty weak to instakill character. They live away from roads, so it's rare event that someone interrupt cheesing. Get blue/green quality set of heavy armor, some food and first aid kits. Rush into nest with "block" on, get beaten, try get up, repeat.
Step one: Find/build robobed.
Step two: Put a robot in in, the stronger the better
Step three: Put on assassin rags, a few backpacks of ore for 100%encumberance and pick up someone/something on your shoulder
Step four: Start punching the robot in bed, training strenght, dexterity, toughness and martial arts at the same time.
Wow, that was extremely fast leveling. Thanks for the video.
Happy to help!
You can do similar in rebirth vs the holy nation guards. I got one of my Greenlanders up to 88 toughness very quickly. The interval between ko and getting back on your feet goes down significantly the tougher you are. Rebirth is also great for martial, dodge, lock pick, sneak, assassination training. Just make sure the guard stops to heal you which is why it is always good to have 2 characters there, as the other can pick up the one bleeding out and drop them near guards to heal.
how? can you get more indepth
@@jonahhughes8197 That is a long guide I'm afraid. Pick the prisoners start, try and get your two prisoners either in a cage or on a prisoner pole but if not, just take the beatings. In fact, just take the beatings a whole lot. One word of warning though, try and save regularly because occasionally the guards may accidentally either hack a limb off or forget you while you are bleeding out. One thing you can do is while you are following the prisoner task and doing your duty of running between mines and processors, you can hit the sneak button. You will be beaten half to death but this will get you on the road to increasing your toughness and sneak. If you are dumped in a cage, pick the locks until you are free. Pick every set of manacles you can and stack them in your Inventory, the guards will replace them over and over. You can quickly increase your strength by overburdening your character with leg irons. Pick fights with lone guards (it's better inside) this will increase your martial skill quicker and you get a martial bonus inside a building. If you are placed in a cage on a roof, there will be barrels and some items to loot on the tables near the stairs. You can rapidly build your thief skills by swapping these items between the barrels and your inventory. Once your thief skill is reliable (50 or so) you can start stealing uniforms off the guards. Hide the uniforms in the chests of the buildings you stay at (the guards never restock their armour), then when you fight them, your martial skills will go up more rapidly as you fighting stronger enemies (HN have way more strength than you). Once your sneak is really high, you can practice assassination on live targets.
@@jackochainsaw thank you so much man, how did you get you character to just play dead all the way up to 88 though mine seem to stop and it takes me hours
@@jonahhughes8197 I got up each time after being smacked down. You Just keep doing it each time they play dead and you can cheese it quite easily.
rebirth is also good for strength.. don't forget strength 😌
Great tutorial! It was a little tricky because the dust bandit camp I chose ended up having tons of hungry bandit patrols but it seems to be working fairly well.
It's a weird point but from my experience camp fires don't seem to affect stealth like other lights and torches do. The sun icon is still dark as if you're in the shade when next to a campfire sneaking.
Oooh nice I retract what I said in the skeleton toughness training vid I watched someone else do this but personally felt as though it wasn't explained properly or wasn't good enough since I always use the starving bandits in skinnerss roam but this is good I now feel as though I can start a toon find a dust bandit camp and have some fun :D
thank you this is exactly what i was looking for! this game's a bitch but I can't stop playing it!
Happy to help! took me a long time to get used to this game aswell, but with over 1300 hours now I'm so glad I put in the hours because man this game is something special.
@@s0u7th13f If I had found this game sooner, I most definitely would have dumped more than that into it lol
I love this game so much that sometime I wonder if myself is an M... Already have 500 hrs on Stream, and before moved to Stream, I already play at least twice that amount of times.
Ah that's how i will start my monk martial artist my last one ended well... Poorly
the hardest parts the start honestly, once you get that palm strike unlocked at 15 you can train it so much quicker.
You can increase the # of groups, or # of mobs per group any time, if you need bigger groups for toughness training, then decrease it after you are done.
Holy shit this is so lit!!!! THANK YOU!!!!!!!
i subscribed for and more good content
After the video all I can say is
Less Goo BrAndoooo
Thanks for freshing up the memory on this one. Anyone who does any tutorial guides for Kenshi deserves a subscribe. I believe though that there is a method to somewhat "force" the play dead to happen. That way they will play dead instead of getting up even while their squad mates are around. Has something to do with using passive/block stances along with sneak. Or I seem to remember having read something along those lines somewhere. Any idea? Might be wrong though.
I know that it's possible for them to heal themselves while also playing dead(in case someone wants to use this method on a solo run) Though that happens rather inconsistently with me.
I might have to experiment with that, it sounds plausible? I know you can force it semi consistently with enough enemies around so maybe there's a way to perma force it somehow.
Flesh people seem to mostly consistently heal themselves after being down, just give it a second, my problem is usually my skeletons that tend to be fussy about healing themselves sometimes.
Can't get my character to chain the playing dead state. Always just get up to fight
Training with dust bandits is dangerous, due to the weaponry they use (sabres, spiked clubs and crossbows). If you want to do this right - pick Skinners Roam and find the 40-ish hobo group. All they have is wooden sticks (theyre not made of wood, but theyre wood-ish color, so i call them that), so they wont bleed you out or deal immense bleeding damage to your body parts.
See... bleeding (cut) damage tends to make the wounds go critical fast. Physical (blunt) damage does not. You can get pummeled heavily with sticks without bleeding damage stacking, and you will eventually wake up from the beat up. Not so with bleeding damage.
This is particularly important if you set the chance to die to 2.6 or above (which you should do... or do you like to fight the same guys for eternity?).
If you can capture a few guys to beat you up in a controlled environment - do so, and give them each a baton (jitte). Those have NO bleeding damage multiplier, so you will never actually die unless they hit you for more damage than you have health on your vitals, which wont be doable for them unless you give them edge level jittes or something. You will end up fairly mangled, though... so make sure you have a bed and someone to bail you out at the ready.
Late game you can forget about this BS altogether - just don the heaviest (specialist grade minimum) armor you can lay your hands on and grab a few black gorillos (because racism - also make sure you keep the gorillos until theyre elders first). You can even train dodge with this set up. Might not be useful for a melee fighter with a weapon, but who knows... you might consider mixing it up in hand-to-hand later on?
EDIT: @5:51 About that - to avoid this issue, put the two guys in separate squads. The whole "squad thing getting up" only applies to the same squad. Not separate squads. This is also the (faulty/bugged) reason why guys with food in their backpacks wont share with other guys from your crew, because theyre in separate squads.
Dangerous in an uncontrolled environment, yes, but this is a controlled procedure since the dusties are "neutral" at start and won't bother your other squadmate as long as you pay up if they demand cash. The reason I don't use Hungry/Starving bandits is because they roam, you can only play dead once if they roam away from you rather than flop repeatedly in their face like you can with a settled camp.
Yes all the other things you described are 1000% faster, but in order to do those you need a controlled environment/your base. This training method literally takes near enough 0 setup (grab a random shit tier recruit, some bandages, and a little bit of spare cash and boom 90 toughness in 3 days tops).
Good shout for 5:51, make sure you still don't park your buddy too close though otherwise the dusties will aggro to him and he can't heal your early toughness wounds though.
After many attempts I got this to work once for like 2 minutes but it was enough to go from 20 tough to 60. What I did to make it work? No clue I just kept trying over and over until my guy stopped getting up to fight and started knocking himself out.
Honestly sad there's so much trouble around this, usually my first 2 and in rare cases 3 camps work fine for me. It seems that sometimes Kenshi does not want to abide by its own rules ahahaha, to be fair I should expect it from a game that lets characters walk on air if you load too slow :D
The Genesis mod contains a xp balancing mod that makes standing up from playing dead not give much xp at all
does it push other xp sources instead?
@@Bloodhoven I think it’s meant to make the grind more realistic for veterans. I don’t think other xp gains have been boosted, but I could be wrong
This isnt cheese tutorial, the real cheese is removing your prosthetic leg in front of a hostile group and put it back on again. This method gives you massive toughness EXP, and its easially repeatable becauae when you remove your equipped leg they loose agro, and you gain exp becauae you fainted momenterally during combat. The bigger the group the more exp you get. You can easially gain 90 tougness in half hour, assuming youhave a robotic leg and foumd a large enough group. Just dont do this trickmin front of cannibals and slavers for obvious reasons.
i prefer the hungry bandit at skinners roam method, by the time im at 60 toughness my combat skills are at 40, this only trains toughness, this does however seem better if you have a good training prisoner at your base
Yeah, this won't train combat stats other than block and dodge but is pretty much the fastest way for me to be lazy while leveling fleshies to 90 toughness, only takes 2-3 in game days so it doesn't bother me too much not getting any combat stats, I make those up with some spoder training or stuff of the sort
I was having the same problem as the others with this not working. The person I was trying to train would just keep getting up and wouldn't play dead. My fix was to create a new squad and place that person in it by themselves. Just had to kick that self preservation into high gear by making them think they were alone, lol.
Also like to add, you need to make sure the character that is being trained has no healing or items on them, thus the reason for a second toon to heal.
Thank you for the information!
Great idea with the seperate squad too, you can do that aswell for recruiting unique recruits that prefer smaller squads to join which seems like it must be intentional.
Leveling the "legit" way took so much time lol
Im on my first playthrough so im trying to avoid the cheese for now.
If it helps, this is technically an intended mechanic which is why the title of the video is labeled without "cheese" so don't feel to guilty taking advantage of it. I'd say for a first time player though, struggle a bit, for the first 100 or so hours I probably spent more time outrunning things than actually fighting them hahahah
Embrace the cheese and become gods that can steamroll through the whole world
I did this method but one of my characters got enslaved by slavemongers :(
Ah yes, the wandering slavemongers, They'll kidnap pretty much anyone. If you've got a second man you can pick up your injured person before they come along, you can also use this opportunity to get free training from your captors by fighting them since they'll always heal you.
So kind of a win in a loss?
I managed to take him and unlock his shackles before they took him away, it wasn't that bad. They just took his katana but I quickly replaced it with the meitou ninja blade from Dimak. I entered the black dragon tower and she was the only one chasing my squad of 14 as we left, so I ordered them to fight her and they won. I now have an extra 20,000 cats and my first meitou weapon :P
@@marcn4452 Congrats! that's a huge win early on, now you'll have food for a while and some good gear to boot, the Journey can only go upwards now aslong as you continue that trend, or it might turn into a roller coaster hehe.
I can't remember the name atm but the area where the cannibals, Holy Nation and free cities samurai fight each other, I like to follow a group of samurai around and get beat up by holy Nation and cannibals until I get bored. Unless I'm Greenland than I follow the holy Nation around.
If you don't care about making either large faction mad, their high stats give good xp when they beat me.
I can't get this to work for the life of me. It'll work the first time I get up and then every time after I earn no exp. =\
Kenshi bugginess at its finest, my usual resolution for that is to quick save and quick load just before getting up (while playing dead) don't know if that still works as a fix though
@@s0u7th13f I'll try that, thanks. =)
great video , but for some reason my character isnt really keen on self preservation and gets up like usual . he must know what i wanna do with him or its a bug. maybe i am doing something wrong ?
Most I can suggest is quicksaving and quickloading. Tends to fix a lot of problems for me, but then again this game is just buggy as all hell. Mind ya that's why I like it so much, but it is a mess.
I prefer to do this in skinner's roam I camp in a ruined mine and send people out 1 by 1 to get beatings and carry them back with a ninja
Nicely explained but I cant get this to work all my character does it go into recovery coma then get up as normal after healed even though my healer is at squin while the camp im using is near the stack.
It seems for some, you'll have to make a seperate squad completely so your characters are not linked. Also, if you're using Genesis or other complete overhaul mods, this may also not work sadly.
@@s0u7th13f nope no mods vanilla thanks for fast reply
@@kean4218 Best advice then is having him alone in a squad while training, or if necessary importing and finding a new camp. A few people have been struggling with this in the past, the pinned comment says some more but I have no idea why, usually for me it works at the first camp I go to almost every single time.
No problem, hopefully it ends up working for ya.
or you could get advanced training mods and sit on the campfire like i do
I either get dismemebered, or spend a decade in a coma and they forget about me when I wake up.
Thanks for teaching me to not try and exploit this buggy mess.
My character REFUSES to go unconscious for the 10 seconds and will get up and block until downed for 300+ seconds again, i cannot find a way to get them to just feign death again so i dont have to wait for another 300+ seconds
any other characters nearby that might force him to immediately get up rather than preserve his own life?
@@s0u7th13f trying on a solo playthrough, tried moving backpack around so meds are inaccessible, clicking on the bandits vs clicking on the ground next to them, maybe my character just has less of a will to be alive than yours LOL
@@s0u7th13f figured it out, i wasn't clicking on my own character to heal. I put meds in their backpack and then in the inventory and then would click on them, now it's working
@@SOTB69 Eyyyyyyyyy! thanks for coming back with an answer, that way if anyone else has issues like it I'll make sure to highlight this convo. Glad you got it working! enjoy the grind friend.
i cant do this anymore now TT, are they patch it??
Shouldn't be patched, It's mostly a staple of Kenshi. Make sure your others are far enough and that there's no interruption in the process. The game's just kinda wonk sometimes, it'll work sooner or later.
broken...
As in doesn't work for you? if so I think there's a few people that are in a similar boat, it seems to be due to Bandits not really paying attention, not found a fix other than to try and find a different camp where Bandit LOS/attention span is better.
If you mean broken as in powerful, then yes, that's the point haha.
if you use Genesis this wont work it seems
I guess that means possum have the biggest toughness
The most rootin tootin tough guys you ever seen
Doesnt seem to work. Found a camp with dust bandits and they attack on sight
Are you hostile with the faction? if not it might just be that the boss aggro'd on to you randomly, either reload to try again or find another camp with Dust Bandits that are more chill, sadly Dust Bandits tend to be rather ambitious.
@@s0u7th13f naw, base -10 relations, tried a couple camps seems to do the same. Does it matter if i approach them in a group or does it have to be one lone guy. At both camps I tried I dont think there was a dust boss, only a bunch with the flickery dialogue and would get hostile when i approached
@@barrybender3377 Hmmm, base -10 might just be some randomly hostile triggers. Sometimes Dust Bandits/Bosses will trigger a dialogue that always leads to them attacking you on sight to "rob" you.
I tend to go in alone, I'd keep most of the group away myself but if it works better for you in a group go nuts.
Yeah the flickery dialogue is a weird bug, as long as the camp has 1 dude with a regular speech bubble you should be able to do this. I can take another look at this method if it doesn't pan out for you and see if maybe it's broken somehow? if not I'll do my best to help you get it sorted.
@@s0u7th13f Thanks man, could be some mod is getting in the way as I play with Kazio which does some overhauls but its hard to tell whats base and whats modded half the time haha
@@barrybender3377 I feel you man, sometimes I forget what the Vanilla UI looks like cause I've played with Dark UI for so long!
I'll give it a test this evening for me and see what happens, Dust Lads are just a bit weird sometimes honestly but when it works oh man it works well.
Can you do this with only 1 character without assistance? Like, can you heal yourself mid combat, and continue healing while uncoscious?
Yes, and No, it's dependant on whether you reach your KO point or not and whether you'll be able to recover if you have. If you put on full coverage armour so the slash damage doesn't cut you apart so you'll bleed out I'd say "YES" but if you're doing this naked for speed, you'll likely bleed out from the slash damage before you can recover (Not always the case of course, but a lot less reliable)
@@s0u7th13f Got it. I'll just grab Ruka to give me a helping hand in this.
@@s0u7th13f
I'm back and just want to say that my main character finally reached level 100 Toughness. Now they are as durable as Steven Armstrong. I'm having them grind strength next so they can be just as strong as Armstrong as well.
It took a long time to reach level 100, and it is such a grind that I'll be looking for good mods to make it easier leveling up all my future followers.
Does cornelius count as a beast or character , can he dive to hiveman? Or should do bandits , does he get, Elder ?
He is an animal and keeps all the behaviour of that (even though he's unique) so nothing will eat him (EX: Cannibals, Fogmen) but Bandits can, and will skin him for meat if he goes down.
Best to train him using the fogmen training technique for toughness, and then wandering around the fog for combat skills.
Newby here, do these camps respawn?
They do not unless the game world is imported, in which case they will but will also appear in different locations.
@@s0u7th13f ok txs
Hey! is it possible to train multiple people like this? or is it hard because they would all have to go down BEFORE the first one that fell recovers and gets up again? what if you put the whole group on passive? would they stay down until they are all knocked out? And does that affect the XP rate when you have more allies around you? :o Oh! and last question lol. do you do this to dust bandits instead of starving bandits because starving bandits would wonder off once you are all knocked out?
The Problem with multiple people is that allies force other allies into helping them, so like you say, they'd all have to go down and then as soon as 1 gets up, they all automatically get up. This seems fine at first until you realize the ones that get up without you forcibly commanding them do not gain the large chunk of Toughness XP. Honestly, you're better off doing this one at a time, because it should only take you about 2 in game days per person for around 90 toughness, which is plenty for the majority of the game.
XP rate is unaffected and only matters based on how many enemies/level of enemies around you (As far as I've been able to see)
Exactly! anything that has a camp that won't eat you and lets you easily get in to heal your character will do, Dust Bandits are the easiest because they're naturally passive if you pay them off, but with Skeletons for example you can use the fogmen due to them having only blunt weapons (for the basic workers) and being unable to eat metal.
@@s0u7th13f Thanks alot for the reply! :) I'm running into a problem your "Beanhop" character isn't doing tho.. i found a dustbandit camp like you did and asked for the fight. But my character refuses to knock itself out for 10 seconds like Beanhop.. he always gets up to take more damage and ends up being knocked out for about 2 minutes.. what am I doing wrong? :S
@@xxGizmodioxx Sounds like your other squad members are still counting towards being in the squad, are your other members too close by? If so he'll recognize himself as being part of the squad and try to get up to help/acompany his allies.
@@s0u7th13f they really should be far enough away :S my group is currently inside the hub. But its possibly the overhaul mod "Genesis" thats messing with me as it has some animation mods? maybe there are animations for getting up quicker or something? or just because the dust bandits attack animations are different the character doesn't understand he will get hit before getting up so thats why he doesn't knock himself out like beanhop does?
@@xxGizmodioxx I think Genesis shouldn't affect you? but I wouldn't actually know too well since I don't use overhaul mods myself. (tried em, just not a fan of 'em)
Have you tried quicksaving/loading? I know sometimes my people get stuck doing something and that helps, if not maybe an import? the import keep in mind will make you lose the bandit camp location though so you'll have to find another.
If your char gets knocked out fully it's still possible, you'll just have to mend him with another character and then force him up afterwards... if he continues to just get up by himself without you though this'll be pretty troublesome.
Any additional info is helpful aswell. Is he a random recruit or modded recruit?
is this fixed? doesnt work for me at all
You're the second person to say that, I might have to check if this is still working, will try to get back to you on that asap.
It seems to be fine for me still, sometimes the Dust Bandits act a bit weird and don't aggro correctly but I'm still able to pull it off. (what's the numbers in your camp like? any mods that completely overhaul the game?) It's definitely looking a bit tougher to do now though, so you may want to try the band of bones, though those are also quite weird sometimes.
@@s0u7th13f im playing vanilla and idk the camp name ^^ jvst tried like 2 times on rnd bandit camps around the hub. ill try again and let yk if i was able to pull it off. thank u for ur time to check on it
@@dead4419 I hope it works out! it's one of my favourite ways to train for toughness so I'd hate to see it not work out for you. Goodluck friend!
So I'm having the issue that even though my character is right in the middle of a dozen dust bandits, all with clear sight lines, he keeps getting up, causing him to get knocked out again rather than just flop for self presevation. It's happened on multiple of my characters, and my healer is far away as well. Any solutions?
Edit: found a solution, remove all healing items and put him in a separate squad, but it still took multiple attempts to hit the sweet spot.
Glad you got it to work for you, seems it's a bit finicky overall for a lot of people but it definitely still works, once you're setup and it works for you, just rinse repeat. if Dust Bandits end up dying or getting knocked out you can even give em medpacks to help heal themselves.
why is my character not knocking hinself out before he was found out??
The pinned comment kind of answers this, aswell as some other but short version:
Character is halfway through animation or does not perceive the threat as life loss.
uh hi, some people i know are wearing flesh- will this still work?
It will!
Skeletons have a seperate more convenient training area but thise technically works for all things (not animals though)
I like this game, but this is my biggest complaint about the game. You cant really progress naturally I feel.
I guess you could always keep a medic hanging out in a town, but even then, I end up dying because when you start, there are no battles that you can win.
Maybe that's what I should make another guide on, because while it's a struggle you can definitely level without farming, it just takes way longer, super satisfying to get a high level character through time and effort though.
@@s0u7th13f Good idea. This game is different than any other game really. With so much freedom its easy to get lost on what to do to succeed.
@@yourex-wife4259 Sometimes I just end up wandering about, no goal in mind, just taking in the scenery and enjoying myself.
the best moments in the game are the moments that surprise you, like the skinfriends!
Does this work with skeletons?
Ps: NVM i didn't watch the whole vid
No problem at all, any questions a good question!
Hope the video helped (: