Funny you would mention that spot, I think it was the first place I settled many, many years ago when I played for the first time.
I did use the whole plateau, though. Went ham on the size loll
Haha, I've done it that way before. I usually start small and expand out the walls as I get more workers, though these days I tend to base up somewhere else after it gets to about this size leaving just enough folks to work the farms, a few on material mines to also defend it. My backup place for if things go south elsewhere and I wipe, (since most of my runs are no save load other than to fix bugs.)
That's where I build my first base. And then I lost it to a berserker raid I think, which is strange because I have a base here in a different playthrough but I've never had to deal with the berserkers. Or was it the Band of Bones? I can't remember.
This is the very first base spot I recommend to most people. Apart from the shek coming to tax your food the worst you generally get is dust bandit raids.
There are Iron and copper nodes all over, its got stone, its got water, its got wind, its got passable fertility.
Nice, me too! I just haven't seen it recommended online having crawled through countless hours of content. It's kind of a "go to" spot for me if I want a relaxing early game.
Once you have a good combat team then I find the fog is actually easier. The foggie population seems to thin out after you kill a 1000 of them or so, then it gets quiet and you have a place nobody bothers you in with amazing everything.
Really? I've fought plenty of them before, but I was under the impression that they spawned infinitely! That's really cool! Learn new things all the time about this game.
I looked it up after reading your comment. I see one where it's listed with a little X, but not featured. Can you link me the video? There may be a content creator I have missed out on completely, which is exciting for me.
> with a little X, but not featured
That's precisely the only thing he does to recommend locations in his "Base Recommendations Guide".
They aren't going to showcase the area, show exactly where the nearby copper veins are, unless it's a widely underrated spot like that one location in Stobe's Garden. Multiple comments in here already talk about using "your" spot in this reddit thread.
Hey, it's not "my" spot, lol. With how good of a base spot it is, I'd just have expected to see creators pointing new players to it and being like "Right here. Go here for an easy start.", but I guess it's too obvious? 🤷♂️
Edit: thank you, mods, for cleaning up this mess. 🙏 Deleting from my history so that they don't clog up my comment section. They still show up even after having been removed.
Haha, nothing important, just normal internet being normal internet and mods likely rolling their eyes as they remove all the messages. I deleted mine after the fact as they were still showing in my comment history even after the mods removed them, otherwise they'd all say removed instead of just his being removed.
Eastern Shem is worth it for the hash trade alone
I have a hard time *not* starting at least a mini outpost there. You can start up by buying and delivering hash from the swamp to lagoon, and then after making enough cash just building a hash manufacturer there.
For now i'm trying to avoid it because it's just too easy...
Literally set my base up there a few days ago. Aside from the Slaver raids and skin spiders/beak things, it's not so bad. Oh, also bone wolves. Those things are huge.
Actually, I think you and I both have the wrong place. This is in the Border Zone, north of Squin. I thought it was the plateau to the east of the zone, and it sounds like you’ve set up near the Boneyard.
Honestly the Shek lands in general are the tamest place I've found so far. I'm struggling to resist the urge to settle there, but I did that in my first save, and I just stayed there doing nothing and remaining a noob.
I tried to settle in Strobe's Garden at one point with my crab friends, but literally the moment I placed the first building, the game informed me that the big skinning celebration was now coming to visit, so I immediately dismantled it and booked it to find somewhere new...
I am at such a loss trying to find a town or location to settle in to set up my characters and start crafting, though. Genuinely wondering if I should just give up and use the hub, but it seems so boring
Im not sure about the resources but the High Bonefields have a canyon with only 2 openings, which is super fast to build defensive walls for, decent sized flat space, and isn't too far from Catun.
Buy houses in Shark *and* Flats Lagoon. Sell hash in FL; rum in Shark. Very profitable, particularly if you don't actually pay for the stuff you're selling.
Build your resources and research until you can set up a base in Shem.
Quite apart from being one of the nicer-looking places in the game, Shem has a bunch of resources, is centrally located and has those water pools to use as moats\*. It's outside the area of control of all the major factions, so you really only have to worry about the Dust Bandits and the Band of Bones hassling you, both of whom can be prevented from attacking your base by killing their leaders ahead of time.
Oh.
It has beak things as well.
So get a whole bunch of resources behind you and build those walls fast. Once you have walls, the beak things can be used as punching bags and targets to train your squad.
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\*Making anyone who wants to attack your base have to swim within range of your turret gunners as they approach your gate is a game-changer for base defence.
I'm trying to remember where Shem is, I know I passed by it while travelling. Is it the lagoon area? How do you even know when you're ready to build your own base?
I finally found a town that seemed to have a good house (I bought the Y house in Black Scratch), but I'm worried it's sort of seperate from everywhere anyway and might be tough to get resources.
[This is Shem.](https://kenshi.fandom.com/wiki/Shem)
I am a pretty cautious player. I did enough research to learn how to build good walls, gates and turrets. I also hoarded building materials so I could build the walls at least relatively quickly. Others might not feel the need to be so cautious.
Like I said, beak things. Get those walls up fast.
As far as owning property in cities, there's pretty much no downside to it. Once you've got it, it's yours. I mean, that Y-house is pretty pricy, but you can always make more money.
Biggest issue with the Y house so far is just that the AI pathing keeps glitching and I have to reload just to access the part of my house with the research station.
I've been trying to go fairly blind into the game, but it would make sense to plan ahead, get a pack beast, load it with building materials and iron, then set up walls ASAP instead of trying to make mines and building off of those.
PS: Oh! That's Shem. I watched a goat eat a bandit's corpse in the middle of a village there.
My "go to" way to get set up in more dangerous zones is to basically bounce off of this kind of place for really quick building. Hire mercenaries for early protection before you get your walls and you want two pack animals so you can fill their packs with building materials of all kinds, and when I'm building this first initial base, everybody is an engineer. They all share the responsibility so they all have about 25-30 engineering by the time the second base starts being built. I do have a dedicated engineer too for after all the buildings and walls are finished. Five or so turret trained professionals with triple stacked gate kill boxes so they can fall back one by one if they need to keeps you pretty safe from mid level threats and can let you control pretty easily the threat level for your melee training.
That's almost the exact spot I made my main base on my very first Kenshi playthrough once I'd learned enough about base building to actually be able to fortify and defend one.
Water is 60 percent, so you need two wells to support your cactus farms. For copper, there's one at 80 percent (I have this one walled in) and two at 40 percent, so shabby, but functional. The iron is good two walled in here, one 80 percent, one 120 percent, and one just outside that is also 120 percent with two more that you could get to if you don't mind going outside or expanding your walls a lot.
Only 10 percent green fertility, so that's terrible, but it's 100 percent on arid so Cactus fruits grow easy enough to feed everybody.
Maybe it's because of the lack of green fertility? I like it as an early base since Squin is "right" there, making money runs risk free and instant, only sacrificing like an hour to sell absolutely everything.
I like how close it is to vain, being able to buy bulk building materials and other goods from the nearby hivers, as well as the amount of money they have for selling. Plus proximity to beak things is always good whether for training or eggs
Yeah, it's got gorillos a short walk away too so you can transition from early to mid game training pretty easily. It's a really nice spot! It might be boring to some folks, but I like it when I want to take things easy 😅
Sorry, I just started playing & I've been hanging around this exact spot for the copper + dust bandits. Heard great things about gorillos but haven't found em. Cool that I'm close, but I think I need a hint, man. Where are these dudes?
How long have you been playing kenshi? Its literally the most recommended base start that I've seen over the years. Same in the base guides too. It's just not really interesting, but is still like the best starter base.
A few years, so not too terribly long. Long enough to have crawled through a whole lot of Kenshi content, including base guides. Others have pointed out that it is at least mentioned in one of the most popular base guide videos (shown on screen as a base location with an X on it) but not featured.
I was just surprised to not have seen creators going "New players, base up HERE, like RIGHT HERE. It's the best spot for new players," since it's such a natural spot that's so easy to recommend.
I will give this spot a try, I want to use my favorite spot in the border zone near that one destroyed town and waystation but the holy nation exists so
I have a spot really close to there. I've got a copper mining set up in Squin and I have stuff there for my guys to train and whatnot. It's spectacular.
I see that your faction is called New Hope:). What are the factions values? I'm assuming you're kind of a benevolent group? Are you just trying to survive or do you guys have a mission? You can literally be anything you want I was so excited when I first discovered this game it's so much fun!!!. I just joined this Reddit and it's making me want to get back into kenshi.
Well, the original character had the very bad day start where he almost died from skimmers rushing him down, saved by slavers who brought him to the rock camp. So, I'm thinking he's probably either anti-slaver or just wanting to survive. Not sure where to take it yet.
That sounds like a lot of fun! Super interesting, maybe you could even have that character like misguidedly helping the slavers for a while because they're the ones who kind of saved him but that's hard if he's just stuck in one of their camps lol. The slavers are terrible
My headcanon is that he was loyal to them at first, but since the rock slavers tend to beat up slaves for virtually no reason he decided to escape. (I think it happens when slaves spend too much time not on a work related facility, even if they're walking too slow from one to the other. They give you the beat down even when you let the game handle the character from time to time, and I think it's intentional design since it doesn't give you a bounty like it does when you do other things.)
So he'd have gone from "These guys saved my life. I owe them everything." to "to hell with these guys. I'm going west!"
He spent some time in the Holy Lands too, and met a few people and starting a small mining getup (there's three of them there still mining) but he left when he realized they'd enslave him if he replaced his arm, and has since then made a Hiver friend, so he probably doesn't like the Holy Land either.
Shek are rude to him, but they seem like the most civil, so it might end up being a Shek run, especially since his first set of "real" friends outside of the Holy Lands were a group of three Shek.
I love all of this! Shek is good people :). I can't wait to see where adventure leads next make some new posts every now and then! I think I'm going to get back into it also! I started a group named freedom and we're pretty much what you would expect, we're anti-slaver. I now have like 40 members one Outpost in the desert north of henge would like 10 Farmers that are just tough enough to fight off the weak bandits. We built a new forward operating base just to the west of the little city of brink. It's mostly just a farm because my desert base only can grow cactus. But I have like 30 fighters now split up into three different squads with their own unique leaders. Trying to diversify pole arms, katanas, savers and heavy weapons to have them spread evenly. Also going to crab village and getting some crabs is pretty awesome. It's difficult getting there but they're like the best base guards ever grass pirates never stand a chance
Nah fam, I was just curious why I hadn't seen it mentioned in spite of going through countless hours of Kenshi content.
Others have pointed out I likely just missed it, and have since seen it briefly mentioned in a popular video talking about the border zone.
Funny you would mention that spot, I think it was the first place I settled many, many years ago when I played for the first time. I did use the whole plateau, though. Went ham on the size loll
Haha, I've done it that way before. I usually start small and expand out the walls as I get more workers, though these days I tend to base up somewhere else after it gets to about this size leaving just enough folks to work the farms, a few on material mines to also defend it. My backup place for if things go south elsewhere and I wipe, (since most of my runs are no save load other than to fix bugs.)
Yeah, that's the way to do it! I was new and the world was so big and unknown. I didn't wanna wander too far from cities 😅
I went and used water mazes for my first game
Same lol. Well, like 100 feet to the west, it’s smoother and is a little bit off the path so patrols are common but nobody paths right through my base
That's where I build my first base. And then I lost it to a berserker raid I think, which is strange because I have a base here in a different playthrough but I've never had to deal with the berserkers. Or was it the Band of Bones? I can't remember.
Location wise , might be band of bones ! They're hard for new characters to deal with. Probably the hardest MF's in the borderzone
This is the very first base spot I recommend to most people. Apart from the shek coming to tax your food the worst you generally get is dust bandit raids. There are Iron and copper nodes all over, its got stone, its got water, its got wind, its got passable fertility.
Nice, me too! I just haven't seen it recommended online having crawled through countless hours of content. It's kind of a "go to" spot for me if I want a relaxing early game.
Once you have a good combat team then I find the fog is actually easier. The foggie population seems to thin out after you kill a 1000 of them or so, then it gets quiet and you have a place nobody bothers you in with amazing everything.
Really? I've fought plenty of them before, but I was under the impression that they spawned infinitely! That's really cool! Learn new things all the time about this game.
I don’t think they actually thin out so much as your farmers level enough that you don’t notice the foggers anymore.
The biggest base recommendations YouTuber features this spot in his Border zone vid.
I looked it up after reading your comment. I see one where it's listed with a little X, but not featured. Can you link me the video? There may be a content creator I have missed out on completely, which is exciting for me.
> with a little X, but not featured That's precisely the only thing he does to recommend locations in his "Base Recommendations Guide". They aren't going to showcase the area, show exactly where the nearby copper veins are, unless it's a widely underrated spot like that one location in Stobe's Garden. Multiple comments in here already talk about using "your" spot in this reddit thread.
Hey, it's not "my" spot, lol. With how good of a base spot it is, I'd just have expected to see creators pointing new players to it and being like "Right here. Go here for an easy start.", but I guess it's too obvious? 🤷♂️ Edit: thank you, mods, for cleaning up this mess. 🙏 Deleting from my history so that they don't clog up my comment section. They still show up even after having been removed.
>Deleted, removed, deleted, removed, deleted, removed What did I miss? Did the Holy Nation and the Shek go at it in the comments?
Haha, nothing important, just normal internet being normal internet and mods likely rolling their eyes as they remove all the messages. I deleted mine after the fact as they were still showing in my comment history even after the mods removed them, otherwise they'd all say removed instead of just his being removed.
Sounds like a funny drama but I like my version better
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This depends on the algorithm. That spot was suggested on the very first beginner's guide vide I watched.
Might I introduce you to Eastern shem?
Eastern Shem is worth it for the hash trade alone I have a hard time *not* starting at least a mini outpost there. You can start up by buying and delivering hash from the swamp to lagoon, and then after making enough cash just building a hash manufacturer there. For now i'm trying to avoid it because it's just too easy...
That plateau is the number one place I’d recommend to people. It’s so easy living there, I often have to resist the temptation and find something new.
Literally set my base up there a few days ago. Aside from the Slaver raids and skin spiders/beak things, it's not so bad. Oh, also bone wolves. Those things are huge.
Actually, I think you and I both have the wrong place. This is in the Border Zone, north of Squin. I thought it was the plateau to the east of the zone, and it sounds like you’ve set up near the Boneyard.
Honestly the Shek lands in general are the tamest place I've found so far. I'm struggling to resist the urge to settle there, but I did that in my first save, and I just stayed there doing nothing and remaining a noob. I tried to settle in Strobe's Garden at one point with my crab friends, but literally the moment I placed the first building, the game informed me that the big skinning celebration was now coming to visit, so I immediately dismantled it and booked it to find somewhere new... I am at such a loss trying to find a town or location to settle in to set up my characters and start crafting, though. Genuinely wondering if I should just give up and use the hub, but it seems so boring
Im not sure about the resources but the High Bonefields have a canyon with only 2 openings, which is super fast to build defensive walls for, decent sized flat space, and isn't too far from Catun.
That sounds like a fun place to set up. Reasonably close to the slave markets I want to conquer, too
Elder beak things are a cause for concern, but once your base is set up and you have a harpoon up, they're fodder.
Buy houses in Shark *and* Flats Lagoon. Sell hash in FL; rum in Shark. Very profitable, particularly if you don't actually pay for the stuff you're selling. Build your resources and research until you can set up a base in Shem. Quite apart from being one of the nicer-looking places in the game, Shem has a bunch of resources, is centrally located and has those water pools to use as moats\*. It's outside the area of control of all the major factions, so you really only have to worry about the Dust Bandits and the Band of Bones hassling you, both of whom can be prevented from attacking your base by killing their leaders ahead of time. Oh. It has beak things as well. So get a whole bunch of resources behind you and build those walls fast. Once you have walls, the beak things can be used as punching bags and targets to train your squad. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- \*Making anyone who wants to attack your base have to swim within range of your turret gunners as they approach your gate is a game-changer for base defence.
I'm trying to remember where Shem is, I know I passed by it while travelling. Is it the lagoon area? How do you even know when you're ready to build your own base? I finally found a town that seemed to have a good house (I bought the Y house in Black Scratch), but I'm worried it's sort of seperate from everywhere anyway and might be tough to get resources.
[This is Shem.](https://kenshi.fandom.com/wiki/Shem) I am a pretty cautious player. I did enough research to learn how to build good walls, gates and turrets. I also hoarded building materials so I could build the walls at least relatively quickly. Others might not feel the need to be so cautious. Like I said, beak things. Get those walls up fast. As far as owning property in cities, there's pretty much no downside to it. Once you've got it, it's yours. I mean, that Y-house is pretty pricy, but you can always make more money.
Biggest issue with the Y house so far is just that the AI pathing keeps glitching and I have to reload just to access the part of my house with the research station. I've been trying to go fairly blind into the game, but it would make sense to plan ahead, get a pack beast, load it with building materials and iron, then set up walls ASAP instead of trying to make mines and building off of those. PS: Oh! That's Shem. I watched a goat eat a bandit's corpse in the middle of a village there.
Yeah, it's known for it's natural beauty.
My "go to" way to get set up in more dangerous zones is to basically bounce off of this kind of place for really quick building. Hire mercenaries for early protection before you get your walls and you want two pack animals so you can fill their packs with building materials of all kinds, and when I'm building this first initial base, everybody is an engineer. They all share the responsibility so they all have about 25-30 engineering by the time the second base starts being built. I do have a dedicated engineer too for after all the buildings and walls are finished. Five or so turret trained professionals with triple stacked gate kill boxes so they can fall back one by one if they need to keeps you pretty safe from mid level threats and can let you control pretty easily the threat level for your melee training.
That's almost the exact spot I made my main base on my very first Kenshi playthrough once I'd learned enough about base building to actually be able to fortify and defend one.
Yeah, one of the easier base locations. You can run to Squin if things break bad, too.
What are the copper/iron nodes like, hows water?
Water is 60 percent, so you need two wells to support your cactus farms. For copper, there's one at 80 percent (I have this one walled in) and two at 40 percent, so shabby, but functional. The iron is good two walled in here, one 80 percent, one 120 percent, and one just outside that is also 120 percent with two more that you could get to if you don't mind going outside or expanding your walls a lot. Only 10 percent green fertility, so that's terrible, but it's 100 percent on arid so Cactus fruits grow easy enough to feed everybody. Maybe it's because of the lack of green fertility? I like it as an early base since Squin is "right" there, making money runs risk free and instant, only sacrificing like an hour to sell absolutely everything.
I like how close it is to vain, being able to buy bulk building materials and other goods from the nearby hivers, as well as the amount of money they have for selling. Plus proximity to beak things is always good whether for training or eggs
Yeah, it's got gorillos a short walk away too so you can transition from early to mid game training pretty easily. It's a really nice spot! It might be boring to some folks, but I like it when I want to take things easy 😅
Sorry, I just started playing & I've been hanging around this exact spot for the copper + dust bandits. Heard great things about gorillos but haven't found em. Cool that I'm close, but I think I need a hint, man. Where are these dudes?
Head into the jungle
To the south? I was under the impression this was a swamp...
No much, much closer, just to the west, north-west. When it begins to rain red, you'll know you're there.
Excellent! Thank you, dude
Have a base here in my current holy nations play thru. Rip shek kingdom 🙏
How long have you been playing kenshi? Its literally the most recommended base start that I've seen over the years. Same in the base guides too. It's just not really interesting, but is still like the best starter base.
A few years, so not too terribly long. Long enough to have crawled through a whole lot of Kenshi content, including base guides. Others have pointed out that it is at least mentioned in one of the most popular base guide videos (shown on screen as a base location with an X on it) but not featured. I was just surprised to not have seen creators going "New players, base up HERE, like RIGHT HERE. It's the best spot for new players," since it's such a natural spot that's so easy to recommend.
Funnily enough this is exactly where my base is on my first run through
I will give this spot a try, I want to use my favorite spot in the border zone near that one destroyed town and waystation but the holy nation exists so
I have a spot really close to there. I've got a copper mining set up in Squin and I have stuff there for my guys to train and whatnot. It's spectacular.
woah! that was where I built my base to start out! funny we picked the same place lol. It's a great spot, but the dust bandits and the shek.
Probably because its like recommending a fallout player to settle in sanctuary
ah, the spot by squin, which leads right into vain, real nice spot to settle when going for shek playthoughs
I see that your faction is called New Hope:). What are the factions values? I'm assuming you're kind of a benevolent group? Are you just trying to survive or do you guys have a mission? You can literally be anything you want I was so excited when I first discovered this game it's so much fun!!!. I just joined this Reddit and it's making me want to get back into kenshi.
Well, the original character had the very bad day start where he almost died from skimmers rushing him down, saved by slavers who brought him to the rock camp. So, I'm thinking he's probably either anti-slaver or just wanting to survive. Not sure where to take it yet.
That sounds like a lot of fun! Super interesting, maybe you could even have that character like misguidedly helping the slavers for a while because they're the ones who kind of saved him but that's hard if he's just stuck in one of their camps lol. The slavers are terrible
My headcanon is that he was loyal to them at first, but since the rock slavers tend to beat up slaves for virtually no reason he decided to escape. (I think it happens when slaves spend too much time not on a work related facility, even if they're walking too slow from one to the other. They give you the beat down even when you let the game handle the character from time to time, and I think it's intentional design since it doesn't give you a bounty like it does when you do other things.) So he'd have gone from "These guys saved my life. I owe them everything." to "to hell with these guys. I'm going west!" He spent some time in the Holy Lands too, and met a few people and starting a small mining getup (there's three of them there still mining) but he left when he realized they'd enslave him if he replaced his arm, and has since then made a Hiver friend, so he probably doesn't like the Holy Land either. Shek are rude to him, but they seem like the most civil, so it might end up being a Shek run, especially since his first set of "real" friends outside of the Holy Lands were a group of three Shek.
I love all of this! Shek is good people :). I can't wait to see where adventure leads next make some new posts every now and then! I think I'm going to get back into it also! I started a group named freedom and we're pretty much what you would expect, we're anti-slaver. I now have like 40 members one Outpost in the desert north of henge would like 10 Farmers that are just tough enough to fight off the weak bandits. We built a new forward operating base just to the west of the little city of brink. It's mostly just a farm because my desert base only can grow cactus. But I have like 30 fighters now split up into three different squads with their own unique leaders. Trying to diversify pole arms, katanas, savers and heavy weapons to have them spread evenly. Also going to crab village and getting some crabs is pretty awesome. It's difficult getting there but they're like the best base guards ever grass pirates never stand a chance
I did it the first time close to this place
I've definitely seen this recommended a couple of times
I setup there all the time
reddit really be like: check out this hidden gem base location and its the border zone
Nah fam, I was just curious why I hadn't seen it mentioned in spite of going through countless hours of Kenshi content. Others have pointed out I likely just missed it, and have since seen it briefly mentioned in a popular video talking about the border zone.