3-2: I've Got a Name

Outlaw Farmer wakes in the middle of the night, feeling rested enough after only a short nap. She's been thinking. She and the gang have been though a lot together over the three weeks since she joined. She's one of the strongest members, she's recruited a couple others, she's saved others' lives and been saved in return a few times over. If she keeps thinking of herself as just the outlaw farmer who hangs out with them because they freed her from slavery, she's kidding herself. She's a core part of the team. And as a core part of the team, it's about past time she told them her name.

The way to change a character's name in Kenshi is gonna sound a little silly at first when I tell you. You change it by going to a plastic surgeon.

Plastic surgeons can be found in Shinobi Thieves' towers and occasionally in bars. Talk to them and they'll take you to the character creation screen, where you can edit anything about your character other than their “race” or gender. As the character creation screen is also where you name a character, you can rename them there too.

Thus, Outlaw Farmer becomes Outlaw Hana! Her name is Hana. She decides to keep the “Outlaw” part on account of it makes her sound kinda dangerous and sexy.

In the morning, Outlaw Hana shares her name with the gang, who welcome her anew. From there, the conversation turns to something the gang's been thinking of for a while: Buying a house. There's a few reasons for this. One is for more storage space. The other is for research. See, the gang has been picking up all sorts of research materials, but in order to actually use them, they need to build a lab.

There are plenty of wrecked buildings to buy in the Hub. While they are all fixer-uppers to put it mildly, the real estate is a lot cheaper than in other places. The gang can work with that. Horse mentions what he saw last night—that a lot of the buildings have people still living in them despite their terrible condition—so with that in mind, they survey the city until they find a small, reasonably priced house with no one living in it. Decent location too, right near one of the town gates.

4,800 Cats is a pretty small dent in the gang's total of 104,703. It's an easy buy. Of course, there's still the matter of renovation.

The house's status bars list its Condition as 0, its Building Condition as a little over a third, and its third bar reads “Building Material 6/16”. In other words, it's totally busted, it's a third of the way to being fixed, and needs 10 more building materials to restore.

Straightforward enough. The gang just needs to come up with a bunch of building materials. Most towns sell them at general stores; while the Hub doesn't have one, the bar here, being the only shop in town, carries a few odds and ends.

Building materials are represented by green containers of indeterminate content. They're cheap, here being sold for 91 Cats a pop, but they're big and bulky and a hassle to carry. The bar here has four for sale in amongst the food, booze, and pile of crappy crossbows, not enough to fix up the house. The gang buys them all and sets to figuring out where to get the rest of them.

To the north lies the Holy Nation, unsafe for non-humans and no picnic for human women either. To the south, the Shek Kingdom. While far from perfect, it seems the better option. As such, it's south the gang travels. Descending from the badlands down into a rocky canyon, it's not long before a town comes into view in the distance, wedged between towering parallel stone outcroppings.

This is the town of Squin. The gang's presence is tolerated here, not exactly welcomed. Thankfully, “tolerated” is good enough for them to go about their business unmolested. They make a visit to the general store, buy up the rest of the building materials they need, and return to the Hub. The gang will see more of Squin another time—for now, they have a house to repair.

Back at the Hub, everyone pitches in. Many hands make short work; the house is all fixed up before sundown!

The gang are now the proud owners of a completely empty house! The next step is clear: Build something in it.

There are only a few things the gang can build right now, most of them outdoor strucutres like a basic quarry, or a well. Those, we won't worry about for now. The whole point of buying this house in the Hub was for a place to get some research done so that's where the gang starts.

Feast your eyes on this contraption! I don't have a single clue how it's supposed to work but the gang sure is gonna be doing some research on it. They build a torch next to it too to make it easier to work through the night; all kinds of work get much harder in the dark, limiting the worker to using only half of their skill level if they don't have any light.

So, research in Kenshi. Research is for unlocking the ability to build new kinds of structures and do new kinds of crafting. We're going to start by researching various kinds of storage container so the gang can offload a bunch of gear they've been schlepping around that it isn't a good idea to use yet. Heavy samurai legplates that would take more strength to comfortably wear around, powerful crossbows that would do more harm than good until someone trains in the skill that makes you not constantly shoot your friends by accident when you shoot a crossbow—things like that. Storage containers are some of the only researches in the game that are free; most other things take research materials. Basic research takes Books, the avocado green books with the orange Machinists logo in the previous screenshot. You can find these for sale at most settlements and the shops that carry them tend to refresh their inventory daily, so getting basic research done is largely a matter of going out and finding some way to make money to finance your Book habit.

Research also takes time. The amount of time is governed by the science skill of the character doing the research. None of the gang have a science skill above 1, but greenlander humans get a bonus to science xp gain, so either Riddly or Outlaw Hana would make the best researcher for now. Outlaw Hana volunteers.

There's only room for one person at a research bench so the rest of the gang has to find something else to do. They break into groups, some training at the Thieves' tower and some mining iron nearby to keep a bit of cashflow. A few hours pass with everyone milling back and forth. Soon, Outlaw Hana has all sorts of storage all figured out and moves onto her next research project: Farming.

There's a few different crops you can grow in Kenshi: Greenfruit, wheat, rice, cactus, cotton, and hemp. While it may still be a while before the gang starts actually building a town and farming, having all the crops unlocked is going to help them start scouting potential locations next time they go out exploring.

Outlaw Hana works through the day and into the next. Eventually, she gets to the point where she needs more materials to finish her farming research, so she decides to take a little break and make the run to the nearest hive village to buy the stuff herself. She's nearly back at the Hub when she finds herself under attack.