4-4: Lay the First Stone

As the gang journeys toward the site of their future home, packs laden with all the materials they need, a realization hits them: They've overlooked something crucial. None of them are any good at building things.

Sure, they all pitched in together to fix up that house at The Hub; they're pretty proud of how that turned out. They did build those research benches and a cooking stove in that house. That was really slow going, though—a lot of bumbling around. They could really use someone with expertise. Their path takes them past a tech hunter waystation; perhaps they'll find some such individual there.

A little outpost on a high badlands ridge. It needs no walls to surround it; a gate is enough, spanning the entirety of the thin stretch of ridge leading up to the outpost. There is a windmill and three buildings. The largest is an L-shaped building with a neon sign that reads BAR. The middle is your typical square house and the smallest is a rectangular shack behind said house. The bar has numerous beds on the roof, somewhat protected from the elements by a series of square tarps stretched across posts above them.

They stopped at this waystation the last time they headed this way, back when Outlaw Hana first went a-prospecting. Jam bought their second prosthetic arm here, the one they used to replace the kludgy Hive-made economy arm they'd bought when the gang was just them, Riddly, and Ells. While they didn't linger at the bar then, they did notice a few drifters there looking for work.

The soft-spoken Silvershade takes point this time, deciding they'd like a turn at the hiring process. They glide into the bar. Among the mercenaries and tech hunters, they spot a hungry-looking hive worker drone—a potential prospect. Not to stereotype, but workers are the ones who'd be responsible for building things in a hive, so Silvershade figures there's a chance this one might have some construction knowhow. They strike up a conversation.

In the bar, Silvershade speaks to a hive worker who is sitting at a table with a couple armoured human mercenaries. The hive worker is wearing beige cargo pants, no top, and carries a horrifically rusted wakizashi. Behind them, a charcoal-skinned human man with shaggy hair tends the bar; behind him, another table seats a couple more human mercenaries and a couple tech hunters. The back wall is lined with casks.

Karst: You look like someone who can appreciate a good wall.

Silvershade: A wall? They're alright I guess.

Karst: I can't stop thinking about them, they're everywhere! Town walls, building walls, walls in chests, walls of rock, walls behind walls, shield walls, cell walls, invisible walls, walls between people, walls around our hearts, walls between my spouse and I, walls! Walls are everywhere!

Silvershade: Uhuh... So, you're an engineer I take it?

Karst: I am! And you can hire me for just 5000 Cat advance. After all, my service is behind a pay wall.

Silvershade: Alright, here's the dough. Let's get you to building walls. [c.5000]

Silvershade barely bats an eye at Karst's eccentricity; they're not really that much weirder than half the people they already call comrades.

Karst is what I'll call a job specialist recruit, someone whose starting statline is mostly bare but with a ton of points in one or two non-combat skills. Specifically, their stats look like this:

Karst's stats window.

A whopping 60 points in Engineer with a nice backup of 36 in Labouring (the skill for odd jobs), and 8 Strength and 23 Athletics to help with all the running back and forth they'll be doing with a heavy pack full of materials. Karst is a semi-unique recruit: In a game of Kenshi, there will always be exactly one recruit with their colourful opening dialogue and statline somewhere in the world and that person will always be a hive worker, but their name is randomized.

Karst is far from the only engineering specialist recruit. There are plenty of others out there in the world, both unique and random, I just haven't had reason to pick any up in this playthrough until now. There are also medic specialists, farming specialists, and cooking specialists.

The Engineer skill determines how fast a character builds and repairs structures. While some science and trade skills affect quality of work as well as speed, Engineer affects speed only, but the difference is pretty drastic. A skilled engineer is vital if you want to get a settlement up and running in a decent amount of time. With a skill of 60, Karst will build things faster than the entire rest of the gang put together.

The rest of the trip out to the building site takes the gang 7 hours; all the stuff they're carrying slows them down significantly. Specifically, Ruka sets the pace with her heavy plank sword and share of the material burden, significantly overdoing it considering I haven't taken the time to train her Strength stat very high. We're not pointing fingers though. Shortly after noon, the gang arrives at their destination.

The map zoomed all the way out, showing the gang's current location. The gang stands at the place that will become their base, a shallow hill of dark, faded brown, wet ground with little pools where water has collected, like wet fingerprints pressed into the land. Rusted, ferrous scraps of metal litter the ground in a cluster next to a towering, rusted old storage tank. Past this, a path runs across the shot, a clear line of much paler ground. The scene extends into the distance with the ground becoming greyer and more dismal. A thick brown haze hangs in the air there, shrouding further ruins in that direction and making what we can see more vague and indistinct. Still, the sky above remains a pale blue. The sun does shine on this land.

With its rippled black mud and scattered industrial ruin, the place is pretty interesting if not exactly picturesque. While it may not look it, it's got all the resources a good building location needs: Fertile soil, good sources of stone, iron, and copper, and plentiful groundwater. Clean groundwater, Outlaw Hana emphasizes to the skeptical Shryke. While this place is next to the Deadlands, it's out of the range of the Deadlands' acid rain; the water is quite potable. She checked it herself.

It's time to get building. The first stone laid, quite literally, will be the stone mine. There's a fairly tight area on the slope with 100% stone quality, making choice of placement easy. The gang all pitches in; every hand will help build this first structure.

Near the collection of rusted scrap, the entire gang kneels around a pile of white stone, all doing the construction animation where you get down on one knee and sort of vaguely rummage around in front of you with your hands. The white stone has red grid lines all over it to show that it is a building in progress.

Stone is for refining into building materials. Getting your own source of it is essential to a self-reliant settlement. Next up is the stone processor for the other half of the equation, as well as an iron refinery to make more iron plates, a wind generator to power both, some farms for the three kinds of crop we'll be growing, a well for water to feed said crops, and various storage containers for everything.

The aforementioned buildings are being placed, about to be built. The building screen is still open, building menus replacing the usual HUD across the bottom quarter of the screen, so all these buildings are currently coloured bright green to signify that they can, in fact, be placed in the chosen locations.

Putting all this together is hard work even with an experienced engineer like Karst leading the way. It's 3 AM by the time the gang has finished building.

A zoomed-out shot of the base from a high angle. It's quite dark out but the gang has built a ring of standing torches around the stone mine and a single torch next to each of the other structures.

With their own building material production up and running, the gang also places standing torches by each of their structures at the cost of a building material apiece. Working in the dark imposes significant skill penalties; good lighting is essential.

Beep and Burn start mining stone; Shryke, Horse, and Jam mine iron; Outlaw Hana goes for the copper. Riddly works the stone refinery, Ruka and Cat work the iron, and Silvershade and Keys start tending the crops. Karst keeps building.

Having laboured through the night, the gang has food on the mind. Next up is a grain silo to grind wheat into flour and a small house in which to build a kitchen. Wheat is a massive pain in the ass to work with, requiring not only a silo but also a special bread oven to turn flour into bread. For actually nutritious meals using more than a single ingredient, the bread is then cooked on a stove with whatever else to make the final product.

Rice is comparatively much simpler to work with—just harvest the rice and then cook it up—but you need swampy terrain to grow rice, which comes with its own challenges. Despite this area's muddy appearance, it doesn't count as a swamp. It shares an environment type with the rest of Shem, which means arid with a dash of green. That means the gang has to make do with wheat.

While the gang's eager to get their food production up and running, the actual results are a ways off. Crops need time to grow and the first few yields aren't even going to be turned into food. They're going to be replanted to expand the fields. It'll take a lot more than these little starter farms to sustainably feed everyone.

When the gang was dividing up tasks, Ells volunteered to be the cook. With mouths to feed and no crops yet ready, his job broadens to food acquisition by any means available. He decides it'll be easiest to simply make a food run to the nearby Smugglers Bar. Climbing the hill to the open plain, he hopes for a quick little jaunt. To his dismay, he's instead immediately set upon by some of his new neighbours.

Ells runs by in the foreground while a mob of 30 or so hungry bandits takes on three beak things. Already, a massive pool of blood stains the ground red from bandits torn asunder.

First he attracts the attention of a trio of beak things. Then he ends up fleeing right into a massive mob of hungry bandits. Fortunately, these are two problems that kinda solve each other. He turns on his heel and runs right back toward the beak things, presenting the apex predators with a much larger meal and the bandits with a much larger problem. The bandits outnumber the beak things ten to one; it's nowhere near enough. They don't stand a snowball's chance in Hell.

Ells makes a clean getaway, rocking into the bar all casual like nothing happened. The food of choice there is gohan, rice cooked up with a bit of greenfruit; he buys out their stock. It provides a hearty 75 nu and sells much cheaper than most food on account of rice being so much easier to process than wheat. It'll be enough to keep the gang working hard for a good while.

4-5: HOEIN' AIN'T EASY ⮞