Guide to Training Statistics

Why train your squad members? Watch a group of sand ninjas carve their way through a hapless mob of hungry bandits and you've got your answer. Specializing your characters is a great way to make them more effective at their chosen jobs, as well as enhance their survivability when they do get into combat.

Unlike other games, the amount of experience needed to level up in Kenshi does not change depending on the level. Instead, the rate at which you will gain experience decreases with each level until reaching level 100, where your experience rate is 0.00x. The exception to this XP rate scaling is Field Medic and Robotics, which may behave this way due to a bug.

Athletics and Swimming

Athletics and Swimming are trained in a very intuitive way. Athletics can be trained fastest by having a character's encumbrance percentage at or close to 0% and sending them running across the map. When at 0% encumbrance, characters will gain XP at 1.5 times their current level's XP rate. After a certain level, characters should be easily outrunning any hostile characters and can easily be sent running around without the user actively watching their location.

You can train swimming all you want, but your characters will never swim faster than they can walk. Avoid lakes like the ones in the Floodlands, South Wetlands, and The Swamp. Always avoid swimming in acidic water as Weather protections against acid rain will not decrease your character's pain. Hive and Skeleton characters do not have to worry about Acid and are fine. Skeletons do not have to worry about swimming at all. They walk through the water and a good strategy for getting places fast is to just have a skeleton carry a character who has to swim.

Crafting Statistics

Armour Smith, Crossbow Smith, and Weapon Smith are all stats which involve crafting Equipment and can be trained on the related Crafting tables. In the case of Armour Smith, experience can also be gained while creating the materials needed to craft Equipment. Make sure to keep a light source nearby the crafting station in order to avoid Working in Darkness stat drainage which will reduce the quality of the station's output. Working in darkness does not have an affect on XP rates aside from slowing production speeds.

Crossbows (perception and precision shooting included in section)

One governs accuracy and the other is friendly fire. The FF one is only trained by shooting your friends, if you fail to hit your friends by accident you get no XP. The Accuracy one is trained simply by aiming as I recall, so fire rate has no effect.

Reloading a crossbow also trains dex a bit. And is sped up with higher dex.

Dexterity

Weight actually has nothing to do with XP rate for Dexterity, despite the description. It's all based on the ratio of cut to blunt Damage on the weapon. The more cut relative to blunt, the more Dexterity XP. As a side note, Dexterity will actually go up during martial arts training, despite not seeming to affect martial arts in any way.

Also see "Take Prisoners" in the section about Melee Fighting.

Weapons which will train Dexterity the fastest are: Katanas, Polearms (except staves, which don't do cutting damage), or Sabres.

Engineer

Training Engineer is pretty straightforward (at least, as of the current build). When building objects, simply have all the individuals you want to gain Engineer XP work on them. They'll all gain experience quite quickly. You can also semi-automate this process by shift-right-clicking on a build project with all your engineers selected before assigning any other permanent jobs. These characters will then drop whatever they're doing and rush over whenever an engineering project becomes available.

Field Medic

First, a point about healing. While it is reasonably straightforward to train specialized medics, there is a good argument to be made for spreading out medical training (and first aid kits) to everyone in the squad because having lots of people healing simultaneously is generally faster than one specialist running around healing everybody.

Heal Everyone

When you finish laying waste to your foes and looting them, take advantage of all that free healing xp by healing them up. Don't worry, with the way damage works in Kenshi it's very unlikely they'll be able to get back up and attack you. And if they do, hey they're only likely to get up one at a time and they're already beat up. More practice for your fighter types! As a possible side benefit (depending on your goals long term) you'll also earn positive reputation with that faction, possibly reducing the likelihood of a future attack. This is also true of any non-hostile faction patrols you encounter.

Craft Medical Items

Build a Crafting table (Medical Workbench). Medical crafting increases Field Medic skill. Because as of .6x or so, characters still accumulate the associated skill when using a device whether anything is actually getting made or not, it makes a lot of sense to keep your medic assigned to crafting even if you're not actually making first aid kits.

Labouring

Also very straightforward. Just give them a labor job and leave them alone. Allegedly, strength improves labor performance, so loading a backpack up with heavy stuff and making them carry it around in their inventory (not on their back) might be helpful in the long run. I haven't noticed much of a difference in labor effectiveness due to strength, but I'll admit I haven't tested it extensively.

Martial Arts and Dodge

Martial Arts is a very dangerous combat method to train because characters engaging in 'unarmed combat' can be injured through their attacker's hits as well as when landing their own hits. Starting out training Martial Arts against characters who are wearing anything heavier than Light Armour can easily result in a loss of a limb. However, most Robot Limbs do increase Martial Arts damage.

Damage done while using Martial Arts depends on three skills: Martial Arts, Strength, and Toughness. Because of this, it may be better to train Strength up a lot before even starting to work on Martial Arts.

As with Melee Fighting skills, the XP rate of Martial Arts and dodge is connected to whether a character is fighting someone who is better trained than them. Wearing Equipment which increases Martial Arts stats will result in less stressful battles, but much longer training time because of this. The fastest way to train Martial Arts is to wear regular armour, not Martial Arts boosting armour, as well as a Backpack with a very high drain on combat stats.

Armour which gives Martial Arts stat boosts are: Martial Artist Bindings, Gi Pants, Gi, and Sleeveless Dustcoat.

Around 30-40 points your characters should be hitting fairly often, and depending on your Strength and Toughness your damage should be fair. Remember to try and weight your characters down a bit while fighting to increase your Strength while you fight, due to combat Strength exp gain being one of the best ways to train it.

Dodge is trained alongside Martial Arts. Dodge will only be trained when unarmed. If characters have weapons equipped, they will try to use their weapon to block instead of dodge incoming attacks.

Melee Fighting (attack, defense, and weapon skills included

• Use light armor - Early on (until you build up your melee attack and defend skills) it makes sense to keep your fighters light - nothing but light armor or less, and focus on items that improve skills (bandannas, martial arts handwraps, ninja or assassin rags, etc). This is both because a -1 skill or +1 skill effect means a lot more when your base skill is 1 than when it's 50. This has a second benefit: it makes them faster and better able to kite enemies (see below).

• Fly a kite! - Kite mobs of slower enemies to build up melee attack. Training dummies are useful (sort of) but slow. If you don't mind a bit of micromanagement, you can speed this up quite a bit. With one or two light fighters selected, attack a bunch of mobs (it'll probably work better if you use "attack target" from the right click menu on the nearest enemy). When your character(s) squares off against the enemy, watch carefully and use pause repeatedly to determine whether your character or one of your enemies is going to swing first. If it's your character, great. If not, run away just out of range and then reengage. Rinse, repeat. This will keep enemies from surrounding you and can often allow you to kill large groups of enemies without a scratch. Of course, if you make a mistake, you'll probably get mobbed and bludgeoned into the sand. But that's good for your toughness skill, right?

• Take prisoners - Once you can build prisoner cages, you can build training rooms that will help you level up fighters very quickly. Build 4 or 5 cages in a house, and fill them with the most skilled enemies you can capture on the battlefield. Don't forget to heal them before you bring them home, though, so they don't bleed out on the way! Once an enemy has recovered (enough), send one fighter into the building, close and *lock* the door behind them, and then let the enemy out. Fight them until one or the other of you falls. If the enemy wins, unlock the door and send in the rest of your troops to flatten them. Then heal your trainee and the foe and return your training "partner" to their cage to rest up (you can also use a bed for this, if you're willing to micromanage recovery times). This works much better if you give your enemies and yourself weaker weapons (rusted junk quality, craft them with a low level weaponsmith skill) and the best armor you have. Early on, this can result in a point of melee attack or defense and a point or two of skill in your chosen weapon every time you win (or a point or two of toughness when you lose). Depending on the weapon you use, you will also train Strength and/or Dexterity.

High Risk High Reward, quick melee skill gain

An effective yet high risk method of raising melee attack and defence quickly is by lowering your combat skills. This happens when you equip a backpack, chainmail, various helms or some armours such as the Holy Chest Plate. In combat, when your stats show a negative in brackets (e.g -10 from a traders large backpack) this is the base used to calculate your experience gain. Meaning, if you have 20 melee attack normally and find it is levelling slowly, if you equip a traders large backpack it will be counted as 10. You will then gain the amount of exp that someone with 10 melee attack would. This is also true of Melee Defence.

Pieces of equipment that lower your combat abilities are cumulative, for example a large traders backpack in addition to chainmail, the holy chest plate and a tin can helmet would lower your skills by (-18).  Thus allowing for quicker exp gain. 

Outpost Skills

these skills are almost exclusively used at a player outpost

Robotics

Robotics is trained when doing repairs on a Skeleton or character with a Robot Limb. Unlike Field Medic, while creating robotics items, characters do not gain XP in Robotics. The Robotics Bench which can be used to craft Robotics Components and Skeleton Repair Kits does not train or use the worker's Robotics skill.

Strength

Encumberance

If you wish to build your Strength up, the most common tactic alongside carrying someone, is to get a wooden backpack full of iron ore and keep the backpack in your inventory NOT your back. This will allow your strength exp to stay at 50% gain pretty much till 100.

When not training or fighting, overload your fighters and assign them jobs where they'll do a lot of running. Alternatively overload them and assign them to follow a patrol or other traveling NPC around. A carried (not worn) backpack full of stacks of ore (or alternatively, heavy weapon clubs) makes a great set of training weights.

Heavy Weapons

That is actually based on the weight of the weapon, unlike Dexterity. More XP per hit for every kg the weapon weighs over your strength level, up to 20kg higher than your level.

Thievery

Stealth

The absolute fastest time to train Stealth is by having Stealth mode on while locked in a Cannibal village cage or a prisoner pole, maybe. The character in this situation should not be left alone tho because getting eaten is not a fun experience. This tactic allows for 90% XP rates while most sneaking only results in 20%.

A safer option is to sneak around town or just sneak when going anywhere, once your character is spotted (red eye symbol) and the spotter plans to initiate combat, the characters will exit Stealth mode and return to their usual running speed.

Thieving

You only gain XP in thievery when there is a chance of getting caught. When buildings are entirely empty or when characters are unconscious, chance of stealing will be 100% and no XP will be gained.

Assassination

i find its a safe time to attempt to assassinate a Fog Heavy while they trying to eat in Mongrel's Barracks. After a failed attempt, they will ignore you and go right back to what they were doing. Be careful that you don't accidentally attempt to assassinate a Shinobi Guard because being locked up in Mongrel is not a fun time.

Toughness

Get beat up. Every recieved damage can get you same amount XP, but the best way to gain is standing up while your character tricking dead. Best enemies for training Toughness is who can beat you and cannot loot you, trying to eat you or taking you to prison. Kral's Chosen for example.

Turrets

use a Training Turret for a while or just start out on some turrets