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.

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 exp. 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 exp rate for dex, 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 dex exp.

Engineer

Training engineers is pretty straightforward (at least, as of the current build). When building objects, simply have all the individuals you want to gain engineering skill 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 you assign any other permanent jobs. Then they'll 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

Get a medical crafting table (basic medical assembly desk or higher). 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. Supposedly 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

By far one of the more complicated stats to increase. Especially if starting with Martial Arts at 0/1. To begin training it is recommended to use Martial Artist Bindings, Gi Pants, and Gi/Sleeveless Dustcoat to train Martial Arts. Once your BASE skill is around 30-40, you can swap those gears out for whatever you'd like really. 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 guide placeholder.

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 level appropriate enemies captured 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 weaker weapons (for instance, the terrible clubs you loot from hungry bandits). 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).

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

crafting and also healing robots

Strength

Encumberance

This tactic will raise a character's strength. 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, ironically. More exp 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.

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

Turrets

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