Holy Nation Citizen Game Start Walkthrough - Kenshi
Holy Nation Citizen Walkthrough (Part 1) Making Money & Buying Property
Holy Nation Citizen Walkthrough (Part 2) Raising Toughness & Heading to Squin
When starting the game as a Holy Nation Citizen you'll begin in either the town of Bad Teeth or Blister Hill. Both of these towns are part of the Okran's Pride zone which is where you will be spending most of your time as a noob. Regardless of which of town you start in I would recommend you immediately head to Bad Teeth since that town is (imo) the better one of the 2 for making money and skilling up.
Just outside Bad Teeth you will find numerous Copper Deposits in Skinner's Roam which have low quality but are close enough to town that you'll have the guards protection while you mine them. A picture of these Copper Deposits is shown above. What you'll want to do is purchase one of the nearby Small Shacks and build a Small Research Bench inside so that you can research some of the early technologies as well as Storage: Copper.
Once you've researched Storage: Copper you'll be able to completely automate the mining task. After that, once the mine fills up with 5 Ore your character will automatically take it to the storage bin and you can pretty much AFK until the storage bin is full then sell everything. While mining if you keep your eyes open you'll occasionally see large roaming groups of Wild Bulls in the area too.
Wild Bulls are great sources of early game money if you can get them to agro your character and then have the guards agro them. To make the group of Wild Bulls agro you what you'll want to do is mouse over them and hold down right click to get a drop down of options. You'll want to select 'Attack Unprovoked' from the list.
If you are in line of sight of an enemy and perform the 'Attack Unprovoked' or 'Attack Target' command they'll engage you and start running towards you. Occasionally the entire group of enemies will follow and this is the ideal scenario for us. You don't actually want to fight the enemies (duh, they'll kill you), what you want is for the nearby guards to engage the Wild Bulls to protect you. The guards will have no issue at all defeating the entire pack of Wild Bulls and they won't take a single piece of the loot.
To get the whole pack of Wild Bulls to follow you successfully you'll need to stay as close to the entire pack as possible. If you get too far away from the pack of Wild Bulls while pulling them then they will leash and return to their original positions.
Groups of Starving Bandits can be defeated the same way as the Wild Bulls but they don't have much in terms of value on their persons. If you'd like to see an example of what I am describing in a video I recommend you check out my Holy Nation Citizen Walkthrough (Part 1) Making Money & Buying Property Youtube Video. During the video I perform this trick to demonstrate how it all works.
After you've done some mining or got lucky enough to take out a group of Wild Bulls and have earned some money you'll want to start recruiting additional members to your Squad. You can find recruitable NPCs in the Bars and Inns of Bad Teeth and Blister Hill; be sure to check them all as each town has multiple Bars! It doesn't really matter who you recruit but I would recommend picking up all of the Unique Recruits that you find. As far as I am aware the only 2 unique recruits in Holy Nation Towns are Bard and Griffin.
You should also purchase the Longhouse in Bad Teeth and repair it to make it livable again too. This is a large building which will give you plenty of room for a Research Bench 2 along with various other building
If you find a Nomad Animal Trader inside a Bar or Inn (or pass one on the road) I would recommend picking up a Pack Garru or Pack Bull too. These animals will provide you with a lot of on-the-go storage space which is an absolute must have for any adventuring party. Another bonus to having a pack animal is any character in the same Squad as them will automatically eat the food out of their backpack. This works with any backpack in the game too -- not just the ones on your pack animals.
Those of you who can't purchase a pack animal early on will definitely want to buy a backpack and equip it on one of your characters so that you can share food with your entire Squad out of a single inventory. Building a Food Storage and stocking it inside one of the buildings you own is a smart idea too. Once you've recruited about 10 people to your Squad you'll want to change your focus from recruiting to outfitting them in any armor and weapons that are available.
None of the Holy Nation towns sell good weapons or armor in terms of both quality of the armor as well as the type of armor. If you don't know what types of armor and weapons are good and why I would recommend you check out my Walkthrough Part 1 as well as my Best Equipment and Best Weapons Guides. Holy Nation shops don't sell any of the weapons or armor that made the best in slot lists so for now just focus on buying what you can to fill the empty slots you have. Some coverage and protection is better than none at all.
Once you've got a Squad of about 10 characters in total and they all have some armor and weapons in each slot you're ready for some fighting! What I would recommend you do is engage packs of Hungry Bandits which roam around Okran's Pride, Okran's Gulf and Skinner's Roam. You want to get beat up and knocked unconscious by them so that your Toughness skill will level up. Fighting them will also raise your combat skills all of these together will make it easier for your characters to survive out in the world.
Toughness is one of the most important stats in Kenshi since it will reduce incoming damage along with improving numerous other things that will make your character more tanky in combat. Every time a character is hit, knocked unconscious or gets up from 'Playing Dead' you'll gain some Toughness EXP. If you'd like to see a trick for raising Toughness really really easily I recommend you check out my How to EASILY raise Toughness Youtube Video. Basically it exploits the getting up from 'Playing Dead' feature since it gives you tons of EXP to stand up from that position (usually multiple level ups at a time).
Plenty of Hungry Bandits roam past Bad Teeth so I recommend you level up your characters around here. When you get knocked unconscious by these guys they'll take food out of your inventory and leave you on the ground, alive. To prevent them from taking your food at all just put it into your backpack, they're not smart enough to search it. River Raptors are another early game enemy you can fight, they're most commonly found near the water in Okran's Pride and have about the same stats the Hungry Bandits have.
When the Hungry Bandits become to easy for you it's time you travel to the southwest towards The Hub and Squin. There will be more Hungry Bandits down here but also Dust Bandits and other enemies for us to fight. This is also where the unique path for a Holy Nation Citizen playthrough will end and you'll merge with my Kenshi Walkthrough (Part 1).
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