The Freedom Seekers Walkthrough for Kenshi
The Freedom Seekers (Part 1) All Skeleton Squad Starting Out
The Freedom Seekers (Part 2) Gearing, Researching & Moving into Mid Game
The Freedom Seekers game mode starts you out with a group of 6 characters at a random Waystation in the world. As you may already have guessed, depending on what Waystation you start at the beginning of your game has the potential to be quite different. For this play through I started at the Waystation in The Hook, a zone in the southern most portion of the world.
If you start the game at a different Waystation than me I would recommend you use one of my other walkthroughs below; choose whichever Walkthrough you need.
Empire Citizen Walkthrough (Grey Desert Waystation)
Kenshi Walkthrough (Stenn Desert Waystation)
Kenshi Walkthrough (The Border Zone Waystation)
Regardless of the location you start the first thing you'll typically be doing is selling the Iron Plates and Building Materials in your inventory then running to someplace safe -- typically a nearby town. Some Waystations are worth staying at (or near) like the one in The Hook or Stenn Desert (even the Grey Desert Waystation isn't too bad) but ideally you want a town for its protection and a nearby Copper Deposit.
Mining Copper is typically always the best and safest way to make money early on in Kenshi. While you have your characters mining Copper you should spin your camera around the area looking for large blood splotches on the ground which will indicate that a battle recently happened at that location. Send a character over here and check for bodies that you can loot, they'll typically hold a lot of items that you can sell early on for money.
Map Location of 4 Copper Deposits near Clownsteady.
Our short term goal is going to be buying a building in Clownsteady and building a Small Research Bench inside so that we can start researching all of the things we need. No matter what town you're in this is more or less what you'll be aiming towards in the short term. You're going to want to research Storage: Copper as soon as possible and build storage for Copper because this will allow you to completely automate the mining process.
Characters will automatically take copper out of the mine and deliver it to the storage instead of you having to do it yourself. Then all you need to do is unload the storage once and take everything to a vendor when it comes time to sell it. After you reach this point you move into phase 2 of starting out in Kenshi - more money grinding.
The next big goal in front of us is going to be gearing our characters with some basic armor and researching everything we need for a base. I'd also recommend you start raising your Toughness in the near future once you've outfitted your characters in some basic gear.
Enemies with low stats like Hungry Bandits, Outlaw Farmers, Goats and Garru are who I would recommend you fight at this point in the game. Garru are the enemies I like to fight the most because they have stats in the high teens but they don't deal a lot of spike damage which means they won't rip off a limb while fighting you.
How it works in Kenshi is if you have low stats and fight an enemy with higher stats you'll get skill ups much faster. The danger of fighting harder enemies is the higher chance of limb amputation along with permanent death if your entire Squad gets wiped out.
Note: It's up to you if you'd like to recruit more people to your Squad and increase your numbers. You start out with 6 characters when playing The Freedom Seekers which is plenty until you're ready to make a base and move into mid or end game.
Once you've purchased a building in town and built a Research Bench you'll be able to unlock better ways to make money such as Electrical Crafting. This will allow you to make an Electrical Workbench and turn your Copper Ore into Electrical Components which typically will sell for more than the ore. For more information about this I recommend you check out my Electrical Crafting Money Making Guide.
Aside from Electrical Crafting you'll also want to make Beds for your characters since you'll need them to heal up after raising Toughness. Now, whenever you want to, you can spend time running around outside of town and getting beat up then returning to town and resting up until your characters are healed up and ready for round 2.
This is where our unique path will end and we can merge this walkthrough with my primary one for Kenshi. For more information about Kenshi I recommend you head over to my Kenshi Walkthrough (Part 1).
Continue to Kenshi Walkthrough (Part 1)
Return to Kenshi Walkthroughs Index