Literally every time I've tried to play Kenshi it's just been trying to mine enough rocks to afford a single meal and then getting slaughtered by the first thing with hostile intent that passes by, beating my entire crew unconscious and then continuing to beat them until they're dead.

I'm told characters get better at fighting by fighting but there seems to be no organic way to do it and you have to refer to the wiki and cheese it and use meta-knowledge to get anywhere

Maybe I approached the game wrong but I found it to be very disappointing

If you start with the default package (one team member, minimal wealth), you'll probably have to spend a lot of time mining or doing otherwise menial tasks before you have enough cash to start a settlement. If you want to get right into the base-building, there's no shame in picking the base starter package (six team members, pack beast, enough supplies for some basic buildings).

When picking a base site, look for intersections between two biomes. This doubles your crop options once you start farming.

Build and expand walls early on. Wildlife and bandit attacks are incessant, but they generally ignore walls. You can lock your team inside buildings in an emergency, which tends to dissuade attackers.

Don't be afraid to save scum. The world is DANGEROUS at first, and it's not unreasonable to give yourself a second chance if you get steamrolled by a random encounter you couldn't have known to prepare for.

Once you build a cash reserve, visit each town to get more crafting plans. There are also many unique NPC's looking to join up, who start with bonuses to certain skills and stats.

Build a kill-box lined with mounted guns around the main entrance to your base.

Learn the basics of combat via training dummies and assisting town guards while they repel bandit attacks. Stay near guards until you've toughened up a bit.

Once your base is established, imprison enemy units and keep them healed and fed. They make for great sparring partners for your advanced team members.

Beep!

First focus on mining. First get a backpack, then buy a small house and automate the mining. This increases you strength and atleticism. Alowing you to outtrun those you cant beat.

Steal equipment from the people the guards beat up.

You may or may not want to get a helper. I honestly recommend against it because having to many of em makes it very easy later on and there are some with unique dialoges better get those.

When you get heplers, its better if they dont change prefered weapons too often.

Run around beating bandit groups to level up.

Hoard blueprints, books, and ai cores, you need those for research.

Weed smugling from the swamp to the empire is good money.

Getting xbows and kiting things is very efective.

There is a place near were you spawn where there are friendly hivers, there are lots of things you can hunt there and then sell to the hivers.

When you build your base keep it well lit, it will improve the quality of what you make.

Ita good to train your armourers by processing beast skins into leather

In the far northwest there are huge creatures that give you a pearl when you kill them get all your dudes with bakckpaks and kite them. That is good training. Running around with the backpacks full of pearls trains strength and shootingthem trains dexterity. You may need a base with a steady arrow production.

Use the regular arrows. Those are cheaper and when used with the stronger xbow quite effective. There is no need for the heavy bolts.

The guys wering human skin have a machine that removes limbs. This alows you to change your limbs for the cheapest set wich improves your strength training rate. Once you have high strength switch to the best ones.

Therd is a guy who lives in the southwest called the removedster. Kidnaping him and using him as a training dummy is very efective.

Find some rocks outside a town, mine them until inventory full, sell the ore, repeat until you have enough money to hire another dude. Do that again until more dudes. Keep doing it until you have more money, more dudes. Dudes rock.

what to expect

Getting the absolute shit kicked out of you is part of the experience. As long as you don't die, you win.

If you look at the map and see that green river valley a bit north of the big swamp? In the northwest of that, right on the edge of the mountain range, is summer camp (Rebirth). Wherever you start, train up athletics and sneak a bit in town just running back and forth for a few minutes, then go to summer camp and refuse to leave until they give you a room. Now you've got full access to a 24/7 gym and the camp MMA tournament (the counselors cheat and use weapons and gang up on you). Stay there until you can singlehandedly win the tournament or until you get bored.

And remember, the training weights they give you are free: you can get more by removing them and putting them in your inventory. And if you get hungry, just slip away at night to plunder the nearby town and you can get back before anyone notices you were gone.

Once you've graduated from summer camp you get a permanent 100% discount on all goods everywhere, provided you show up at night and knock out everyone in the building first.

Honestly it might ruin the fun of dying absolutely horribly and instantly repeatedly until you suddenly DON'T and then it's like, hell, what do I do now? And then there's a whole fucking world to explore.

Starting out by mining iron is very safe but can be boring, first time I did that I also played it too safe and didn't really do anything. There are abandoned towns you can find with a lot of stuff to sell that I think is more enjoyable. Iron however is very great for strength training. To get the max bonus for strength training you need to be very encumbered and carrying someone. Shift clicking on a lot of things will set that character to do a job so you can automate strength and athletics training.

Dark ui mod is extremely good and worth using, https://www.nexusmods.com/kenshi/mods/253. There are also a few performance mods that are worth it if the loading times bothers you. Making simple mods yourself isn't that hard, like giving your faction its own color or creating a custom start. The game has a bug where your turret guards may end up falling through the floor when reloading, one of the big utility/performance mods fixes this. You can also only build turrets on the big walls, not the tiny connectors.

Building bases directly on roads will break ai very frequently, I don't remember the keybinds off the top of my head but you can view roads in game with some dev toolset.

Healing enemies you down is worth it for xp and, if one is alive to see you do it, it will increase your rep with that faction slightly.

You get more xp from combat by being disadvantaged, either by fighting someone stronger than you or purposefully weakening yourself.

Animals level a bit differently, they have ages they go through and they gain more xp when they're younger I think. They also cannot lose limbs.

You can ally with the starving bandits, generally at the start of a game they will initially be friendly and approach you asking for food. I think any of the none aggressive options improve relations and giving them food can be worth it. Dealing with constant starving bandit raids generally just becomes annoying later on.

Probably a shitty idea but, I like to train my squad's combat skills by hanging around mongrel and bee-lining for the city gates when I get radically outnumbered. Those that get too injured to fight get put on copper mining duty at the node close to where the gate guards hang out until they recover.

Safety in numbers, always have at least two people if you possibly can, so one can run away and come back to save the other if you get KO'd.

Get reasonable armor when you can to keep from losing limbs (unless you want a prosthetic). South of the Holy Nation there's a lot of weaker bandits, near the Hub, which is good for getting your butt kicked safely.

Once your team is tough enough to not immediately lose limbs/die, I like to head west from the Hub to one of the Hive villages, there you can join the militia dealing with local wildlife hazards, which will give you training AND let you loot the drops off of said wildlife. You can then turn around and sell the drops to the Hive folks for food and extra money.

Trading is reasonably lucrative if you can figure out what sorts of goods are both safe to transport through territories where the locals might get mad at you, and in demand somewhere. Long distance trips also have the advantage of helping you level your running skills, which are one of the most important skills. Nothing is too dangerous if you can run fast enough to get away.

You can help level up combat skills faster, once you have enough to not immediately die, by deliberately wearing stat reducing equipment.

Best of luck. Easy mode is (or was, maybe they patched it) making clothes in a reasonable sized town, once your main armorer gets enough skill you can turn very cheap raw materials into legendary headbands and sell them for enormous profits.