Kenshi is an open world sandbox set in a post-apocalyptic world. The core goal is to survive.

In this post I'll share an early-game system for automating money gathering so you can build a solid warchest to fund your squad's adventures.

Usually I like to talk aobut building systems with technology but I think technology is all about applying systems / philosophies to real-world problems. My hopes is that exploring how 3S (Simple Scalable Systems) can be applied to problems in games, it will help see how it applies to problems in the real world.

Money Farm Overview

At a high level, we're building an automated mining system in The Hub. This system should be replicable in any city that has a mining resource nearby but we're focusing specifically on The Hub as that's where most players will start out.

• Characters have Job - Mining Iron Ore outside of town
• Characters transport ore to storage in house
• When storage is full, you manually sell the ore to the Barman

Inputs:

• Food
• Time (and characters)

Outputs:

• Ore (sell for money)

In my tests, this makes about 4k money per game day with 3 characters mining. This rate will likely be different for you depending on how many characters you're using and what their stats are.

Requirements

In order to set up the automation, you'll need a few things:

• Buy House in The Hub and fix it - While you could build your own house out in the wilderness, this is not recommended as early game threats (bandits, wolves) will destroy you. Building inside The Hub gives protection as the inhabitants will defend against any enemies, leaving you relatively protected.
• Research Bench - Then research Storage
• Ore Storage - This allows auto hauling from the ore deposit. Without it, characters will just idle once the ore is full.
• Food Storage - While you don't technically need this to make your characters keep mining, it makes it a lot more passive. Without it, you'll need to keep checking in on your characters and make sure they have food to eat. The Food Storage allows them to go grab food if they're hungry which allows you to just check the storage to make sure stuff is in there - a lot more efficient.

Issues

• Selling - Selling is still a manual thing. Every time the ore storage is full, I have to manually grab / sell 10 ore at a time. I'd like to automate this further but I think this requires more tech which makes it a more mid-game automation.
• Danger - Even though we're close to The Hub there's still a risk of random parties coming by and wiping your people. I like to Save often (after every mine / sell cycle) so if I get wiped I just reload the previous save and be careful for this iteration.