Day 23 Solo: When Kenshi’s Training Loops Take Over

Day 23 in Kenshi: When “Lone Wander” Turns Into a Problem

I started as Lone Wander and somehow made it to Day 23 without recruiting anyone. That’s usually the part of Kenshi where you’re still a professional victim: running everywhere, eating dust, and learning the important lesson that goats are not “starter enemies.”

But my run didn’t look like that.

Here were the stats I’d written down by Day 23:

• Strength: 30
• Toughness: 76
• Crossbows: 24
• Stealth: 76
• Assassination: 49
• Martial Arts: 24
• Melee Defense: 38
• Melee Attack: 24
• Medic: 28

On top of that, I’d already delivered a few bounties people normally treat as “later”: Sora (twice), Flying Bull, and the Dust King.

This is the moment where you realize Kenshi has two games inside it:

1. the desperate crawl from weakness to competence, and
2. the part where you accidentally discover a training loop and start walking around like a disaster.

I stepped into the second one early.

What “Day 23 Solo” Usually Looks Like (And Why Mine Didn’t)

A normal solo drifter at Day 20–25—no intentional training, no degenerate loops—is still shallow in the fundamentals. You might have decent Athletics from travel. You probably don’t have high combat stats, and Toughness is usually still low because “not dying” is the main goal.

My numbers weren’t just “ahead.” Toughness 76 is the kind of stat that changes the tone of the game. It’s not “I’m surviving.” It’s “I’m learning what I can get away with.”

And Kenshi rewards the worst parts of my personality: patience, opportunism, and a willingness to turn living beings into training equipment.

The Band of Bones Dojo: How I Did It Without “Cheating”

Here’s the main “abuse” I used:

I kept tormenting the Band of Bones near the Waystation. The routine was simple and brutally effective:

1. Knock them out.
2. Steal their hackers and sell them.
3. Once they’re disarmed, train unarmed by fighting them while they’re basically harmless.

That loop matters because it creates the most important thing in Kenshi training: safe repetition.

• Disarming them reduces the chance of getting catastrophically injured.
• Fighting unarmed enemies stretches fights out, which means more time generating skill gains.
• It’s sustainable. You can do it again and again, which is what turns “progress” into a straight line.

This wasn’t some external exploit. Kenshi is a simulation sandbox: if you can engineer a situation where enemies survive, keep coming back, and can’t meaningfully punish you, the game will happily hand you the stats.

It’s not cheating. It’s worse. It’s understanding.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

Why Toughness Exploded (And Why Toughness Changes Everything)

The single biggest outlier in my sheet is still Toughness 76.

Toughness isn’t like a normal “RPG defense stat” where you just get slightly sturdier. It changes how you relate to risk. With high Toughness, getting knocked out stops feeling like a failure state and starts feeling like… tempo. Like something you can spend.

Once your character can take punishment, recover, and keep functioning, Kenshi stops being “don’t get hit” and becomes “how much trouble can I start before the world actually responds?”

That’s why high Toughness is so dangerous for the fun of the run: it doesn’t just make you stronger—it makes you free.

Stealth + Assassination: The Quiet Version of Breaking the Game

The other half of the story is Stealth 76 and Assassination 49.

That combo turns the world into a series of unlocked doors.

Not literally unlocked—Lockpicking is its own thing—but spiritually. Guards, patrols, camps, even bounties: everything becomes “optional” if you can:

• approach without being seen,
• remove the key person from the situation,
• and leave before the consequences arrive.

This is why delivering those bounties early didn’t feel like a heroic war story. It felt like logistics.

That’s an important detail: Kenshi’s difficulty isn’t only about enemy stats. It’s about how many problems you’re forced to solve at once. High stealth and assassination reduce the number of simultaneous problems to one.

The Price of Mastery: When Kenshi Starts to Collapse

Here’s the honest problem: if you crank stats early, Kenshi can start to feel solved.

The game’s best stories come from being underpowered, making bad calls, surviving anyway, and dragging consequences across the desert like a tin can tied to your ankle. When you’re strong enough to control engagements, you don’t get that same chaos for free.

Signs the collapse is happening:

• You stop planning routes and start taking shortcuts through danger.
• Knockouts feel inevitable, not risky.
• Early factions become vending machines for gear and money.
• Fights stop producing stories and start producing numbers.

And the worst part: I didn’t even do it with a big squad. I did it solo, which means all of that power is concentrated into a single character who can basically decide what kind of game Kenshi is going to be.

My Next Constraint: Free Recruits Only (No Paying Cats)

After hitting this weird midgame power pocket too early, I decided my next goal was recruiting—especially skeletons—but with a rule:

Only free recruits. No paying to hire.

Important clarification: “free” doesn’t mean “skeleton-only.” It means any character I can recruit without exchanging cats. Dialogue recruits, rescues, liberations—stuff I actually have to do, not just buy.

I like this rule because it turns recruiting back into content instead of shopping.

It also forces a different kind of pacing. If I can’t just walk into bars and assemble a competent squad on command, then every new party member becomes a little arc:

• Where do I find them?
• What danger do I have to cross to get them?
• What does it cost in time, risk, or reputation?
• Can I keep them alive long enough to matter?

This is one of the few self-imposed rules that actually fights back against my current power curve.

Why Skeletons Are the Perfect “Next Step” (And Also a Threat to Fun)

Skeletons are appealing for the same reason my run spiraled in the first place: I like reliability.

They don’t add the same logistical weight a big human squad does, and they pair well with a small-team, high-impact playstyle. The danger is that they could accelerate the collapse even harder—because a tiny elite squad is exactly how you turn Kenshi from survival sim into extraction shooter.

So the real challenge isn’t “can I recruit skeletons?”

It’s: can I recruit them without turning the rest of the world into background scenery?

If I want the run to stay sharp, the answer probably looks like restraint:

• Keep the squad small.
• Make recruits feel earned, not collected.
• Avoid turning every encounter into a stealth knockout problem.
• Let the world hit back sometimes—on purpose.

Because Kenshi is at its best when you’re strong enough to act, but not strong enough to act without consequences.

Conclusion

By Day 23, my Lone Wander wasn’t “progressing”—he was already warping the shape of the game around him. The Band of Bones loop was the turning point: once I could safely repeat fights and control risk, the stats followed. Going forward, free-only recruiting feels like the cleanest way to keep Kenshi dangerous without pretending I didn’t learn anything. I’m not trying to be weak again—I’m trying to stay mortal.