When Kenshi Turns You Into HR

Kenshi’s Worst “Success” State: When You Accidentally Become HR

Kenshi has a very specific way of ruining your fun: it rewards you just enough to think you’re progressing, then punishes you with logistics until you start longing for the days when getting your teeth kicked in felt clean.

That’s exactly what happened to me after I hit Shark.

I went there because I’d been hunting down skeletons. I hired one—Khalid—and somehow walked out with a whole mess of additional bodies: Hamut, Miu, Dr. Chung, Stubs Mamuso, and Khalid. Six people total. It felt like a win at first. More hands, more safety, more options.

Then they got enslaved, I had to rescue them, and after all that I managed to scrub the “ex-slave” status by parking them at a waystation near Clownsteady.

On paper: huge recovery.
In practice: now I’m babysitting.

And the world got weirder: Tech Hunters ended up at war with the UC, slavers, and the Trader’s Guild. Whether I caused it directly or just tripped over a world-state chain reaction, the end result was the same: the map started feeling politically spicy… while my actual moment-to-moment gameplay turned into “watch six HP bars refill and pray pathing doesn’t get someone eaten.”

This is the Kenshi inflection point nobody warns you about: you don’t “lose” the game—you just lose the feel of it.

Why a Bigger Squad Can Feel Like a Smaller Game

When I was running lean, the loop was sharp:

• You pick a fight you might survive.
• Every injury matters.
• Every escape feels earned.
• Downtime is short and purposeful.

Then you add five extra people and suddenly you’re dealing with:

• someone always being unconscious
• gear inequality (one decent armor set, five trash outfits)
• fights that aren’t dangerous, just time-consuming
• long recovery cycles multiplied by headcount
• constant micro: who’s bleeding, who’s limping, who’s hungry, who’s stuck on a rock

The irony is that squads can make Kenshi less free. You stop roaming and start managing. You stop making aggressive decisions and start making safe ones because you’ve got too many liabilities to risk momentum.

And once you start playing safe in Kenshi, boredom moves in immediately.

The “Shark Problem”: Recruitment Is Cheap, Consequences Aren’t

Shark is basically a recruitment trap. It’s chaotic, full of opportunity, and it’s easy to convince yourself that grabbing a few more unique recruits is just smart planning.

But Kenshi doesn’t care about your planning. It cares about friction.

More characters don’t just mean more damage output. They mean:

• more food
• more beds
• more heal time
• more armor sets to maintain
• more chances for the game to produce a cascading disaster (slavers, guards, random patrols, faction hostility)

So you end up with a squad that’s functional but not necessarily fun—especially if what you actually like is high-agency play: moving fast, picking fights deliberately, and staying personally invested in the risk.

My Squad, Honestly

This wasn’t a trash crew. It’s just a crew that pushes me toward a playstyle I don’t enjoy long-term.

• Hamut: feels like the one “main character” recruit—toughness potential, anti-slaver energy, naturally fits frontline suffering.
• Miu: screams scout/runner/thief arc. The kind of character who’s fun if you let her be separate from the blob.
• Dr. Chung: medic/science vibe. Quietly useful, but not exciting in a group brawl where everyone’s collapsing anyway.
• Stubs Mamuso: utility, ranged potential, another body that becomes “one more thing to keep alive.”
• Khalid: not bad, just… filler. Perfectly fine, rarely the source of a story.

So now I’ve got a decent team and no desire to drag them all across the map together like a touring band.

That’s the core mismatch: Kenshi rewards commitment. A half-committed squad is where fun goes to die.

The Fix Isn’t “Go Back to Solo.” It’s Rotation.

My first instinct was to do what Kenshi players always recommend: cut the squad down, dismiss people, hard reset to two or three characters.

But there’s a better solution if the real issue is boredom from babysitting, not “too many recruits exist.”

The solution is rotation.

Instead of hauling six people into every disaster, I can:

1. Park five of them somewhere safe.
2. Let the skeleton grind research.
3. Take one character on an actual adventure for ~10 in-game days.
4. Bring them back tougher and more self-sufficient.
5. Swap to the next character.

That way I keep the roster without letting it turn the game into a management sim.

And Kenshi quietly supports this playstyle because of one key thing: cats are basically global. You can earn money in one corner of the world and spend it in another with almost no friction. Food and basic supplies stop being a limiting factor once you understand that.

So I don’t need the whole crew “active” to keep the game moving. I just need one person to be living dangerously while everyone else is paused in a place with beds.

Why Dr. Chung Is a Great First “Solo Arc” Pick

If I’m going to rotate characters into competence, Dr. Chung is a perfect candidate.

Not because he’s flashy—because he’s survivable.

A solo training run works best when the character can:

• get knocked out without immediately dying
• patch themselves up
• limp back to safety
• learn by failing repeatedly

A medic-focused character turns early defeats into progress instead of reloads.

There’s also a nice narrative logic: a doctor wandering ruins and hostile towns makes sense. It doesn’t feel like I’m grinding. It feels like I’m doing a weird little Kenshi travelogue where the guy keeps getting his ribs broken and taking notes.

If I can get Chung to around 40 toughness over a focused stretch, he stops being dead weight and starts being a character I can actually deploy without constant panic.

The 10-Day Loop: How to Train Without Losing Your Mind

Here’s the structure I’m aiming for, because it’s simple and it keeps the game from turning into a spreadsheet.

Step 1: Park the squad

The waystation near Clownsteady already proved itself: safe enough, beds available, and it let me clear the ex-slave status situation without chaos.

When I park people, the rules are:

• give them enough food to idle
• keep them near beds
• don’t assign a bunch of dumb passive jobs that cause wandering

They’re not “working.” They’re on standby.

Step 2: Put the skeleton on research duty

Skeletons are ideal for this because they remove an entire category of annoyance. No food. Less fragility. Less attention.

Research progress is the kind of background momentum that makes rotation feel worthwhile: even if the active character spends three days getting wrecked by bandits, something back home is still advancing.

Step 3: One character goes live for 8–12 days

The key here is not rotating too fast. If I swap every two days, I’m just repeating the weakest part of Kenshi over and over: the “I’m terrible and everything is slow” phase.

A proper solo arc needs time to pay off.

The goal isn’t to become a god. The goal is to become durable:

• enough toughness to stop folding instantly
• enough combat competence to escape bad situations
• enough medical ability to recover without a full entourage

Step 4: Spend cats wherever it’s convenient

This is the mental unlock that makes the whole approach work: money, training, and location don’t have to be linked.

Earn in one area. Buy gear in another. Heal in a third. Kenshi doesn’t demand a home base for progress—it just tempts you into one.

Rotation keeps the freedom without the full commitment.

What This Solves (And What It Doesn’t)

Rotation fixes the exact thing that’s killing the fun:

• I still get solo tension.
• I still get travel and discovery.
• I stop managing a six-person conga line.
• The squad slowly becomes competent without forcing me to play “squad game” full-time.

It doesn’t solve faction weirdness. If Tech Hunters want to beef with the UC and every slaver-adjacent group on the map, that’s just Kenshi being Kenshi. But it does change how that chaos feels: it becomes weather, not a daily paperwork problem.

And honestly, that’s all I need. I don’t want a stable empire. I want a series of contained disasters with recovery time that doesn’t take real-world hours.

Conclusion

Kenshi gets boring when “progress” turns into responsibility. The fix isn’t necessarily fewer recruits—it’s fewer active liabilities. By parking the squad, keeping the skeleton researching, and rotating one character into a focused 10-day survival arc, the game stays sharp without throwing away the roster I fought to keep. If nothing else, it brings Kenshi back to what it does best: one idiot with a plan, walking into trouble on purpose.