Kenshi
Southern Hive Exile Starts Expanded
Herrdrakener 25 Dec, 2019 @ 6:58pm
Updated Guide to Southern Hive exile mod start
With the updated mod, you can skip the whole "escape the Hive" part and start right at a city already. But if you prefer to try to escape yourself, here's a guide.

There are now three different starts for escaping the Hive; the Village, the Armory, and the Queen's Hive. Since the Village was the original start, I'll go through that first.

As soon as you start, immediately run indoors to grab supplies. Look for medical supplies first, which you absolutely WILL need. Start looking in the barrels and boxes before snatching anything lying about outside of them, because as soon as you snatch something, you're a thief, and then the workers in addition to the soldiers will be after you too. And the workers are really hard to avoid indoors with their long staves! It makes stealing anything else a challenge. I paused frequently to plan out my next dash while trying to dodge the soldiers during the search. You will likely have to search multiple buildings to find a medkit, but I pretty regularly managed to find at least one in the four buildings.

Now, once you have the medkit, dash to a "worker" building (a building that has workers spawn inside) if you're not in one already. In there let the guards knock you out. There's almost no chance of you escaping the guard, but if you're lucky, you'll only be injured just enough to briefly lose consciousness and get the guards off your back.
I've found that the soldiers don't often enter "worker" buildings when not chasing you, and if you find a secluded corner and stay in stealth mode, you can go unnoticed until nightfall. During this time, build up your thieving skill by repeatedly snatching up and then dropping to snatch up again, whatever's lying around on the floor. Do NOT take anything in a barrel or box yet, as you will likely get caught and then get another potentially fatal beating.

Once it's dark, take what you want for the journey, including from the barrels if your theft skill is enough to have good chance of stealing from them without getting caught. I suggest not taking heavy armor or anything else that will hamper your stealth, though. Then make your escape.
While moving about, pause frequently to scan for patrols. I carefully planned each move in short darts from one hiding spot to another, so I was never far from a hiding place when a patrol suddenly appeared. Keep moving if you can; in Hiver territory there is practically no hiding spot that patrols won't eventually find. Eventually, the patrols will thin out, so you only have to watch out for beak things and gorillos.

The Queen's Hive start is very similar to the Village start, except the soldiers will freak out about you threatening the Queen if you enter the large, non-hive building. You can use the same essential tactics as the Village start.

In the Armory start, you'll start near an armory building with no soldiers immediately about. Depending on which armory it is, there may be hive buildings nearby or stuff lying about on the ground. If there are hive buildings, don't enter them, because that's where the soldiers are. Get out of there as fast as possible, before the soldiers come out and see you. You can quickly grab a few items lying on the ground, though it won't be anything immediately useful for your journey, like food or medkits, except maybe the tools if you get caught and bound to a pole.

I went north, straight to Lagoon Flats. It is a pretty good starting city, if you can make it there; the frequent attacks on the gates from animals means you can collect plenty of skins and meat to sell, and it being a Tech hunter town means you can buy some good weapons and armor once you've saved up enough cats. It also gives you a chance to practice fighting on wounded animals.
I save-scummed like a cheating cheater to make it out, though I tried as hard as possible to do it as little as possible. No matter what you do, this is going to be a really hard start that you will have to restart many times before your pink antman makes it out of Southern Hive territory.
Last edited by Herrdrakener; 12 Mar, 2021 @ 6:01pm
< >
Showing 1-6 of 6 comments
danshaku  [developer] 15 Apr, 2020 @ 6:20pm 
Wait don't you immediately get chased by the soldiers? How do you stay in the village without the everyone out to lynch you? I know usually I just make a break for it asap and hope animals distract the guards.
Yawn 1 May, 2020 @ 4:38pm 
What ended up happening in my case was rather strange. The hivers attacked me once at the start knocked me out and then I just got up stole some bandages and bandaged up. At this point I had one broken leg to the point I had to crawl so I just started sneaking and noticed my sneak within like a period of 50 seconds being at 45 already. So I realized my opportunity and kept sneaking around since even though the hivers could see me and appeared hostile to me they didn't directly attack me and I just kinda stole more stuff and trained sneak up to 90 within like 3 minutes. Was insane the way the xp went up had no idea why it was like that

After this I quite simply sneaked out the place and was lucky enough to have stolen a sleeping bag and could heal only a few meters away from the hive village. From there I traveled to Flats Lagoon which I had never seen before same with pretty much everything down south. Bought some food ran to the swamps which I was at least somewhat familiar with albeit terrified of those blood spiders. After running for so long I got some pretty good athletics and could run at about 22 MPH so I was safe from everything in the swamps. By sheer chance I had somehow I honestly can't remember seen that I could sell hashish for 700% at Flats Lagoon I think I stole it from the Hivers. I grabbed what little Hashish I could and sold it all to flats for decent profit. From there surviving was easy. Bought green as a companion and named my character "Purple" the hive prince. Played this character for 130 in game days. He can now run at 55mph and is a pretty insane warrior albeit not as strong as the bugmaster sadly. But yeah I don't see why people had difficulties surviving maybe I just got lucky with the roll of the dice. This was my favourite player character so far despite some "bugginess" with me being referred to as human by certain characters and for that I gotta say thanks for creating this mod.

Just to clarify I can run at 55 MPH because I was forced to replace my legs over time due to hivers having weak limbs and I lost one to a Leviathan; the other less impressively to a bar fight with some guy named "Alec" or something like that in shark. I promptly placed his corpse outside for the blood spiders to eat since the hounds beat him up good.
Last edited by Yawn; 1 May, 2020 @ 4:41pm
Herrdrakener 26 Jun, 2020 @ 11:21am 
Yeah, Danshakuimo, you do get chased pretty much immediately. I made a lot of use of the pause button to be able to pick and choose what to steal when!
But once you steal, not only the soldiers but also the lesser workers also start chasing you. And they have staffs, so they are REALLY hard to avoid while trying to steal indoors.

Yawny, you really sound like you may have lucked out with a bug (pun not intended) being able to learn stealth so fast. You will learn stealth fast with this start, but not usually that fast.
Kōdo 27 Oct, 2020 @ 3:05am 
I think this guide might be out of date, there's no medkits in the Southern Hive buildings, at all. There's occasionally splint kits, but no medkits. Tried over twenty times in a row now and I'm pretty sure medkits don't spawn in these buildings.

Any viable strategies for the Southern Hive Village start would be awesome because it's a really cool start but virtually impossible in its current state.
Last edited by Kōdo; 27 Oct, 2020 @ 3:15am
Herrdrakener 7 Nov, 2020 @ 6:43pm 
Huh. Been a while since I played -haven't had much spare time lately. I know I never found the medkits just laying about in the open, only inside barrels and boxes. If there's none in the buildings at all, yes, that would make it impossible for all practical purposes.
Herrdrakener 25 Nov, 2020 @ 7:24pm 
Well, played the new starts, and updated the guide!
< >
Showing 1-6 of 6 comments
Per page: 1530 50