Enhanced Survival Challenged 2.5 (increased difficulty)

This mod aims to remove the cheese wealth mechanics that make Kenshi too easy, and make your struggling, suffering and overall challenge in Kenshi greater. If you like it leave a thumbs up.

Best played with Shidan’s Longer Merc Contracts mod, Bayrock’s Ironman Mod, and Dangerous Hazards. For mod load order do longer contracts->ESC->DH->ironman, for it to all work correctly. Also in-theme mod recommendation (but not yet fully compatibility tested): Thieving Skill Nerf.

Easy cash cheese mechanics nerfed hardcore. Shops are much more discerning now and won’t pay top dollar for used tainted gear that was obviously just looted from a corpse. You will risk starving for a good portion of the game and will cherish hard earned cash much more.

• Prices you can sell items for has been drastically reduced. Looted armor and weapon, and player made gear, now sell for 1/4 of the amount you could sell for in vanilla game.
• Prices of all other items that are not trade goods now sell for a mere 1/8 of their full value, food, ores, intermediary goods (iron plates etc).
• Rare ruin items like power cores and skeletal eyes are 1/2 their value now and are also used for base building.
• Trade goods (rum, grog, sake, hashish) sell for about 2/3 to 3/4 their value in vanilla but are now very hard to mass produce due to more labor intensive farming and water changes.
• Prices for illegal trade goods reduced significantly across the board.
• Medical supplies and luxury goods are now basically non-player made trade goods and still sell for full price so are valuable to find. Cheapo items like cups still sell for full price.
• Places where hashish and hemp were legal, but not lawless, have now had their price reduced ever further (such as Catun, Clownsteady, Flat’s Lagoon, Mourn, etc) and you won’t make much profit selling at those places.
• Shop counters have been disabled.
• All crops now take twice as long to harvest. You may now need to allocate multiple farmers to harvest things before they die.
• Tanning, making armor plates and making chainmail now use laboring skill instead of armorcrafting.
• Animal skins now produce only half a leather instead when you tan them.
• All construction times now double.
• All dwelling structures and walls take twice as much building materials to make.
• Store bought building materials now doubled in cost.
• Doubled all research costs (books, schematics, ai cores, etc) which now slows base development a lot and really forces you out into the world and ruins.
• Increased the research time multiplier for higher level technologies.

Vanilla was too easy with an army of chars, you now need to make the best of a much smaller team and have many of them multitask.

• Faction limit now capped at 12 chars. If you need more than that you will need to spend cats and get mercs.
• To make animals more useful in such a small squad the stats of ownable animals have been buffed 15 to 20%, garrus buffed slightly less since they are still best mobile storage. WARNING: This also means similar wild animals types (bonedogs, goats, bulls, garrus, etc) may be tougher.
• Attack slots increased to 2 (you can now have 2 people attack the same target at once, and they can do the same to you) so getting swarmed and KO’d by a large mob of weak enemies is a real risk now.
• Swamp turtle stats doubled and they have been given a high damage attack type. No longer are they the easy PZ walking meat generators of the swamp. BE WARNED!
• Meat drops on all animals reduced significantly from 1/4 to 1/2 their original. Teeth and leather drops also reduced and sell for much less than their old value. Beakthing egg value reduced significantly.
• The amount of drop items from uber bosses left unchanged and value of unique drops left unchanged.
• All blunt weapon weight reduced by about 25% and given +30% additional armor penetration.
• All chaimail armors have had a slight increase to blunt protection since they were a bit weak before.

Water should be one of the most scarce and valuable resources in Kenshi, I’ve tried some changes to reflect that.

• Water table rates halved in most all biomes, reduced even further in some. Swamp is now the only place to have 100.
• All wells (even electric ones) now require an operator, making it much more labor intensive, especially in low water areas. To compensate for this, basic non-powered wells no longer count as towns and wont get raided so it is possible to have well outposts (that have nothing but wells) in high water areas and import water in.
• All well output reduced, but scaled. Manual well output reduced by the most, about 50%, while well III reduced the least, about 20%.
• All farm field water usage now scales with size, in vanilla they were all the same. A medium field now uses the default amount of water in vanilla. Small fields use half that, large and XL now scale up with XL using about twice what a medium field uses for water.

Biome resources now scale with difficulty. Easier biomes to live in have reduces resources while harder or specialized ones have more. See here for detailed listing of changes.

Some key base buildings are now locked behind needing ruins gear in order to build them to encourage ruins exploration and make end-game bases more progression based.

• Wind Turbines, fuel generators, and most fully automated heavy machinery now take Advanced Circuitry to build. The means to fabricate Advanced Circuitry has been lost to time and can only be found in ruins.
• Batteries, Skeleton Beds and Robotics Bench now require Power Cores to build. The technology to make Power Cores has been lost to time and can only be found in ruins.
• Harpoons Guns now takes Ancient Long Bore Segments to build. These are pieces of precisely constructed durable alloy barrels which can no longer be manufactured. Ancient Long Bore Segments can only be found in ruins.
• Stone and Iron processors and some other heavy machinery now take Gears to build. Gears of such quality and durability for industrial use can not be produced anymore and must be traded for or scavenged from old Empire ruins.
• Heavy Armor Smith now take multiple Grind Machine Pieces to build. Modern smiths never really re-learned the old ways of their pre-industrial ancestors and instead mainly craft their wares using semi-mechanical methods with scavenged metal cutting gear found in ruins. Weapon Smiths II and III take tools to build.
• Research Bench 4 now takes a skeleton eye to build in order to properly analyze the cryptic ancient research books and engineering schematics. Skeleton eyes can only be found in ruins.
  Research Bench 5 and 6 take even more Skeleton Eyes to build.

I made this mod mainly for myself. I love survival games that make you struggle, suffer and feel like you just "never have enough". I find it fun being forced to make hard trade offs and tough decisions. This mod isn’t for everyone but if you enjoy it, have suggestions, or find errors in it please let me know.