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Enhanced Survival Challenged 2.61 (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 Jaeger's Realistic Thieving, Shidan's Longer Merc Contracts , and Shidan's Reactive World. For mod load order to work correctly do: Realistic Thieving->longer contracts->ESC->Reactive World.

Easy cash cheese mechanics nerfed hardcore. Shops are much more discerning now and won’t pay top dollar for used and tainted gear that was obviously trashed and just looted from a corpse. Sold looted gear sells for a fraction of the price and you will risk starving for a good portion of the game and will cherish hard earned cash much more. Trade good prices nerfed, drug prices nerfed, everything with basing is harder and longer. Bounties remain the same to reward exploration and risk. Click here to see a detailed list of changes.

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 capped at 12 characters, attack slots increased to 2x, meat and leather drops reduced, maces buffed and various other balance changes. Click here to see a detailed list of changes.

Water should be one of the most scarce and valuable resources in Kenshi, I've tried some changes to reflect that. Water is reduced in almost all biomes significantly, wells are more labor intensive (even electric ones), and you cannot find water for purchase at any vendors. Click here to see a detailed list of changes.

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

Some key base buildings and research are now locked behind needing ruins gear in order to build them to encourage ruins exploration and make end-game bases more progression based. Highly suggest NOT to set up a base right away as you will be missing key ingredients for many items until you find them in ruins. Click here to see a detailed list of changes.

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.

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3-25-24 minor update

Balanced out hashish illegal prices. See page on econ changes.

3-20-24 bug fixes/tweaks

-Water now completely removed from vendors like it was originally intended.
-Basic wells put back to vanilla in terms of counting as a town.
-Beak things egg price fix. They were intended to be reduced to 1/8 but were accidentally set to 1/64 price. This is now fixed back to 1/8.
-Fixed chainmail blunt bonus across all chainmail like it was supposed to be. Basically all chainmail now has a small 10% bonus on its base blunt protection. So if it was 20% before it’s 22% now etc.
-Continue to refine blunt and maces to make them more practical. All maces except jittes now have an additional +20% robot damage in addition to the faster swing speed and +30% additional armor piercing which was incorporated before.
-Reverted Bulls and Garrus to vanilla stats. They were way too powerful when leveled up with the buffs I gave them. Have kept a slight strength and combat staff buff on bonedogs and goats though to make them more useful in a small squad. Note this means wild ones are also more buff.
-Wooden sandals way too buff. Nerfed to give a flat 5% speed buff and no combat speed buff.
-Put some hashish and bloodrum prices back to vanilla to try and balance them more.