Kenshi is one of the best game to come out in awhile but the fun struggle to survive in the early game goes away almost immediately and it gets too easy due to certain cheese mechanics that provide abundant easy wealth. I’ve tried to address the main ones here and make the game overall more challenging. 

Recommended setup to play the mod as intended: Be sure to leave all the slider options during game creation at default since many have already been changed in the mod. 
-In game options recommend increasing base raid/attack slider to 1.5 and set attack frequency to "high" for maximum fun and challenge that syncs well with this mod :)

Mod Changes:

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 weapons now sell for 1/4 of the amount you could sell for in vanilla game. Player made armor and weapons will sell for 1/3 of what you could sell for in vanilla.
-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). 
-All research and engineering books still sell for full price, forcing you in some desperate long vs short term decision making situations.
-Rare ruin items like power cores and skeletal eyes are 1/2 their value now. Less but still a fortune in this mod and exponentially more valuable relative to common intermediary goods which is how it should be.
-Trade goods (rum, grog, sake, hashish) sell for about 1/2 to 2/3 their value in vanilla but are now very hard to mass produce, see notes below on basing and farming.
-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.

Base and Resource changes: 

Water always felt too easy and abundant in Kenshi. This is supposed to be a barren apocalyptic wasteland and freshwater should be one of the rarest resources.

-Water table rates halved in all biomes. Swamp is now the only place to have 100.
-Rates of water production from wells reduced. Basic well output is now about 1/3 of vanilla. Well II output is 2/3 of vanilla, and Well III is 4/5 of vanilla so it’s a lot slower until you get level III.  Pre-electric farming will be very labor intensive until you get Well II.
-[This next feature has been modded in but currently doesn’t appear to work due to a possible bug in Kenshi. If it is working for anyone please let me know.] 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.
-All crops now take twice as long to grow and twice as long to harvest.
-All production speeds (mining, refining, smithing) halved, researched speed halved, and the increase to research time for higher tech levels bumped up about 25%. 
-Stone resource levels reduced by half on all biomes.
-Store bought building materials now doubled in cost.
-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. Was too easy in vanilla to have a never ending supply of meat from swamp turtles or bulls and EZ money from skins.
-The value and amount of drop items from uber bosses left unchanged.

Combat:

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

-Faction and squad limit now capped at 14 chars (2/3 the vanilla squad max of 20). This allows you to have a couple animals if you wish, have a person or two off scouting or doing other things, and still be able to have a decent attack force. Overall you now need to really make use of all your people to the max.
-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.

Practical effects on how you play:

Just my own personal results after the first playthrough of what the practical effects of this mod seems to be:

-Due to how hard cash is early game you can’t expand your team too fast or you will starve or be forced to sell some into slavery. Expand slow.  Don’t get skeletons too early or you will not be able to afford to repair them.
-You will be living “paycheck to paycheck” until the mid possibly even late game due to the reduced cats and increased difficulty in doing large scale farming.
-You will probably have to adopt new basing strategies.  I found it very hard now to grow enough to keep fed and do other things with my base.  You may have to pick whether you want to farm or smith or have seperate specialized bases for both that you rotate between.  You may have to make use more of city buildings as safe research areas as some of the high end research items can take 4 or 5 days to complete.
-Leather armor is much more important now and a useful stepping stone to high end armor since you can get skins early and make it in the safety of town. Since mining and processing to make metal armor takes so much longer to do now and is a struggle to keep fed while doing it, both cloth and leather armor have a more useful life cycle in item progression.
-Farming takes a lot longer and is more labor intensive now. It’s hard to keep everyone fed with just a couple farmers making cactus chews.  You will need to dedicate an entire team to farming and/or make the higher end value-added items like dustwiches to survive better.
-Ruins are now valuable in other ways. While the intermediary goods sell for very little now (armor plates etc), given how long they take to make on your own, I found myself collecting them to actually use instead of just selling.
-Bounties, especially unique boss bounties, are one of the only ways to get really rich now fast but the money is fleeting.  The really valuable unique boss bounties are only one-time so don’t splurge your fortune away too fast…  It was really easy in this mod to feel rich after a 20 or 30k bounty, buy something cool, then find myself living paycheck to paycheck again just barely affording enough to feed my squad.
-If you follow my recommended game options and increase base raid attacks to 1.5 and random attacks to “high” you will find yourself having to run away from raids occasionally or risk getting an entire squad KO’d.  Mercs are even more useful now for guarding your outpost but their salary now forces you to make some hard trade offs.
-I found myself not only being forced to have people multi specialize in base tasks, but also in combat.  With a hard faction limit I found myself trying to turn some squad members into 2x fighters, training them in crossbows and small swords so they can do the damage at any distance. I rarely ever had to do this in vanilla.
-Becoming a post apocalyptic trucker is now a fun and practical way to make money buying and selling trade goods in different places based on pricing differences since other ways of EZ cash are gone.

Personal Statement:

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.