STALKER thread

Since Steam sales are upon us again, I've noticed lots of rookies diving into the most Sup Forums-core game series of all time: the STALKER trilogy. So I thought, heck, let's set up a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. thread!

Let's start with the infographs.

Consult this Starting Guide,
then see the /vg/'s huge Stalker General for more tips and links: Play in the release order. Start with no mods - only latest patch, OR get the full "Starter Pack" first; these contain bug-fixers and light visual mods that can help performance as well.
Leave big overhauls for later playthrougs. Avoid the "Complete" -mods. Always play on MASTER difficulty for best realism and atmosphere, and disable crosshair.

Don't give up in the beginning! The starting gear sucks ass and first area can be a bit boring.

Other urls found in this thread:

armstalker.ru/
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

Now, once you're done with the vanilla(-ish) games, you may wanna give them another spin, with bigger overhaul mods!

This neat chart helps you find a mod fitting for your needs. I'm personally a big fan of the good ol' AMK1.4.

I just bought Stalker:SOC in the sale. I played a pirate of it years ago but never finished it.

I played Call of Pripyat about a year ago and thought it was excellent.

I tried to play Clear Skies about 6 different times, the first couple of times I didn't get past the first mission then the last time it was very confusing; I got sent to defend a farmhouse, or something, but there was nothing there to shoot then about 10 minutes later a bunch of friendlies showed up then about 10 minutes after that a couple of bad guys arrived but the friendlies killed them. Then I got sent on a mission to see some dude who was on the other side of a fence, both of which entryways were heavilly guarded by machine guns and tons of enemies which I had no chance of defeating. So I gave up. Also, I cleared out a house of baddies with the help of friendly npcs but later walked past the same house and those friendly npcs killed me.

>I just bought Stalker:SOC in the sale. I played a pirate of it years ago but never finished it.
you really should finish it. Though I guess CoP's already kinda spoiled it for you. All in all, SoC's still my favorite.

Yeah, CS is the most problematic game of the bunch, and REALLY requires all the fixes you can get. For this, the STARTER PACK is good to have.
Trust me, everyone hates that machine gun. However, you're not meant to run AT the military base, but instead escape it to the Cordon's neutral Stalker village (you know, the one you start at in SoC). There's also a bit easier, kinda cheat way of doing this: instead of revealing your arse to the MG, go back to the swamp, look up the northern entrance to the Cordon area, and literally LEG IT all the way to Sidorovich. Neutral Stalkers are a faction of their own in CS, and you are not automatically buddy-buddies with them at first.

Cool, I was just thinking about grabbing atleast one of the STALKER games but I never know where to start.

Is it true, that in SOC, bullets you fire have a random chance of vanishing in lower difficulties?

I knew it would come to this. That's been THE #1 question about STALKER games for around 8 years now. The 2nd being "what mods do I need??", followed by "BAWW! I played this for 20 minutes, and uninstalled. It's 2hard/2boring!".

No. You are mixing couple different things there.

For starters, the STALKER series has quite interesting difficulty system. The HIGHER the difficulty, the MORE damage everything and everyone does. This means you die faster, but so do your enemies.

Now, when it comes to Clear Sky, the devs introduced these upgrade-tree mechanics to the weapons. To encourage (?) looking for parts that enable you to upgrade your shooters, they made all the gear in the game start with veeery nerfed specs. To the point that your shots actually DO disappear mid-flight at some distance, unless you get accuracy upgrades on the piece.

Besides the previously mentioned major fuckup of CS, all the guns in STALKER are perfectly usable, up to their maximum reach distance that is. These games do have ACTUAL bullet physics you see, with major differences between different ammo-types and weapons. No hit-scan guns here.

>I knew it would come to this.

Hey, I'm just checking out the already available guides, not here to complain about anything. Just grateful for all these info pics.

/r/ing the pic that compares mods that has ZoA being a shit ton of dogs

Didn't mean to come off as insulting. Sorry for that.

That being said, good hunting, STALKER!
I'm honestly kinda jealous, as you can only play these games for the first time once, and compared to how much the devs fixed these games after the release, any newcomer is going to have a lot smoother start nowadays.

this one?

thanks famicom

Is there a mod that allows point blank shots to th head to kill enemies, 'cos it's supposed to be all realistic and shit.

sure thing, bro.
Have a good time in the Zone!

It's already like that in the vanilla games. Even the worst peashooter in the game (Makarov) can 1-shot kill any human enemy, assuming he's not wearing strong enough helmet.

If your foe's armored, use rifles + AP rounds.

Man, almost daily some /vg/ wanker comes here and posts this obnoxious guide. All a new player needs is to be told to patch the game and play on Master difficulty.
Quit spoon feeding them like they're bunch of a vegetables, just look at the fucking tips there, "press X to sprint", gee thanks.

How about shooting someone from 2 feet away with a shotgun, is there a mod where doing that can cause some damage or something?

No, I mean, you position the gun sight over a guys face, right, then you pull the trigger and he acts as if he has been shot in the face.

Mind you, he is wearing a 1970s parka

>How about shooting someone from 2 feet away with a shotgun
Same thing. In fact, the sawnoff is one of the strongest weapons early on in the game. It's just that a single buckshot pellet has weak armor penetration stats, and the sawnoff spreads them to very wide area at short distance, so you need to get close and land a good hit on unprotected parts of the body (namely face).

If you wanna snipe with shotguns, get a better gun + slug or dart ammo.

getting shot in the face results an instant kill in like 99% of the cases in STALKER. This applies to you, the player, as well.

If you fucks want accurate guns, keep playing until you get past Yantar or skip straight to CoP.

Is there some sort of lag problem then?

It's ok, I sussed it out, you just remember to press F6 if your bullets manage to kill something.

reminder that if you want to turn off the camera bob in SoC put cam_inert 0 into the console

Bullet physics. STALKER games do not use hitscan.

The guns fire actual projectiles, that take time to travel through the air, start arching down at certain distance, and ultimately drop. They can also ricochet off hard, angled surfaces, penetrate weak surfaces, etc. There is also some cone-fire effect, that simulates things like trembling hands and imperfections in aiming / gun / etc.

For best accuracy, do the Low Crouch, and aim with the sights. And if enemy is on the move, do not aim directly AT him, but instead a bit in "advance", AKA where he will be next.

But I can't stress enough how big role assault rifles and scopes have in these games.

CoP's guns suck unless you upgrade.
You already get sweet mid-tier rifles at the Aprogrom Institute. Pop a scope on top of one of those, and you can beat the entire game with little issue.

I'd recommend 0.1 instead, and in general just tone down the headbob. Preferably via ZRP's modifier.exe settings.

Can I pirate this or do I need to buy it to play it properly with all the recent patches?

>tfw there are people who gave up STALKER before getting to experience the joys of nightvision and NATO or 9x39 weapons
>tfw there's players who didn't even leave Cordon before quitting

>AMK+AA2
Yay or nay?
>To the point that your shots actually DO disappear mid-flight at some distance
So that's why I couldn't even kill tohose fucking bandits near the radio tower while I could kill faggots with no problem in SoC

Just bought the complete package, downloading Call of Pripyat right now. Hope I don't regret buying this.

yes, you can pirate them.
it's almost recommended even, as the old devs are long gone and won't give a single cent nowadays.

Also, by pirating, you usually get the original 1.0 release versions of the games, which you can then patch to whatever version you want. This is especially handy in case of some specific big mods, that may require the game to be patched to a specific version.

The STARTER PACKs include the latest patches (with exception of SoC's pack, which has 1.0004, that AMK requires), and many other bug-fixing and visuals + performance improving mods.

>>AMK+AA2
>Yay or nay?
nay, because you cannot mix two major overhaul mods in the first place, plus AA2 is buggy POS.

>So that's why I couldn't even kill tohose fucking bandits near the radio tower while I could kill faggots with no problem in SoC
yeah, CS has that kind of bullshit designs.
Things get notably easier once you save up enough to get SEVA and a NATO gun.

Like said in fucking OP's post: play in the release order! CoP's the LAST part of the trilogy.

I started downloading it like 30 minutes before I saw this thread.

SoC's like 4GB or so. Should be finished in no time with any decent, modern internet connection.

Also, don't people know how to SEARCH for information these days? We got Google, Wikipedia, fucking official STALKER website...

Anyway. Play SoC first! It's the best game, best starting point, and only game to even try to teach newcomers the basics.

>If you fucks want accurate guns, keep playing until you get past Yantar
if you can't start hitting skulls with the full size AK74, especially the Rapid one / one with the scope, you really should check your gud-levels.

Protip: Single shot and Burst firing modes + low crouching are your friends.

Didn't realize there was already a Stalker thread up before posting my question so I'll just ask it here and let that thread die.

Where can I find whatever controls how fast squads respawn if I'm playing Misery? It should be in the smart_terrain script but isn't anymore as far as I can see. Playing Misery 2.11

These are what I'm looking for:
local DEATH_IDLE_TIME
local RESPAWN_IDLE

Also is there any way to change the spawn zones for creatures and human squads?

Already asked /sg/ and they just memed at each other and ignored me.

sounds like some quite deep stuff, that's not fit for rookie thread. Have you tried consulting the creator of the mod?

Also, just for your knowledge, the pace of /vg/ threads is a looot slower than the ones here on Sup Forums. There's also these specific times when the HC fans are lurking and posting the general. Thus, I'd recommend having patience, and seeing how things unfold.

I always found it great how they hardcoded the easier difficulties to have worse aim.

>misery
KYS

actually it's worse hit-% for the NPCs, and globally lower damage values for everyone.

This system directly inspired the Metro 2033's Ranger Hardcore difficulty setting. In other words, it's kinda lunatic to not play these games on the Master difficulty, preferably with crosshair disabled too.

what the hell does that even mean?
also, Misery is a fine mod. It's like crack for us true old-timers, who could play the vanilla games blindfolded by now.

>The guns fire actual projectiles, that take time to travel through the air, start arching down at certain distance, and ultimately drop. They can also ricochet off hard, angled surfaces, penetrate weak surfaces, etc. There is also some cone-fire effect, that simulates things like trembling hands and imperfections in aiming / gun / etc.
This is all in SoC?

Cheeki Breeki

>Misery is a fine mod
Kill
Your
Self

Yeah think I'll just make a post on the Misery forums at this rate. Nobody seems to know. On the plus side there's mutants running everywhere with the few changes I was able to make.

Was it too hard for you, just like Dad's dick?

>This is all in SoC?
Yes.
Hell, it was one of the game's biggest "attractions" back then, so to say. Besides the obvious thing of the game being in development for almost a decade before coming out in very simplified and shrunk form.

Why
You
Hafta
Be
Mad
?

Misery is just a bad mod.

it's not. Otherwise, I would not have put a good 2 weeks to 1.0, 1.1, 2.0 and 2.11, each.

How so? It's a bit heavy on the grind but you can fix that pretty easily. Some of us enjoy playing survival type mods. I miss when bullets were overpriced and the marshes were full of 10-15 strong dogpacks in earlier versions.

I think you would if you're an idiot.
It's not a good survival mod.

Why not?

>one stalker game 7.99
>stalker bundle 9.99

do the math kid, buy all three

I played all 3 games. Looking for some sandboxy/free play mod with plenty of cheeki breekis to kill.

Actually I don't even mind if it's another game similar to STALKER. I mostly just want to shoot people and have lots of gun porn.

Do you have any recommendation?

armstalker.ru/

i liked this game but i'm a fucking bitch when it comes to horror so i can't really put myselft to keep playing it

does faction wars for clear sky still get updated, i last played it like 2 years ago and had to stop cause of crashes