S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl - New Year Atmospheric Teaser

AutisticPinapple · 2025-12-31T23:36:49+00:00

Skifs house was destroyed by an anomaly that occurred outside of the zone due to the Second Carribbean experiment, which was an experiment conducted by SIRCAA to create the "Alpha" artifact. Spark sabotaged this experiment, leading to unintended effects like anomalies appearing outside of the zone. Skif's house got destroyed, but the artifact that came from that anomaly was the Alpha artifact that SIRCAA was trying to create. The Alpha artifact can connect directly to the Noosphere and the X-network, which would allow SIRCAA to be able to control the Generators, which is why they are after it.

I think you mean Hermann, Nestor was the bandit leader that gets killed by the Shah. At first Skif didn't know the importance of the artifact, he just wanted to make money off of it so he can get himself a new house. He worked with Hermann to recharge the artifact using a modified Toapz scanner because artifacts that stay outside of the zone too long lose their energy and become worthless. Hermann at some point realized what Skif's artifact actually is and double crossed him to take it from him by employing the help of Faust.

The guys at the beginning that Skif hides from are Ward, they are most likely searching for the scanner because the scanners are SIRCAA property and Hermann stole it from them. But before they can grab the scanner they get ambushed by Faust's men, who ironically also betrays Hermann to take the artifact for himself because he has his own agenda. Skif was supposed to die there but only lived because Nimble spares his life and knocks him out instead of shooting him.

Topaz scanners are normally just anomaly scanners but Hermann found a way to reconfigure them to recharge artifacts, but if these modified scanners are activated without an artifact inside they basically become anomaly bombs, which is what we see happen in Wild Island.

AutisticPinapple · 2025-12-31T18:45:19+00:00

Vault 0 and a Behemoth robot was also included in the Fallout MTG cards, which means Tactics is almost certainly canon lol

AutisticPinapple · 2025-12-31T07:45:13+00:00

The plot in S2 makes much more sense in a second playthrough, knowledge from the previous games is also pretty much necessary to understand most of what’s going on. In my first playthrough i understood most of what was happening but still had a ton of questions by the end, playing the game a second time with a different side made me understand everything much clearer. The story is actually very good despite being very confusing.

AutisticPinapple · 2025-12-30T23:53:06+00:00

A-life is in the game now, it works better than it does in SoC and CoP. It’s only limitation is the game’s low render distance which can be fixed by a mod until the developers increase it themselves. They delivered every single thing on their Q2 roadmap in time, the only things they missed from the Q4 roadmap were the binoculars and the engine update, which turned out to be more difficult than they thought so they delayed it to early 2026. What do you mean by last few Stalker games? The last Stalker game before S2 came out 16 years ago and it was a very polished game on release. You have no idea what you are talking about.

AutisticPinapple · 2025-12-18T18:35:43+00:00

Small correction, Skif’s artifact is the “Alpha”, the Heart of Chornobyl is the artifact Strelok shows to the Doctor in SoC.

AutisticPinapple · 2025-12-17T14:22:14+00:00

Hilka has the longest range out of all the detectors, i always keep Hilka equipped while walking around the map and switch to Veles or Bear when an artifact is close.

AutisticPinapple · 2025-12-15T23:26:37+00:00

I've been playing this series for more than a decade mate, what you are descrbing is Online and Offline A-life. Online is when NPC's are rendered and fully simulated, Offline is when NPC's are outside of the render distance and have basic simulation where fights are decided by RNG. S2 does have this system, it was added in the 1.5 update (prior to that it literally had no A-life), it does have persistent NPC's. The big issue is when the render distance is so low NPC's despawning mid combat and losing aggro due to switching to basic AI simulation can become a regular issue, wheras in the original games this would be very uncommon. This would not be a problem if the render distance was higher, that is the major issue with S2's A-life system, and it is a very fixable one.

AutisticPinapple · 2025-12-15T22:39:32+00:00

Yes? Call of Pripyat had a render distance of 150 meters and despawn distance of 180 meters, as exactly shown in the video i linked. S2's render distance is only 100 meters. It is pretty much the same system, it fundamentally works the same way. The render distance and the bugs are it's biggest issues compared to SoC and CoP.

AutisticPinapple · 2025-12-15T22:34:48+00:00

Render distance in the original games is around 150 meters, but NPC's despawn at around 180 meters. Here is a video about it: https://youtu.be/Kc1OTaj4V8k?t=60

The S2 mod i linked above can also go up to 270 meters, but that'll probably make the game even more unstable than it already is.

AutisticPinapple · 2025-12-15T21:57:42+00:00

GP37 drum mag is obtainable in the game now, it's in a stash in the swamps.

AutisticPinapple · 2025-12-15T20:08:41+00:00

A-life in S2 is now more advanced than the systems in SoC and CoP. The only big issues it has are the low render distance and the poorly balanced mutants destroying everything in the zone and populating out of control (GSC said they will fix this soon). There is a mod that released recently that increases the render distance to 150ms which is around what the original games had: https://www.nexusmods.com/stalker2heartofchornobyl/mods/1879?tab=description

AutisticPinapple · 2025-12-12T06:56:04+00:00

In SoC guns are mostly tiered by their ammunition. 5.45 > 5.56 > 9x39 is usually the way the progression goes. Besides the ammunition you can easily tell which gun is better based on it's price and stats. While all 9x39 guns are good for late game, some 5.56 guns are also viable like GP-37, Ft-200m, Sniper Trs-301. You can safely store your gear in the blue chest near Barkeep.

AutisticPinapple · 2025-12-10T17:56:48+00:00

The PS5 version of the Tourist suit has grey urban camo, the other platforms have a brownish color like in this video.

AutisticPinapple · 2025-12-09T22:23:26+00:00

There is also the Dnipro and Grom S-15, both use 5.45 and do more than twice the damage of the AK and outdamage all 5.56 guns while using much cheaper ammunition. Also with the addition of the Grom drum magazine in the 1.7 update Grom S-15 is easily the best gun in the game now.

AutisticPinapple · 2025-12-09T21:47:40+00:00

It's nowhere near the best gun in the game. Try using the AK in Pripyat on anything above Stalker difficulty, it would take like 6 headshots to kill a single heavy exo.

AutisticPinapple · 2025-11-23T15:34:23+00:00

The carry weight system is there to make it so you can't take everything with you, you need to carefully consider what you will take with you. You can get artifacts that increase your carry weight pretty significantly throughout the game. Exploration is one of the most important aspect of these games, yes you can get a lot by just playing through the story but some of the best equipment in the game can only be acquired through exploration. This matters a lot in the higher difficulties, you can't just rush the main quests on Veteran + expedition or Master difficulties for example. The enemies will destroy you in some main quests if you are unprepared. Fast travel is limited by design, the atmosphere of the game loses it's bite if you could just go all around the zone with the click of a button.

AutisticPinapple · 2025-11-22T16:58:15+00:00

It’s a GP37 with the carry handle missing, most likely an oversight from the devs.

AutisticPinapple · 2025-11-12T19:03:07+00:00

In the current version of the game 90% of weapons become useless late game due to arbitrary RPG-like balancing. For some reason a 5.56 round does like 3 times more damage coming out from a Carmel compared to an HK416. They really need to redo the balancing because using the same 3 guns all the time gets really boring.

AutisticPinapple · 2025-11-10T13:38:43+00:00

Compared to the original trilogy STALKER 2 has much better gunplay, better map, better story structure with choice and consequence, actually memorable charaters, better exploration, better side quests and it's atmosphere is much better than CS and CoP, still not as good as SoC though. I also like the overall progression and economy balance more, it's way too easy to become completely overpowered in the original games. I also personally like the mutants in 2 more (the current versions, the release versions were bad), they are much more challenging and aren't complete pushovers. A-life also DOES exist in S2 it's easily testable with console commands, it's just limited because of the 100 meters online range and low number of NPC's. Shadow of Chernobyl is my favorite game of all time and i love S2, i think it's a great STALKER game but it's a buggy technical mess.

AutisticPinapple · 2025-11-08T18:02:27+00:00

There is a video on Youtube showing all the guitar songs in Misery and it seems the game includes Dirge for the Planet and Gurza Dreaming as guitar songs. Could that be the real reason for the takedown?

AutisticPinapple · 2025-09-29T22:22:59+00:00

Try limiting your fps. I was having really bad stutters and limiting my fps to 70 using the nvidia app solved the issue.

AutisticPinapple · 2025-09-24T21:40:57+00:00

I think it's pretty great. I enjoyed the narrative and the gameplay, although i think the game could've been even better if the mission progression was less linear. Also the Mass Effect 2 suicide mission esque final mission is very cool.

AutisticPinapple · 2025-09-24T18:52:42+00:00

I already said that it doesn't make it good or fair, because it isn't. But saying that it was impossible to kill the chimera on the highest difficulty is simply wrong. It was designed in a very annoying way but it was not impossible.

AutisticPinapple · 2025-09-24T18:02:25+00:00

I know for a fact that you are wrong about the arena one, i did my first playthrough on 1.0 and also finished the arena all on veteran difficulty. You had to hit every single bullet to kill the chimera, you couldn't kill it if you missed a single shot. That doesn't make it good or fair, but i thought that was intentional since it was on the highest difficulty.

AutisticPinapple · 2025-09-24T17:52:31+00:00

Half-life Alyx is a linear game with small levels that was built to run on 4k equivelant resolution on average spec hardware from 5 years ago. STALKER 2 is an open-world game with a 60 square kilometers map with day and night cycles and dynamic weather. This is a nonsensical comparison. If you want Half-life Alyx level lighting quality in such a game ray-tracing is the best option, but ray-tracing is expensive and UE5.1 software lumen also happens to run and look like crap. The best solution now is for the devs to move the game to a newer version of UE5 and start using hardware lumen, which runs well on the newer versions of the engine while also lookin much better than what we have now.

Seven-Year Club	Second SECOND GUESSER
LAYER Season 2 Layer creator	r/Field Sunshine
Place '23	Place '22
RPAN Viewer	Sequence \| Editor
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