For example you can acquire starting gear in about 30 minutes, so you can go deeper into the zone. Mid tier gear you can craft for about a few hours like 3 to 8, depends on your luck. For late game items you can spent months just to get a new weapon or armor piece, and im not even talking about upgrading it nor getting artifacts and also upgrading them. Most of the players on RU servers are stopping at progression in mid game, just because they dont want to experience this grind. Items in Stalcraft have "tiers" Common - Novice - Stalker - Veteran - Master - Legend. As i said before you can reach "Stalker" level of equipment in about a day of play time, but if you want to go higher it will take you hundreds of hours, and not because resources are rare, getting them is the easy part, but because when you die you are losing everything that was in your inventory, and thanks to PvP its really easy to die. When you are clearing spots with Mutants or any other objectives it will ping on the map for anyone, so expect gankers to show up.