Things We Wish We Knew Before Playing Stalker 2: Heart Of Chornobyl

The world of Stalker 2: Heart Of Chornobyl is fragile and unique, where anything can happen at any moment. In this living and breathing world, things happen even when you aren’t in a specific area. It’s also a huge place that will take you a long time to explore fully, and you might still easily miss some items.

While the main focus is on the story, you can nearly double your play time if you focus on the side content along the way. With a game this beefy, it’s important to keep a few things in mind so that you can have a smoother experience.

Take Your Time To Look Around

As you play the story of Stalker 2: Heart Of Chornobyl or explore any random location, you’ll commonly find yourself in rooms that might initially feel empty. However, if you go around and take a look at everything, you’ll find some items to loot like medkits, bandages, ammo, and items to cure radiation.

These are not only important to keep you alive but can also be a great source for Coupons. Of course, you wouldn’t want to sell essential items like medkits, but you can always sell the ammo you aren’t using or certain bottles like beer or vodka that are just taking space in your inventory.

You also have private storage in every main outpost with all the traders where you can keep your extra items that you don’t want to sell just yet.

If the items are sitting in the open, you’ll commonly see a white dot on them. However, sometimes these items can be found inside hidden backpacks or containers. You can simply interact with the backpacks while you’ll have to break the containers with your knife. It’s important to keep an eye out for these since they’re the main source of restocking your items.

Save Your Ammo As Much As Possible

You might be able to get a significant amount of ammo while you’re looting around, but no amount is quite enough for this game. You’ll mainly face two types of enemies: humans and mutants. The former has significantly less health and can be defeated in one headshot for the most part, while the latter is a different story.

Mutants in Stalker 2: Heart Of Chornobyl can either be found in groups with low health or solo with a high HP pool. Both of these will take a significant amount of ammo to defeat, and you can’t afford to run out since it’s nearly impossible to defeat them with your knife. Therefore, it’s important to save your ammo for these occasions.

Mutants also don’t usually drop any loot when you defeat them, so they’re largely just an ammo sink.

This ammo saving can be done when you’re fighting humans by attempting to headshot them as much as possible. Keep in mind that you’ll be spending a lot more ammo if you hit them on the body.

Your Choices Can Make Big Differences

One of the biggest things that make this game so immersive is its choices-matter nature. The game has a total of four endings, and you’ll get one of these based on all the choices you’ve made throughout the main story. Of course, that means you’ll have to play multiple times to achieve every ending.

However, other than the main story, you’ll also find various choices in the side content. While these might not be as impactful in the long run, these choices can make a significant difference in the amount of rewards you get. This difference can range from getting absolutely nothing from a quest to getting rare items like a better scanner.

Pay Attention To Your Backpack

In a game where you can easily run out of resources, it’s common for players to pick up everything they see just in case it comes in handy. However, the developers have a system in place to avoid this by having a limit on your backpack. By default, you can carry up to 80 kgs of items, though that’s the maximum amount.

Once you start getting over 54 kgs, your backpack will start getting heavy and you’ll see an encumbered icon above your HP bar on the bottom left. Whenever you’re encumbered, you consume more stamina for each task and your stamina also regenerates slightly slower.

Your stamina in general regenerates slower if you’re running but it sees rapid regeneration if you stand still for a bit.

This high stamina consumption continues to increase as your backpack gets heavier, and you also start moving slower. While you can counter this by constantly drinking water, it’s still recommended to keep your inventory managed by discarding items that you’re not going to use or sell.

Random Events Can Be Avoided

Once you get through the prologue of Stalker 2: Heart Of Chornobyl and start exploring the main world, you’ll commonly have incidents where one or two groups of random factions spawn near you. These factions might start fighting among themselves or attack you. However, it’s not always necessary to engage with them.

When this random event occurs, you’ll get a white arrow in the middle of your screen in the middle of nowhere, which shows how close the enemy is to detecting you. If you see this, simply run in the other direction until you’re far enough for the enemies to lose aggro on you.

These random events can sometimes occur when you’re breaching a facility in the main story, at which point you can’t avoid it.

The reason it’s good to avoid some of these events is that they usually take a lot of your resources including ammo, medkits, bandages, and grenades. However, once you defeat all the enemies, you likely won’t get items to make up for that loss.

Beware Of Anomalies

Apart from the enemies that you can easily defeat with your gun, there are other mechanics in Stalker 2: Heart Of Chornobyl that you can only avoid, and these are called anomalies. You’ll encounter these very commonly on your adventures. You can find them both alone or in groups, and you get a clear signal when they’re around.

Whenever you’re close to an anomaly, you’ll start hearing beeping sounds that will get more aggressive as you get closer. As soon as you start hearing this sound, it’s important to stop and take a look around. If you enter these anomalies, they can easily take away over half of your HP within seconds.

Some anomalies do instant damage like the gravitational pull while others do damage over time like fire pits.

If you find a large group of one of these anomalies, you might also find an artifact nearby. Whenever you see these, it’s recommended to take your scanner out and see if it detects anything. The default scanner has its blue light opening and closing whenever an artifact is nearby, which gets more aggressive as you get closer.

Don’t Ignore The Side Missions

If you simply follow the main story in the game, you can finish it in about 30 to 40 hours. However, you’ll be missing out on a lot of lore while also making the game harder for yourself if you do this. This is mainly because the side quests and other mechanics in the world give you important rewards like better guns and armor.

You’ll mainly find side quests when you enter a new outpost, but you can also find some of these in the open world. It’s recommended to take part in these quests as much as possible while also getting all the stashes around the map, since these usually contain some good rewards.

Don’t Forget To Save Often

One of the worst feelings while playing Stalker 2: Heart Of Chornobyl is when you take ten minutes to breach an enemy facility just to accidentally get knocked out and realize that autosave put you back at the very start. To prevent this feeling, the game also has a manual save feature that you can use.

To do this, simply head over to the main menu and press the save button. Here, you can either create a new save or overwrite an existing one. Of course, you won’t be able to do this in the middle of a battle. It’s recommended to save after every fighting sequence you get just so you don’t have to redo it.