How To Upgrade The PTM Gun In Stalker 2: Heart Of Chornobyl

You’ll find dozens of powerful weapons in your adventures in Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl, but one will always be at your side: the PTM in the form of Skif’s Pistol. This trusty sidearm, as a quest item, is locked and will never leave your inventory.

There are plenty more PTM pistols to find in the Zone, and you can upgrade them with special attachments and mods to increase their effectiveness. The PTM or Skif’s Pistol can easily carry you through the entire game, and an upgraded one makes for a formidable secondary that is unlikely to ever run out of ammo.

How To Upgrade The PTM

You can upgrade the PTM and any weapon currently in your inventory at a Tech vendor, who you’ll find at most bases in the Zone. The first one you’ll encounter is Lens in Zalissya, where you can spend a few hundred coupons on each of its three potential upgrades.

With these three upgrades, the PTM not only takes up less of yourequip load, but you’ll also means you’ll need to lead your shots less and be able to get more consistent headshots on enemies with head armor.

That second upgrade becomes especially important when more enemies have such armor in the late game.

However, two additional attachments for the PTM are not available at a Tech shop: the Pistol Suppressor and the High-Capacity PTM Magazine.

As you’d expect, the suppressor makes your shots quieter, helping with stealth if that’s your thing. The High-Capacity PTM Magazine increases the number of rounds the PTM can hold to 12, up from 8. Getting your hands on these items takes a bit of extra work, but neither is difficult to find.

Where To Find The Pistol Suppressor

There are several places in Stalker 2 where you can get a Pistol Suppressor for use with the PTM (and several other weapons). The easiest is to go to the stash in the Boiler House, which you can easily reach shortly after leaving the tutorial.

To equip the Suppressor, drag it onto the icon of Skif’s Pistol or another PTM while you have the weapon equipped. To unequip it, open the weapon options (that you’d use to Unload a weapon, for instance) and select the suppressor. It’ll unequip from the weapon and return to your main inventory.

You can also
find a suppressor in the Slag Heap in the Garbage region
, but you get a PTM with a suppressor equipped for free during the side quest The Road to Salvation.

How To Get The High-Capacity PTM Magazine

We could only find two of these High-Capacity PTM Magazines in the game, and both are in the Lesser Zone.

The first is in the deepest part of the Sphere where you meet Solder during the Behind Seven Seals quest, on a table in Solder’s room.

Be sure to get it during the mission, as we can’t find any way to get back into the Sphere basement
once you escape.

The second and easier magazine to get is in the small building at the western edge of the Northern Checkpoint. You can go there before or after finishing Behind Seven Seals and grab the Magazine off of the table near some radio equipment.

Be mindful of the guards who are liable to be there for most of the game. Because they’re in the Lesser Zone, don’t expect much resistance against later-game gear.

You can always buy the Pistol Suppressor if you don’t want to go hunting for it, though the merchants who sell it are outside the Lesser Zone. Specifically, they are:

• Sidorovich at Rookie Village in Cordon, just east of the Lesser Zone.
• WO Komisarov at the Cement Factory in the northeast corner of the map.
• Ragman at Rostok, the large city on the map west of Garbage.
• Viktoria Dorozhnyuk at STC Malachite at the far west side of the map.

Of the vendors who sell Pistol Suppressors, Sidorovich is by far the best if you want one early game, as he’s very close to Lesser Zone, and the Rookie Village where he lives gives easier access to the eastern portions of the map as well as a safe base of operations to work from.