How To Get The Best Artifact Scanner In Stalker 2: Heart Of Chornobyl

Looking to add some artifacts to your collection in Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl? Then you’re going to need a Scanner, and you’ll need to use it liberally. You’ll get one of them within minutes of starting the game, but you’ll need to go hunting for others. The hunt is well worth it, however, as even the first upgrade is a massive step up, with each subsequent improvement going even further.

Don’t expect to get any artifact scanner upgrades for a good few hours, as there are some requirements you’ll need to meet to access them. You’ll find information on all that and more here.

Where To Find The Echo Scanner

The Echo Detector is the first scanner you find during the initial tutorial mission, There and Back Again. When you go through the scientist outbuilding, you’ll come across a dead scientist’s body with a Viper-5 next to it. Looting the body awards the Echo Scanner.

As the first scanner you unlock, the Echo Detector’s functionality is simple. The closer you are to an artifact, the more frequently the light in its face will blink. Be within arm’s reach, and the light will be solid. You get no direction or distance marker, just the light.

Where To Find The Hilka Detector

There are several places to find the Hilka Detector. It’s available either in a stash you’ll encounter as part of the Budmo! mission, as a purchase at several merchants across the Zone, or at the derelict Lviv oil tanker in the far east of the Zatov region.

The Budmo! stash is east of the Slag Heap, and you’ll want to go there first; if you complete the mission by helping the drunkard’s friend at the eastern stash, its contents will vanish.

Additionally, the Lviv tanker is only fully accessible via the A Mysterious Case mission, as the door into the boat will only open once you’ve accepted the mission from the Sultan at the Sultansk base. You’ll find the Hilka Detector there in the scientists’ bunker at the eastern end of the boat.

The traders you can buy the Hilka Detector from for 4,000 coupons are:

• Barkeep in Rostok
• Pythagoras at UTC Malachite
• Hawaiian at Yaniv Station

These vendors are the resident owners of the pub at each location, so they will sell food items, sometimes artifacts, and will purchase anything you need to offload.

The Hilka Detector is a massive upgrade from the Echo, as it gives you a precise distance measurement out to 100 meters when it detects an artifact, and the readout goes down at such a rate that you’ll always have an approximate direction of where you need to go.

Where To Find The Bear Detector

There are two ways to get your hands on the Bear Detector. The first, and much harder, is to reach the end of the Uninvited Guests side mission, which you can start by talking to Mytryk Genius on the north side of the Concrete Forest in the Cement Factory region.

You’ll need to navigate the underground in the mission until you face off against two Burer enemies, then loot Mytryk’s stash that’s nestled beneath a pair of large wooden cable spools.

You can also purchase the Bear Detector from the Hawaiian at Yaniv Station for 6,000 coupons.

As for the detector itself, it’s an improvement on the Hilka in two important ways. First, it gives a relatively precise direction you need to go to reach the artifact it’s detected, and the closer you get, the more the ring of pips fills up, so you always have a good idea of where you need to look.

Where To Find The Veles Detector

Like the Echo Detector, the Veles Detector is a mission reward, specifically the mission In Search of Past Glory, which you’ll complete nearer the end of the game. Getting there is at least a 15-hour trek, much longer if you do a lot of side content.

You’ll actually receive the Veles after completing the step where you take the Suppressor blueprint to Dvupalov and he and his assistant have an argument.

Using the Veles is as simple as it gets. Its display shows the location, distance, and direction of the artifact you’re looking for on top of the usual audio cues.