STALKER Shadow of Chernobyl Mod Thread

[MadMaxHellfire]

tried anomaly. too much jank. just too much jank.
story mode, scientist, started at some bunker, pda is a mess since it doesn't open full screen anymore. spent most of the time dressing up. first person invisible animations, truely the next generation of immersion. in retardation, perhaps. walked outside, it was dark, not a compass in sight, walked back, people started shooting, something exploded and i died.
tried again, same settings, somehow i couldn't pick the same starting position. this time it was day and there were people around, so i looted some corpses, shot a couple bandits, found out most of the maps are clear-sky type: you're minding your own business then an anomaly kills you out of the blue.
all i wanted was the modded skyrim experience: walk around, pick some flowers, kill a bandit or two, avoid more than two bandits at once, go back, sell loot. all i found was turboautism.

 

[normie]

tried anomaly. too much jank. just too much jank.
story mode, scientist, started at some bunker, pda is a mess since it doesn't open full screen anymore. spent most of the time dressing up. first person invisible animations, truely the next generation of immersion. in retardation, perhaps. walked outside, it was dark, not a compass in sight, walked back, people started shooting, something exploded and i died.
tried again, same settings, somehow i couldn't pick the same starting position. this time it was day and there were people around, so i looted some corpses, shot a couple bandits, found out most of the maps are clear-sky type: you're minding your own business then an anomaly kills you out of the blue.
all i wanted was the modded skyrim experience: walk around, pick some flowers, kill a bandit or two, avoid more than two bandits at once, go back, sell loot. all i found was turboautism.

play cotz if you want to freefroam, build on that instead of anomaly

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

download url or didn't happen.

 

[None]

all i found was turboautism.

Welcome to the Stalker modding community. The only exception I found was Lost Alpha, give that a try if you'd like something that feels new.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

i don't need new. i need good.

 

[Gerrard]

tried anomaly. too much jank. just too much jank.
story mode, scientist, started at some bunker, pda is a mess since it doesn't open full screen anymore. spent most of the time dressing up. first person invisible animations, truely the next generation of immersion. in retardation, perhaps. walked outside, it was dark, not a compass in sight, walked back, people started shooting, something exploded and i died.
tried again, same settings, somehow i couldn't pick the same starting position. this time it was day and there were people around, so i looted some corpses, shot a couple bandits, found out most of the maps are clear-sky type: you're minding your own business then an anomaly kills you out of the blue.

Sounds like a skill issue to me.

 

[Mercatroid]

Sounds like a skill issue to me.

Really, Gerrard? You're on the 141st page of a thread that's had like half a dozen discussions about how vanilla Anomaly is broken, autistic jank that isn't worth playing over CoC. I tried playing unmodded Anomaly one time and found that the optimization was utterly abysmal and couldn't run well even on a 5800x3D/3080, the assets looked worse than CoC and honestly even worse than Autumn Aurora, and the game balance felt like it had been designed by a clueless Souls-playing 14-year-old who just thought "the game needs to be harder!!!!11" I walked about 100 yards and ran into a regular Boar that was an insane bullet sponge and one-shotted me in Wind of Freedom armor. Uninstall.

Anomaly is probably decent if you install dozens of addons and mods and custom fixes, but even then it has stupid Misery-style shit like 1000 pointlessly-different inventory items. It has cool shaders and higher-poly models that can legit look better than CoC, but overall as a game it just seems to be much, much worse.

Frankly I'd rather play Vatnik Farming Simulator 2025.



Who else is going to farm the fertile plains of Outer Limansk? Get to work, Stalker.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

so in the end what's supposed to be the best sandbox stalker experience?

 

[Gerrard]

Really, Gerrard? You're on the 141st page of a thread that's had like half a dozen discussions about how vanilla Anomaly is broken, autistic jank that isn't worth playing over CoC. I tried playing unmodded Anomaly one time and found that the optimization was utterly abysmal and couldn't run well even on a 5800x3D/3080, the assets looked worse than CoC and honestly even worse than Autumn Aurora, and the game balance felt like it had been designed by a clueless Souls-playing 14-year-old who just thought "the game needs to be harder!!!!11" I walked about 100 yards and ran into a regular Boar that was an insane bullet sponge and one-shotted me in Wind of Freedom armor.

That's very interesting because I played it on a i5-3570 and a 1060, I wonder how you can fuck up base Anomaly settings to run bad on that PC. Did you just turn every option on without reading and move every slider to max?
As for the game's balance, it's mostly based on Dead Air which itself was based on Misery 2, so yeah. I think they unfucked some of it in the most recent 1.5.3 patch, but I haven't played this version.

 

[Dark Souls II]

so in the end what's supposed to be the best sandbox stalker experience?

It's still Anomaly, but I don't get it why so many people keep trying it out without customizing the settings to their liking, then complain that the settings are not to their liking.

pda is a mess since it doesn't open full screen anymore

You can get the 3D PDA to full screen with one click, or disable the 3D PDA altogether.

first person invisible animations

Not sure what your problem was here, most animations work perfectly fine. AFAIK there are still some items without animations, but most items have them. Haven't played Anomaly for a long time, but even a couple years back I remember all the most common items having working animations.

walked outside, it was dark, not a compass in sight, walked back

It's dark at night. You can have a flashlight, and later NVG with a few different settings. You're also probably not supposed to walk around the Zone at night.

most of the maps are clear-sky type: you're minding your own business then an anomaly kills you out of the blue

You can fully customize anomalies to be static or dynamic, and if dynamic you can specifically customize how often they change location. You can also customize how easy to spot the anomalies are.

all i wanted was the modded skyrim experience: walk around, pick some flowers, kill a bandit or two, avoid more than two bandits at once, go back, sell loot. all i found was turboautism.

Lower enemy density, adjust enemy dispersion, lower the number of roaming enemy squads, change the progression settings for enemies to have better loot. Done.

The settings menu in Anomaly has literally hundreds of different factors you can fully customize. Why not use it?

 

[Mercatroid]

That's very interesting because I played it on a i5-3570 and a 1060, I wonder how you can fuck up base Anomaly settings to run bad on that PC. Did you just turn every option on without reading and move every slider to max?
As for the game's balance, it's mostly based on Dead Air which itself was based on Misery 2, so yeah. I think they unfucked some of it in the most recent 1.5.3 patch, but I haven't played this version.

To be fair I was being hyperbolic. The game ran fine, but with less than half the fps I get in CoC, which made it feel lousy. Since these games are hardcore shooters that are often very difficult, I don't want to play something that frequently drops below 60 fps. Like, unless it looked really fucking cool, which base Anomaly doesn't. I was in the Freedom base looking at the models in there like the piano, and then I actually loaded up AA and looked at it and it looked a whole lot better. For some reason the textures in stock Anomaly are just total ass. But I have seen youtube videos with guys playing it with really nice shaders applied, and probably texture packs too. Clearly it can be very atmospheric. Also since I tried it I have discovered Lossless Scaling, which can make anything run at amazingly high fps. It's tempting to try it sometime, but it's kind of a big rabbit hole to jump into when I already know CoC and a bunch of its good addons so well.

Actually I'm curious if anyone has tried the faction war addons for Anomaly, and if they're as interesting as Warfare or EOC. When I look at Anomaly videos on youtube it's mostly zoomers playing as Monolith and just derping around. Doesn't feel like a lot of the Anomaly players really get the vibe of what a Stalker game is meant to feel like, and I saw a lot of complaints in this thread that it seems like the developers didn't either.

 

[Yosharian]

Sooo what's the best modded Stalker experience then

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

you know, after spending a decade longing for a sandbox stalker experience, it came down on me it makes very little sense since there's no character progression and no mod is 1.13. repeating tasks earns you nothing, it's just grind for the sake of grinding.

 

[Ol' Willy]

so in the end what's supposed to be the best sandbox stalker experience?

Oblivion Lost 3.0 is the most promising, but it is still in Beta. Playable, but unstable

 

[fizzelopeguss]

I played Stalker day one when it released but never got around to playing clear sky and pripyat, do any of these mods include those campaigns? Are they even worth playing?

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

"clear sky" is good is you want to spend 99% of your time taking three steps and throwing bolts everywhere hoping to find the single narrow 3 steps long corridor to the next room of lethal anomalies. in the open.
cop's first mission is "climb that very short hill from this side and this side only, walk through this minefield of anomalies which would make baby clear sky cry, don't jump over all these knee-high fences because reasons, and reach the other side which you could had just as easily reached by fucking walking up the other side. still because reasons". insult to injury, any decent mod added damage and area damage to anomalies, which made the mission literally impossible without advanced equipment and a lot of healing, which of course you didn't own since that's the fucking first mission.

 

[V17]

I played Stalker day one when it released but never got around to playing clear sky and pripyat, do any of these mods include those campaigns? Are they even worth playing?

I played CS and CoP sometime in the last 3 years for the first time, CS with the community made Sky Reclamation Patch to fix some bugs and mildly rebalance the game (horrible grenade spam), CoP I think pretty much vanilla apart from some very basic visual mods. They're imo slightly weaker overall than SoC, but they're good games and do some things better.

CS has a lot of fighting enemy NPCs and fewer mutants, anomalies or overall horror parts. The very ending sucks balls and the almost ending is very linear, but most of the game was enjoyable for me. It also features a visibly updated graphics engine, introduces emissions and it's a source of some classic memes like the bandit radio. It reuses some of the maps from SoC but modifies them, so I assume a mod that lets you run this campaign would have to be tailored specifically for CS, as opposed to CoP which uses its own maps and can theoretically be separate. And the modding community seems to kind of not give a shit about CS.

CoP is smaller overall (3 maps, though the first 2 are bigger than any other) and the maps kind of feel like empty terrain with scattered points of interest, as opposed to smaller but more coherent SoC maps. The campaign is pretty good, if a bit short, but it's supported by side quests that are of about the same level of quality, so it can feel less linear than the other two. It feels the most polished out of the three, which simultaneously adds some enjoyment and removes some charm and interest for me. It was more novel and more enjoyable than CS overall.

 

[cretin]

Sooo what's the best modded Stalker experience then

If you ask me its NLC7 but it filters everyone. It filtered me 4 times before it clicked.

Safer normie options are probably something like anomaly custom, IWP, OGSR gunslinger.

 

[Gerrard]

"clear sky" is good is you want to spend 99% of your time taking three steps and throwing bolts everywhere hoping to find the single narrow 3 steps long corridor to the next room of lethal anomalies. in the open.
cop's first mission is "climb that very short hill from this side and this side only, walk through this minefield of anomalies which would make baby clear sky cry, don't jump over all these knee-high fences because reasons, and reach the other side which you could had just as easily reached by fucking walking up the other side. still because reasons". insult to injury, any decent mod added damage and area damage to anomalies, which made the mission literally impossible without advanced equipment and a lot of healing, which of course you didn't own since that's the fucking first mission.

Your skill issues are showing again.
Also, if you think Clear Sky had too many anomalies and you had to "spend 99% of your time taking three steps and throwing bolts everywhere", never play Stalker 2.

 

[JDR13]

Look who's back from the dead (and reached Top10 on Moddb again)
https://www.moddb.com/mods/stalker-complete-2009

Version 1.5 is a 4K RTX HDR-ready, in-depth rework of the original mod. It showcases the finest contributions from the community over the years, alongside brand-new, original content. Every featured piece has been meticulously edited for consistency, delivering a unified aesthetic under a cohesive art direction. Designed to work with the original game's engine, the mod incorporates extensions and the DirectX 11 support, to maximize its potential and fully leverage modern hardware capabilities.

perfect mod for the 1st playthrough
again

Is that sarcasm? I heard Stalker Complete is mostly shit.

 

[Baron Dupek]

It's whatever mod, but for some reason it was heavy pushed for people asking "if there's any patch/mod for the 1st playthrough" and it changes too much to qualify for that - with nerfed AI (almost blind enemies) and increased carry weight limit where every kilogram matters... and no gameplay changes is mentioned in the changelog, only visual and audio.
https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=136620&s=2450a57ed27283d89cdcb9245dbe854d

Complete is obsolete, get "Starter Pack" for your first playthrough​

Completes really are over-hyped, and nowadays also OBSOLETE mods, that introduce more problems than they claim to fix, plus they make the games much easier than vanillas.
Just to list some of their most notable "features":

- All weapons have their accuracy increased 10-20%
- All damage decreased by few percents.
- Weight limit increased by 10kg, maximum being 70kg. In vanilla the Exo-suit enabled up to 80kg!
- Limits NPC's eye sight distance so they can't spot you from beyond ~100 meters. =You see them always first. Said to remove enemies skill to spot you from"unrealistic distances".
- Sound radius of knife and other critical sounds such as falling dead bodies, grass, and footsteps greatly reduced
- Reduced the sound distance of death cries
- Repair Kit - A special item to the game that allows you to repair weapons and armors out in the Zone. Can be purchased or found.
- The bar trader and Screw now sell weapons and armor repair services.
- Elite Nightvision - Black & white night vision based on the psy_antenna postprocess effect. Replaces the original UV-based blue NV, and lets you see perfectly in the darkness, be there light sources or not.
- The old, “green” night vision has much less noise and blur. NVs don't emit any audio noise anymore (=can't be heard by NPCs/mutants).
- scientific suits with 90% rad protection now feature an anti-rad injection system.
- bandages auto-apply at 10% health.
- enabled a tracer effect for armor-piercing bullets, making them visually distinguishable when use
- allows looting cash from bodies (CS & CoP only)
- You can BRIBE hostile factions to leave you alone, even if you just massacred most of them!

Saddest thing is, very few of the users of these mods even know half of its features or changes. This is why you hear 'em being called "vanilla 2.0" etc all the time.
If you want to have TRULY just bug-fixes and optional, light-weight and style-wise very true to the original visual upgrades, look up the "Stalker Starter Packs" for all three games.
You can find information, guide and links from this YT video and its description:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHWKexK7B_8&hd=1

 

[Anomander Rake]

I have finished Stalker Shadow of Chernobyl today.

I'm planning to start a new playthrough, this time modded.

Undecided between AMK Autumn Edition or Oblivion lost 2.2 (to be found here: https://www.moddb.com/mods/stalker-oblivion-lost-30/downloads/oblivion-lost-2-2-for-1-005)

I’ve read everywhere that Amk autumn edition is great for a second playthrough but I’m scared of the savegame corruption that seems to be plaguing the game (and it’s not clear if it was solved. See here: https://www.moddb.com/mods/autumn-aurora-compilation-mod/images/the-last-tests-save-corruption)

Also it seems like Autumn Aurora changes the graphics, while I'm unsure about AMK (?). It’s unclear what does what, while reading Oblivion lost 2.2 readme made me itchy to start a second playthrough.

From Oblivion lost 2.2 readme:

Spoiler

A-LIFE

- Now almost everything can happen, there's a chance to meet any NPC on any level.

- Sometimes the army raids, sometimes they don't, this is totally random, too.

- The mutants are making their way through the Zone in big hordes.

- The mutants are entering places where they could not enter before, so there's an increased chance to meet them in npc populated areas.

- Sometimes you may happen upon unique situations, it can be very hard or even funny.

- You will not have the same situations 2 times on the same level.

- The respawn can be very random, there's a chance to meet different types of mutants then before.

- The bugs of the older versions and the vanilla bugs have been corrected, now you won't see any failed quests and Quest NPC's who die before you can complete their quests, also the vanilla respawn is working properly and balanced.



FACTION WARS

- There's a chance to meet any faction in any level, also it's totally random.

- A message will give you notice about the random events.

- The Military attacks the bandits in the carpark.

- The Military attacks the loners and the bandits in the Hangar.

- You can meet Mercenaries in Agroprom.

- The Duty and the Military attacks Borov's base.

- The Freedom attacks the Duty base.

- The Military sometimes attacks Rostok Wild Territory.

- The Duty attacks the Freedom base.

- All factions try to reach the center of the Zone, and there's a chance to some of them become zombified by the Psy Emission.

REWORKED AI

- The npc's can avoid anomalies.

- The npc's can throw grenades.

- The npc's can use medkits, heal themselves and each other.

- The npc's can upgrade and replace their armor and they will collect suits and weapons found laying about.

- There are no dead npc's around campfires, but if someone dies near one, the campers will drag the corpse away.

 

[cretin]

AMKAE is a pretty safe choice.

OL2.2 is based on AMK iirc. Never played it. A lot of the features they are describing there is basically just putting words to what the offline simulation does, that AMK brought to the table. Ditto for the "reworked AI" which was a pretty standardized ai mod pack for soc.

 

[Stavrophore]

Anomaly and especially Gamma are like cock and ball torture, masochism to the max. Have fun wasting 20k 9x39 ammo on couple of NPCs, just to find they have maybe 5k loot and you have to grind 2-3 quests to get your money back. It's just this miser/scrooge experience where you count every bullet, have no fun in the process, and in the end start questioning yourself "why im even playing this? It feels like these retarded online mmos that unwashed 90iq teenagers play with grind around every corner".

 

[jebsmoker]

only time of year i can post this: