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?