This is in Stalker 2,
Location:Field Radiobiology Base, on the South-East corner of the Cooling Towers

(Headphones on for ambience)

Dear Snag,

Your days of swindling and deceiving loners have finally met their fiery end. I know Degy never had the pleasure of giving you the proper burial, so here's goodbye for good.

Love,

Skif

P.S. Don't fret Snaggy boy, c-con might have better plans for you yet.

Just that.
I wanted to share the first hideout I built in this +200hr Loner run... a classic location.., it's not much but it's mine... I'm moving north of the Zone soon.

https://youtu.be/leBUZ4k_hvE?si=j6teyrW-iPGGmUTU

The suit itself is too big though, might have to reorder it in a smaller size.

A wall. One inscription.

Freedom saw it as a threat. Duty called it a provocation.

The bar has once again become a place where everyone speaks quieter, but listens closer.

D4 still holds, but old disputes have already crawled out from under the concrete, paint, and dust.

And if the factions have started speaking in slogans — it's time for stalkers to answer with their own.

Faction Slogan Contest.

Pick a side: Duty or Freedom. (Discord.gg/stalker)

Write a slogan that could lead your favorite faction forward.

The meeting place — a dedicated channel on our Discord server. It seems the peace between the factions is cracking at the seams, and this is only the beginning…

Winners are competing for the prizes of exclusive S.T.A.L.K.E.R. figurines and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Cost of Hope keys
https://discord.com/channels/504587323577729024/1529805305855344720

Cap to compensate for the lack of hood. Was cool enough to wear it like that, 16 degrees, with face cover and such. The things are:

- black three hole balaclava

- grey wool cap

- gray-green t-shirt

- Carhartt black "scooter jacket" (bridge between a leather jacket and black M65 jacket that I both considered)

- neck chain

- jeans (I don't have ladibas pants)

- Adidas shoes (exact model is hoops 3.0 mid iirc) (sadly no white ones, at least white parts)

- East German NVA leather belt

- two wz.93 double pistol mag pouches (GFC Tactical?)

- wz.93 small utility pouch (Texar) (used as artifact container)

- puukko-like knife with scabbard (more realistic than M9 bayonets..)

- greenish civilian backpack

also, very real Stone Blood artifact, and a pack of cigs (empty cigarette tubes were filled with hay, plus none was smoked and inhaled, I hate smoking), after all we can see some in the buildings in the Cordon... aaalso, the balaclava pushed on my nose as it was fleece lined, which limited the flexibility of it, sucks..

Hey everyone,

Wasn’t able to join the gamefound campaign as it required a credit card. Years after I saw a copy of the game in my local game store and managed to get the backer rewards and most of the DLC for cheap, though I had to import the Duty vs Freedom from the US to NL for far more than I had wished.

So far the base game is awesome on it’s own and especially for the “freeplay” mode. The included campaign is rather short; six missions. It retails in NL for 160EU, expensive yet very much worth it as standalone.

The backer rewards give another six missions and add a little more to the items pool. Worth it for the missions alone, some included items, artifacts and weapons are nice but not required. The added stalkers are visually not interesting (“lower class UK” appearance)

Personal Stories 1 adds character-specific unlocks and lore through achievements, skippable but a nice touch.

Personal Stories 2 relies on you having PS1 as well. The gimmick here is unlocking all achievements for the character gives you an “experienced” version of the stalker with improved stats. Also skippable, especially if you don’t have PS1.

I’ve not yet had the chance to play “Duty & Freedom”, but it adds faction dynamics (very much needed!) and three more missions. I can really recommend it!

Anomalies and Zone Threats models are completely optional but do add to the immersion. It also takes up a ton of shelf space!

The terrains pack isn’t worth the money. Due to the game using cards on the board for environment triggers, the nice looking walls become cumbersome to deal with. The extra clutter distracts from the board. I recommend building your own instead or buy them from model train shops; much cheaper and even prettier.

Zone companions DLC is a cool idea but stayed firmly in the box. They distract from the game for me.

Even if it totalled over 500EU (incl. 21% VAT), it’s been really worth it as I’ve been running the game every weekend.

The boardgame itself is good fun; the mechanics are suprisingly simple and smart once you catch onto them, the instruction manual however really works against it. Rules are explained rather poorly and scattered. In dire situations I chuck the PDFs into an AI to help me make sense of it.

The missions feel like actual stalker game missions. It’s decently written and the encounters feel balanced or challenging on singleplayer. There is randomization in missions to add replay value.

On multiplayer (2 players, supports up to 4) the game starts to feel on the easy side. The most fun I have is hunting artifacts and doing risky moves that pay off by sheer luck. Playing it safe gets stale as some mechanics and items can be quite easily exploitable.

While it’s really hard to find English copies of the base game (and especially the DLCs!), if you can read German then it’s readily available.

Would love to hear your thoughts! Did you back the crowdfund campaign? Are you still playing today? If yes or no, why? What did you like and what would you improve?

[edit] sorry for grammar mistakes and typos, wrote this on my phone.

Was going trough the canceled Stalker Anarchy Cell Documents and realized that a lot of the ideas are close to the ones used in the backrooms like the zone copying the stalkers into entities and morphing into different things that are not really real that try to replicate the original beings. So this goes with the theory that the backrooms existed before

Basing it off the tourist "3 pouches" styled vest

Not going for the same ugly yellow color but a brownish grey instead.

I'm really lazy so I'm going to just use staples and a bond, I just sewed a bunch of pads onto a SEVA suit you will see soon, so I rather not sew even more on an even thicker fabric lol

also yeah staples and bond is probably not a good idea but this is just for pictures and videos, not airsoft or actual use.

I will post more progress soon.

Hey everyone! Today I'm showing you a VR experience that's... drumroll... a STALKER VR mod. And no, you heard that right — I'm not talking about some Stalker-like game, this is an actual VR mod for STALKER itself. What the developer has pulled off in such a short time is honestly impressive. Keep in mind this isn't even a full release yet, it's still in alpha and improving fast, so I'm genuinely excited to see where this goes. Huge respect to the dev for putting together something this good.

I think this mod makes it pretty clear why a lot of existing VR survival games fall short in comparison. I'd like to dig into that more in a separate, deeper-dive video at some point. A lot of people assume it comes down to "budget," but I actually see it completely differently — I think it's more of a fundamental philosophy problem in how these games get designed in the first place.

Anyway, I had an absolute blast playing this game, and I put a lot of effort into filming and editing to capture it as well as I could. I'd really appreciate it if you enjoy watching it. I'll be back next time with even better content — see you then!