Few tips on how to hide from the Black Stalker

[Home Appliance]

When you hear a storm brewing, go find these places:

1. Outside corners of a building if you're outside or doorways if inside of a building, so if the BS spawns on one side of the building you can quickly go to the other side, you can play hide and seek this way. BS will usually teleport in, not being able to see you in its line of sight, then teleport out very quickly.

2. The above also works for pillars, trees, any obstructive object that is tall and wide enough to cover your body's width.

3. Bushes, make sure you can freely move whilst crouching cause BS will walk towards your position and get very close to you.

4. Elevator shafts with ruins in them, you can climb on the ruin in crouched position until you're positioned halfway between two floors, then wait for the BS timer to end.

5. Hiding under things, there are some objects that you can crouch under throughout the game, like trains or wooden boards for example.

[Col Hanzaplast]

You can hide in big bunkers of Moscow Eye and Red Forest.
You can hide in small bunkers of Kopatchi.
In general you can hide in cellar or under stairs.
In Moscow Eye there are two small pools of water. You can hide in the narrow tunnel between both. There is also a tunnel in Kopatchi and Pripyat Center.
On Red Forest road you can run fast thru the map as a roadrunner ;-)

[Crypto Gamer]

Good advice on how to evade him which is very common early game and on harder game difficulties.


That said the Black Stalker can come back again based on the "storm timer."

Black stalker timer scales(with unknown factors) it start at around only 0:45 but eventually will eventually stay around 5 minutes of field time.

His hp also scales somewhat likely by same unknown factors and combat difficulty.

The storm timer can go down to like 5 mins(as days pass+ based on survival difficulty so best to build anti storm devices so the timer is around 30-45 mins.

With that you will usually ecounter him once often zero times and explore easier looting the map.

Also if you"kill" Stalker he can not come back for that day regardless of timer.

He seems to take very little increased damage from headshots(unlike every other enemy) so best to body shot if you are going to "kill" him.




About enviormental devices.

Always good idea to place enviromental field devices inside lockpicked doors or secluded locations where enemies do not find them as they never spawn inside those.

Imo anti storm/ black stalker one is the most useful as he only gives big exp but takes a lot of ammo/resources to kill and gives nothing else/resources especially on insane difficulty.
Defeating him only on scripted ecounters is enough for his dropped clue.

Effect is global do not matter what map you place the device.


Anti-Radiation device unless near the map edges/bounadries seems to be capped at around lowering your max hp by like 30-40% but not more even if you stay inside it for long.(eg. looting)

So you can treat it as lowerred max hp"debuff" and not waste resources on them until late game where you can afford it.

It seems radiation devices seems to be map specific and not global.
Best to use on map you visit often.

Radiation damage from monsters and black stalker is likely unaffected by the device...



Anti-wormhole/monster device.

Global effect.

Once you have a few damage upgrades+modifications or made a high tier gun.

Even on insane difficulty monsters usually give more"loot value" then resources you spend on killing them.

On normal Xbow can often 1 head shot them for very cheap cost there is a chance that you can retrieve the bolt.

That said if you do not build devices monsters will become more common might result in too much difficulty in that case you can lower their count via device.


The anti "monster landmine" deals lot of damage to chernoblyte monster and also stun them for a few seconds.

So you can make one and shot at them and let them touch the mine.
Anti cherno mine 1 hit kills all basic monster (afaik 900 hp) on insane combat difficulty.

Very useful againts the boss versions of the monsters found during the side quest.

I think hardest boss monster on insane has 3000 hp.

So landmine damage+ its stun and few shotgun shells will kill them very fast.