Beginner/first-time Stalker player tips

[falloutgod13]

I see some new players thinking the game is bugged or too hard. Welcome to the zone stalkers, it's gonna try to kill you all day and night, especially at night. Been a while since I played a stalker game so I'm re-learning the basics. So here's what I've been recalling about how the game works.

The game will try to kill you all the time and it cheats. The enemies will empty magazine after magazine of ammo at you but when you loot them they'll only have a one or two bullets on them. If you try to jump on something to shoot at mutants many of them will take cover behind things, even the dogs have a hive mind and know how guns and bullets work.

Things do get easier when you get better gear later on but until you get further along and start to collect artifacts that buff you without slowly killing you the game is more about survival than combat and exploration. Avoid fighting as much as possible, this can't be stated enough. Even if you can win the cost is usually not worth it, this can't be stated enough.

- Pick the easiest difficulty and it will be hard enough learning the game mechanics and adjusting to the lack of resources.

- Don't loot broken guns marked with red icons, no one will buy them and it costs more to repair them than they'll be worth to sell after.

- Always loot ammo from guns, it's generally lightweight so you can stash it or trade if you don't need it for your weapons.

- Avoid combat as much as possible, run away from fights as they're generally a waste of ammo and healing items. Early on you'll expand more resources on combat than you'll gain in return.

- Focus on progressing through the quests and engage in combat only when necessary to advance the story until you start to get some good gear, it doesn't happen quickly.

- When you go exploring avoid doing so at night, visibility aside, stronger enemies like bloodsuckers will spawn at night in certain locations. They take a lot of ammo to kill so unless you need to kill them you're better off running away.

- Try to lead mutants into anomalies if you're confident in avoiding them yourself, conserve ammo.

- Lead bandits into stalkers and let them kill each other, as a bonus you can sometimes heal bleeding out stalkers to get a reputation bonus - this helps as you get lower prices on gear and better prices on things you sell will traders.

- After exploring for a day be sure to come back to the main hubs to repair your gear. The more worn down your gear gets the more it costs to fix and you won't have much money early on, don't spend it all on upgrades as you'll need it for ammo and repairs. I think gear will degrade even when not in use just by being equipped and time passing.

- Save often, save scum.

- Stash and sell what you don't need, especially if you start to get weight penalties. Mark your stashes in the PDA - there's a limited number of unique markers you can place on the map for such purposes.

- There's generated missions at stalker hubs, first town is the bartender but they have a cool down on them so don't depend on them. They might cost you more resources to complete than you'll get in return. Again, avoid combat.