What are the best weapons and gear to have in my way to bar?

[Toxic Yui]

I'm newbie, any advice is welcome.

To be fairly honest I crafted a lot of s***t and Idk if I'm just wasting resources.

My main weapons is the mp5 (green one, with drum and 2.5 sight), shaman's boomstick (with 4.0 sight) and the shorty

[Cosmic Bunny]

The crafting weapons can be nice because you can progress them into further things and they keep upgrades too as long as it's in the tree! So there's a benefit.

However I learned by doing story and side quests you can get free armor and gear [Can't craft into other things but hold up on their own] so honestly running what you have and doing quests will take you into the bar, do the bar story quest and you'll end up with decent gear to defend yourself.

There's even a sub quest to get a really nicely upgraded RPG which is amazing in PVE against enemy ai stalkers, wouldn't waste it on muties though.

My shorty has been in my sidearm slot since I could make it and haven't found anything better to replace it for mutants. As for main weapon I ended up upgrading to an Abakan which I was told isn't that good, but it feels pretty nice still especially on burst fire.

A lot of the resources to upgrade those weapons are only really gathered in those regions anyway so you don't really waste them, I would recommend though looking into backpack upgrades ASAP because you'll ALWAYS keep those. Doesn't hurt to get a good melee weapon too for the move speed and make a nice science suit so you can upgrade it for exploring hotter spots.

I learned the hotter dangerous spots tend to have a lot of caches when you use your metal detector!

I'm a new stalker to this zone myself so please any veterans correct me on anything, just giving my two cents of how I stumbled my way through the bar so far.

[sgt_sas1905]

really depends on players taste some just focus on 1 AR 1 Sniper 1 Combat Armor 1 Combo/Scientist Armor 1 Backpack of Choice 1 Container but some do craft everything early to prevent coming back to cordon in the future just to craft some .