Quick start / before you play / join the bandits guide.

I have a lot of "before I play" guides that - as promised - try to give you exactly the sort of information I wish I knew before I played the game. Obscure mechanics, weird builds, frustrating stuff that you probably wouldn't be able to figure out on your own beforehand.

This particular guide combines that with some walkthrough elements and info about the faction war.

This guide rather assumes that you've played through Shadow of Chernobyl (arguably the superior game, and a lot of things in the prequel won't make any sense if you haven't played SoC), so I'll mostly be explaining things that are new to CS. Also, I assume you're playing on Veteran / Master, which will force you to play smart / min-max, and haven't modded the game with anything that changes it more than CS Complete.

Heavily inspired by Gopher's playthrough of Clear Sky - an LP in which someone who successfully completed Shadow of Chernobyl found himself utterly lost and confused by CS, and refused to experiment or take advice until he abandoned the game on the very last level. Don't be like that. Read before you play and follow sound advice.

The most important information is probably at the start (new mechanics and basic gameplay tips) and the end (how to make it through Limansk with your sanity intact).

As you start / basic mechanics.

The game starts with you in the middle of the Clear Sky camp, drowning in a sea of weird map icons, most of them with functions that are new to someone who played SoC. You can't meaningfully interact with people in the camp until you complete your tutorial mission, so let's have a quick walkthrough:

First of all, unequip your AK and use the shotgun. I'll explain in detail a bit later, but let's just say:

A) Shotguns for mutants, rifles / submachine guns for humans.

B) You won't find a lot of AK bullets in the swamps, so save it for the toughest fights.

Most water in the game, including the swamp area, is heavily irradiated. Just setting foot in the water will basically poison you, the level of damage increasing as you get more heavily irradiated, and only stopping when you take anti-rad drugs / drink a lot of vodka. Don't touch the water until you have good radiation resistance / anti-rad drugs to spare.

Next, you have a quick explanation of artifacts and anomalies. Artifacts will often spawn in anomaly fields, and you'll only be able to retrieve them if you have your detector equipped (holster your weapon first) and are standing right next to them. Anomaly fields like this one, with static anomalies that don't create a radiation / psi field that constantly damages you, are easily navigated with care, no matter what's your current equipment. Artifacts located in more dangerous areas will have to wait until you have rad resistance / healing to spare. Many artifacts move about within anomalies, which often means that you can stand in a safe spot and have the artifact move close until it lands at your feet.

Artifacts with the red "radiation -" effect will irradiate you. Since you don't have any radiation resistance / artifacts with the green "radiation +" effect at this point, artifacts are just a really good way to make money, as equipping one will kill you.

As you approach the tower (avoiding the water), you can rush into the trailer, break the crates and grab the ammo, then shotgun the boars (one blast to the face as they charge you). Or the other way around, but that will leave you with less time to loot the corpses and climb the tower (and loot the corpse there).

Now that we're back in the Clear Sky base, let's go over the various icons, and faction war mechanics.

The faction wars are... a series of wars between factions, obviously. Specifically, the swamps are a battleground between Clear Sky (your side) and the Renegades. The faction war is decided by taking over and defending control points, but also by performing quests for "Group Leaders" - marked on the mini-map as bigger dots with fringes around them. Group leaders give you sub-quests - whether to take over a location or to bring back some items. Getting the quest items improves the faction's squad numbers and equipment. While some quests (like the ones asking for AK bullets or medkits) are best left for later (when you don't desperately need those items yourself), you'll probably have 9x18 bullets / 12x76 buckshot to spare. The "fetch a unique item" quests in each level generally pay rather well, and some of the items are highly useful.

You get payment for successfully completed missions from the faction trader. My walkthrough suggests you grind for money in the swamps (just a bit), so expect to be seeing a lot of him. Sell him your spare weapons and artifact, but note that regular friendly stalkers may pay more for healing items (though you should hoard these at the moment), while the barman will pay more for food. (If you have mods on, you'll just have to check who pays more for your weapons, as there's no easy rule). If you killed all the boars and / or climbed the tower during the mission, you'll get a flash drive.

Flash drives go to the faction tech, who can repair your weapons / armor and upgrade them (higher levels of upgrades when you get more flash drives, each faction tech has a certain specialization in what they can upgrade). You'll get a new weapon very quickly, and a new armor semi-quickly, but I'd still upgrade your armor with Kevlar plates and the PMm for accuracy and increased clip size (but not the switch to 9x19 caliber, since you won't be finding those bullets soon). Having a moderately accurate pistol as you venture to fight the Renegades will downgrade the game start from "Hellish" to "Challenging". Note that most weapons have mutually exclusive upgrade paths (highlighted as you go over the upgrade options) - upgrading both A and C will allow you to upgrade E, while B and D allow you to upgrade F. So don't upgrade A and D and get stuck with a weapon / armor that's locked out of the higher upgrades path.

Finally, the barman and Nimble. The barman buys food and Vodka at full price, which is a fairly good source of income as the game starts. More importantly, he and Nimble sell "stashes", little nooks and crannies filled with loot (if you discover a stash on your own without being told about it, it'll be empty). The order in which you are offered stashes is randomized, and you don't need to buy some to be offered others. Ask about the contents of each stash you're offered - the swamps are probably the only place in the game where your equipment is scarce enough that you may want to buy up all the stashes, but your first priority should be any flash drives and the Chaser 13 (a weapon that's basically overpowered at this stage of the game).

Now that your equipment is as good as it's going to get, you've asked every group leader for side quests, and you've used up all your money in exchange for supplies and upgrades, it's time to head out into the swamps and start the game proper.

Basic combat tips:

Try to always travel with friends, particularly when trying to take a control point. Taking out a group of bandits on your own with your current equipment is a bit of a losing proposition.

Try to catch the enemy in a cross-fire. Have your friendly group come in from one direction, while you flank from another. This means the enemy won't focus all their fire on you, and will have to choose between taking cover from your shots and taking cover from your friendlies. (Conversely, the friendlies won't infuriatingly push you out of cover).

A lot of guides suggest leaning around corners, but that's really only good for peekaboo quick shots, as leaning basically exposes your entire body. Waist-high cover that you can crouch behind gives you some actual protection, particularly against the bandits, who tend to fire from the hip. Granted, you will still catch the occasionally deadly bullet to the dome, but such is life in the zone.

Try to keep your distance. A good advice throughout this playthrough, but particularly in the swamps, where one close-range shotgun blast can outright destroy you.

In general, crouching behind cover with a decent long-range gun that's (hopefully) slightly longer ranged than the guns the enemy are using is a decent strategy for most of the game. Swamp Renegades barely use grenades, but other enemies do, and they all have exceptionally long-range and accurate throwing ability. Take note of the audio cue for grenades, and move out of the way asap.

In general, you want to carry 1 shotgun for mutants (the Chaser for most of the game), 1 assault gun for humans (AK->TRS/IL->Vintar->FN/Thunder) and 1 pistol for emergencies (You barely use the pistol after the swamps, so don't get yourself weighed down with pistol ammo)

Swamps to the Cordon - first steps in the actual game.

Your weapons in the swamps:

The PMm - not the best of weapons (not even the best of pistols), but ammo is abundant, and it's good enough to handle one Renegade at a time. Go for headshots if you have time to aim, go for a Mozambique drill (several shots to the torso until they flinch, then one to the face) if you don't. Reasonably accurate if upgraded, but the distance at which the bullets outright disappear from existence isn't that long.

The shotgun (Obrez) - use buckshot to one-shot most mutants you'll find in the swamp. You can actually kill Fleshes and Boars with the knife (easily and not quite as easily respectively) but that's something you might want to experiment with when you have more healing supplies. Trade for the Hunting Shotgun asap. Remember that if you're in range to effectively shotgun a bandit, he's in range to effectively shotgun you, and his shotgun WILL hurt more.

Hunting Shotgun - still one-shots mutants with buckshot, but now you can sorta snipe with slug ammunition, though not all that far. The swamps are literally the one and only place in the game where slug and dart ammo is actually effective against human enemies, so enjoy that while it lasts.

The Chaser-13 - this is a perfectly viable endgame shotgun, and getting it shortly after you set foot in the swamps would be straight up overpowered, if you didn't have to get into shotgun range to make use of it. Unlike the regular shotguns, you need to manually unload it to switch ammo types.

The Viper-5 - if fixed and switched to the 9x18 caliber, a Viper makes for a good Renegade extermination tool. It will become obsolete the moment you leave the swamps, so don't invest any further into modifying it.

The AK - like I noted before, you won't find a lot of AK bullets in the swamps (at least until you take over the Renegade base / complete a certain item recovery quest) and the AK is huge overkill for most regular fights. Stash it somewhere until you're about the leave the swamps / until you're fighting Renegades in leather cloaks, because those ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ basically ignore PMm shots.

Faction war specifics:

During the rest of the game, your faction will be mostly helpless without you taking the lead. However, the swamps serve as a tutorial for the faction wars mode, and Clear Sky can easily overwhelm the Renegades even without your help. This quick escalation will leave CS in control of the East side of the swamps, with some enemy concentrations in the North-West that you'll have to clear out on your own. Furthermore, you seem to be faced with a choice of either grabbing loot and stashes at your own pace, or being rewarded for participating in CS assault quests.

You may want to install this[disk.yandex.ru] mod, which fixes friendly AI to actually attack and capture enemy bases. If you don't speak Russian, the download symbol is an arrow pointing down.

Make sure you grab all the loot from every corpse during faction clashes, and dump it all into a box / stash that you can recover later, while still having the freedom of movement to rush towards other clashes. If you leave some of the original items in a stash, said stash will stay marked on your map, leaving a handy reminder if you decide to leave your loot there.

When CS attacks Renegade positions that are marked as a quest, help them out by killing at least one enemy to make sure your contribution is noted and rewarded.

You can ignore some attack quests, but make sure you at least participate in the attack on the Renegade base (Machine Yard), quickly defend it, stash all the loot, then help take over the Southern Farmstead.

Now that the faction war is over, you can retrieve and sell all your loot, hand in fetch quests, loot various stashes, and explore anomalies for artifacts (though some might be too dangerous even in a fully upgraded CS suit).

Your goal is to max out out your CS reputation and get the improved CS Armor the trader is now selling (for 15000 rubles). CS-1 makes for a weak endgame armor, and will carry you for most of the game. Buying and upgrading this (also upgrading your AK if you have any money left over) is the goal of grinding in the swamps.

A good way to grind extra cash and get some neat items is going through the unique item fetch quests (unique PMm, CS scout PDA etc). Actually, I'd recommend going through these quests in every new map, they're generally interesting.

If you're still short on cash after looting every stash and handing in every quest, try defending the Machine Yard / attacking the Encampment Near Truck. The Renegades will keep spawning back there, and the reward is pretty decent.

As you exit the swamps into the Cordon you're faced with a military checkpoint. You could run to the North, jumping from cover to cover between deadly machine gun bursts, or you can check your map and note that there's now an alternate exit into the Cordon in the North-East part of the swamps. Turn around, go back to the swamps, and take the alternate exit (past a bunch of renegades, granted). Stalkers in the Cordon might be hostile if you come near them, but only until you make your way to Sidorovich (which you can do as easily as getting a guide from the nearby Stalker base).

Note that Clear Sky turns neutral to you when you come back from the Cordon. One reason to maximize your grinding before you leave the swamps.

Cordon to Red Forest

The moment you enter the Cordon, you're asked to help the Loners take out a bunch of Military squads. This is fine - the Military is hostile to you by default, and killing them won't matter in the long run. Remember that NPCs are programmed to run away from grenades - which makes grenades a poor killing tool, but an excellent distraction for you and your allies to enter choke-points without being shot to bits.

Cute trick when attacking the Vehicle Station - pay the group of Stalkers on the hill to the south of the station to assist you. They will flank quite effectively, but more to the point, one of the surviving members is likely to be a guide (quick travel point). Select a random corpse, then loot everything from all the firefight victims, periodically stuffing their weapons into the same corpse. Use shift+f to drag the corpse up to the guide, grab all the weapons as you stand next to him, then ask him to escort you to the Stalker base. Drop enough weapons to be able to walk to the trader, and sell everything. Just a bit of spare cash that you can get with minimal frustration.

A quick note on how reputation with factions works: You can earn the hostility of a faction by either joining an enemy faction or by killing a lot of faction members. The Bandits are a separate faction from the Renegades, and aren't hostile to you by default unless you join the Loners (you can check the Garbage map to see the bandits are marked as neutral-yellow). However, if the Garbage bandits are neutral but not friendly, bandits in other locations will be hostile - and if you kill these bandits, you will quickly tank your reputation with the faction.

There's even a trap quest in the Loner base inviting you to kill a bunch of hostile bandits - you can just take it and allow random Loner groups wandering the road past the bandit camp to deal with them. Saving Wolf's brother requires a bit more luck, but you CAN lure a Loner group that way.

If you do all the Loner quests in the Cordon, they may be able to take over the exit to the Garbage on their own, which saves you from having to kill the bandits or get robbed by them (the bandits blocking the other exits from Garbage will still try to lure you over to get mugged though). Loners will actually do better if you observe the fight (you'll be able to loot some decent weapons as well). If not, just spend all your money on weapon modifications before you go through.

The game basically expects you to join the Loners and run through the second-quickest and easiest faction war in the game, since the bandits are terribly outclassed. Even if you decide to do that (joining the Bandits is basically an optional challenge mode) you should still enter the Garbage and interact with the bandits on friendly terms for a bit before destroying them.

Before you leave the Cordon, take out the Military Outpost. Not only will eliminating it allow you to make your way to the CS base and back unmolested, but you need to do so for one of the Loner quests (unless you're great at sneaking). You probably don't have a good sniping weapon (and if you snipe from too far, the military will actually respawn in the base), so I'd come in along the left side of the road towards the checkpoint from Sidorovitch / the Rookie Village, away from the machine gun, then sprint for the machine gun building to the right of the gate. Take out the soldiers there, and you have a great spot for sniping the soldiers in the barracks - who have to come up the stairs to get you, putting their heads into your crosshairs.

In the garbage, you can work on both the Diggers and the Bandits quests at the same time. Even dealing with the smuggler / bringing the money to Stringer are in the same spot, little sense as that makes. (You'll probably need to juke the bandits to loot Stringer without killing them, then rush back to the Flea Market for a reward). You only have to decide between aiding the Bandits and the Diggers during the Flea Market assault - if you help the Diggers and liberate the concentration camp, the Bandits will turn permanently hostile.

Dark Valley is fairly straightforward. You can pull the same trick mentioned in the Vehicle Station paragraph to loot everything at the farm assault / the factory. When choosing between the TRS and the IL for your new gun, remember that the IL has slightly better stats, but wears out and breaks down far more quickly.

You'll get mugged when you follow the plot back to the Garbage and get mugged again when you cross over into Agroprom (unless you're REALLY friendly with the bandits, in which case you can run past without getting shot). The guys who grab your stuff at Flea Market will actually be friendly if the bandits are friendly as a faction.

Agroprom is also fairly simple, since you really should be getting the hang of things. Go right to the Duty base, head to the main quest location (possibly trade your Chaser for a better shotgun from the quest giver, and quickly run back to the base to upgrade it) and you can go on to Yantar.

After you go through the underground, consider upgrading your armor - Skat-9 / PSZ-9d for better protection against bullets and mutants, or the SEVA suit for anomaly exploration.

You can just about kill the bandits in the train tunnel for the Stalkers and hopefully still remain friendly with the bandits as long as you were grinding bandit quests (you can still join the bandits if they're a BIT hostile). As to the main bandit base in Agroprom (rocks near the swamp), you can try to get Duty to take it out.

You may want to save some artifacts for when you travel to Yantar. The duty base pays terribly low prices for artifacts, while Sakharov pays the most out of any trader in the game.

You can theoretically go back and join the bandits right now, but that will make the game unwinnable. So don't.

Joining the bandits / Getting to the end

The moment Lefty and co. shut down the psy-field, you can turn right around and join the bandits. It will make the next two levels really annoying, and there's an argument to be made for only joining when you're about to cross the bridge into Limansk.

I'd split the difference - travel to the Red Forest, make your way to Forester, then go back and join the bandits.

Actually, get the quest that sends a Duty squad to attack the Renegades in the mines before leaving the forest. Ostensibly, the Renegades might be friendly when you join the Bandits, but really, you probably shot way too many of them to ever be forgiven. Grab the Compass artifact in the mines (and climb just a short way down the ladder into the lower level, before climbing back up).

You can easily join the bandits if you're unaffiliated, but what happens if you're currently a member of a different faction?

As a quick reminder; faction members will hate you if you join an enemy faction, or if you've killed too many faction members. If you join a faction and un-join before massacring the opposition, their enemy faction will be neutral-ish, and the offer to join them will stand.

Duty hates Freedom and the Bandits. Loners (Stalkers) hate the Bandits. Freedom hates Duty (in lore and gameplay terms they will happily fight the Bandits though). Everyone except the Bandits hate the Renegades. Antagonism is always mutual.

So you can join Duty, get their rewards, get a guide to take you to the Stalker base in the Cordon, join the Loners, then join Freedom, then join the Bandits. This is actually proper roleplaying as bandit scum :). Note that any quests from a faction member will fail if you become that faction's enemy, even temporarily. So Duty quests will fail when you join Freedom.

You can play through the Freedom faction war, wiping out Duty in Agroprom and Red Forest before you join the bandits. It's not exactly "easier", but certainly more interesting.

When you join the Bandits, make sure to check the previously locked door opposite of their trader. Just a couple of artifacts you don't want to miss out on.

The Bandit side of the faction war is quite buggy. Try not to abandon "defend this position" quests to do something else, as you can easily mess up your progress.

You can also download the "Improved Faction Wars AI" mod and see if that helps.

You can effectively use the Bulldog to clear out cramped spaces - just get some practice landing shots properly, since grenades seem to fly short.

As you cross the bridge into Limansk:

Drop your shotgun and exploration artifacts - you won't be fighting monsters or exploring anomalies in Limansk.

You'll need a strong bulletproof suit, fully modded (Skat/PSZ-9D/Exo).

An assault rifle that can act as a sniper or a close combat room-clearer (the FN you get as a Clear Sky reward upon lowering the bridge works well). You can also get a dedicated sniper and dedicated close combat weapon, but make sure they use the same bullets (armor piercing and abundant in your inventory).

Artifacts - anti-rad and health/bleeding. Maybe better weight limit.

Load up on medkits and bandages. Save a few thousand rubles for weapon repairs.

As you go through Limansk, Clear Sky group leaders can fix your armor and weapons. Good spots to do so - after taking out the military machine gun / after the first stage of the hospital fight.

The bandit ambush at the crossroads is scripted to fire at you regardless of what faction you are, but the machine-gun emplacement bandits will be friendly if you're a bandit yourself (the CS group will still fight them though).

If you're having trouble with a certain bus in Limansk, remember - LOW crouch.

Ok, but why join the bandits to begin with?

Mostly for bragging rights. Which you can't even brag about, since the game doesn't have achivements and it's nigh-impossible to take a steam screenshot.

But seriously - the benefits of joining the bandits are getting a fully upgraded SEVA suit (though the SEVA isn't that great, and you can have it fully modded just by staying neutral), a few impractical weapons, and the undying enmity of the most common factions you'll meet.

This was mostly intended as a "before I play" guide to make your first (and last) steps in CS less frustrating. Joining the bandits was added as an optional goal for a second playthrough or something - keeping the bandits neutral when you first enter the Garbage is actually quite recommended regardless of which faction you'll end up joining.


Thumbs up if you found this guide useful. Let me know of any errors or glaring omissions.

[Kreiselheisl]

u doing gods work man, the way to play the game bossmode

[Beast of Burden.™]

Awesome!!! thankyou

[Neonetik]

Hey, I never said that I thought it was the best combat suit myself, I just said it was more than good enough for the whole game, and that the developers themselves felt that it was the best combat suit for those reasons. Personally, I do find it more than worthwhile compared to the bulat suit thanks to the lighter nature of it (and the benefits that comes with like a longer sprint distance without worrying about chugging energy drinks and stuff), and 3 artifact slots meaning you could combine a bubble with the best health regen and stamina regen, or the best health+bleeding, or hell, stamina and weight if you wanted.

Just pointing out that it does have good usage as a late game suit. Whether that's the best or not is up to you, but it's certainly quite a good suit regardless.

[Xander77]

Your source far over-values the benefit of extra artifact slots compared to bullet resistance (particularly in Limansk)

[Neonetik]

In addition, I just wanted to throw a little more love to the Viper-5 as a pretty good light-weight weapon for dealing with mutants throughout the majority of the game. I run the Vintar BC primarily, and like to carry the Viper-5 (with the default, more powerful ammo type) around as a backup. It has the DPS and fire-rate that pistols don't, whilst avoiding the heaviness of other generally superior weapons, and their heavy ammo (the Viper-5 being cheap to upgrade it also nice, not that money is an issue, especially if you know how to get an essentially infinite supply). I find it works quite well, though it is hot trash against anything with armor.

[Neonetik]

Pretty fantastic guide, though I will say that the CS-1 suit is more than good enough for the whole game. Hell, the developers themselves have directly stated that it is the best combat suit in the entire game, thanks to having generally good protection, the ability to sprint, and being able to equip 3 artifacts. The fairly substantially lower weight compared to the Bulat suit is pretty good too.

Source: https://www.facebook.com/officialstalker/photos/clear-sky-tip-the-cs-1-suit-is-the-best-combat-armor-in-the-entire-game-properly/685995134759738/

[HauntedFolly]

This question has probably been asked before, but what is the difference between CS Complete and SRP?

[Xander77]

https://www.playground.ru/stalker_clear_sky/file/s_t_a_l_k_e_r_clear_sky_uluchshennaya_vojna_gruppirovok_v1_4-1175608

[La Flame]

Just wanted to let you know there is no download on the Yandex link anymore.

[James Mason]

Sidorovich pays most for artifacts, 90% of base value. Sakharov only pays 80% of base value which is still high, but not the most in the game.