S.T.A.L.K.E.R - Knowing how the catalog works edition

*I didn't like it THAT much
fuck

Why is the Zone so comfy?

...

I think I've figured out why I didn't like CoC as much as I should have. The map and level designs are shit. Or at lease how it's laid about so linearly. Way to many level segments just don't have enough in them. Especially when you go farther out.

I might just have shit taste or something but somehow I can't stomach a second playthrough even after I installed mods. I think it's just that the games initial lands just don't have enough to offer.

The Zone Reclamation Project. It's a bugfix mod, and that's the maximum for an initial playthrough.

I've been trying out different mods along with CoC. I'm not sure if I like warfare all that much. It adds some neat stuff, but also turns the Zone into a god damn warZone(huehue) 24/7 meaning you can't take trips around the zone without dodging constant firefights. I'll try Dynamic faction relations next and see if that turns out better.
I've also switched from Arsenal Overhaul to STCOP with ITEMSOUP (Heinz beans and chocolate bars everywhere) to spice things up a bit. Only complaint so far is that some of the weapon descriptions are fuckhuge and don't completely fit on my small res screen and getting food or supplies isn't exactly a problem, but maybe that's also because the warfare mod supplies me with so many corpses to scavenge.

All in all I'm having a lot of fun dicking around with it. Also, anyone know of any good graphic mods that are CoC compatible?

What? CoC is literally all the level design that's in all the STALKER games. Swamps are linear? Bar and the areas it leads to is linear?

Even Fallout 4 is better than stalker.

...

I think he means SoC.

I was my bad. I was drunk last night

Out of the series, CS is still on my list to finish. I'm working back to where I last left off, which was past Dark Valley with Freedom. Made enemies with the bandits unknowingly after completing a certain quest, so now it's shoot on sight with anyone in a trenchcoat.

Arsenal Overhaul makes weapon variety massive. Some of the guns have weird bug hiccups, like ammo types not being used when they should be able. I think this might be a version incompatibility bug or something.

I'm finishing up CS currently. I've done missions for all the factions but only joined Loners so far. Its easier to do them because their faction missions has zero risk of potential allies shooting you during the story. I was going to join Freedom since I heard they give exosuits for doing their missions but thank god I didn't since the Red Forest story missions are Duty controlled areas.

It's like you've learned nothing from Oblivion Lost, Narodnaya Soljanka, and Lost Alpha.

also
>still playing shitty games developed by incompetent developers that couldn't code their way out of a potato, never actually finished the first one, made the second one shitty, and made the third one as cheaply as possible

You people need to learn

Did you just arrive here from r/gaming?

...

Such is life in the Zone.

Absolute Nature for CoC?

does anybody else read CoC as Cock?

I read it as Corruption of Champions

So I was playing CoC for a while again and got all the exoskelly upgrades, including second generation night vision. Except it looks all green. If I remember correctly the second generation night vision device had a blue tint, and you could see basically everything regardless of how much light there was. Did they change that?

so I just recently completed Clear Sky. pretty mediocre, and such a let down coming from SoC. For some reason the game didn't end after the end cutscene, so I spend some time walking back to Clear Sky camp, and did not understand that was the end of the game until I looked up a guide on where to go next.

since SoC was pretty good, i guess I will try CoC.

(Checked)
I'll check it out, thanks.

roh-online.com/en/
Any of you guys get in?

invite please?

it depends on the helmet you have.

depending on quality, science helmets get purple or blue while military helmets get green or grayscale.

I want in too

Relatively new to CoC and only played CoP before

Was that exceptionally bad luck or can I expect this to happen more often?

What mod should I play if I've never played a mod before and have completed all the games (except Clear Sky) multiple times on master?

Even attempted a knife only run of CoP

This happened in my SoC playthrough and I thought it was humorous, the bandit is crouched and moves back and forth to and fro until I put a bullet in his head at least.

AMK for SoC is a must passed that you can stick with SoC because it has the most mods for it or check out some stuff for CoP like Misery don't play SoC Misery because it's ass

Any mods that add extra content worth playing?

What the fuck is going on with the catalog?

AMK adds a bunch of stuff, most mods add bunches of stuff. Zone of Alienation, LURK are decent ones for SoC, I didn't like CS myself so I got no recommendations and dunno for CoP at the moment.

Any AMK variant is good. I remember playing AMK with Arsenal.
Zone of Alienation is also incredibly good, it has stuff like a magazine system. But last I played it was INCREDIBLY unstable. Give it a try if you want.

Everything is fucked.

yet i'm still a virign

I'm starting to hate that place. Can't see shit, there's dogs and mutants everywhere to fuck your shit up, anomalies out the ass and military patrolling as well. It's just too much to be a thrill and turns into a god damn headache.

This is definitely one of my favorite songs off CoC, although maybe I just have a surprising thing for Zemlyane

THEY ACTUALLY DID IT
THE ABSOLUTE MADMEN HAVE FOOTAGE FOR RAY OF HOPE
HYPE

NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER
ASDFDAFDFADSDDF
I'm excited.

reviving this nigger thread

get up there

They only accepted slavs, for the sake of ease of bug testing.

They're probably devs, if anyone remembers me saying ART IS TRUTH reported the underground alpha footage, it's these guys. Pretty shitty move tbh because I translated the forums and they said they would not be doing this sort of thing, but it could be a translation error. Looks sweet though.

Does anyone need help with installing mods?

Who is ready for storming servers as the mighty Monolith?

I thought everyone did that.

AA2 or AMK. Probably AMK for the challenge.

Started playing SoC again because I never beat it. I beat CoP though.

So how come some enemies die from one shot to the head but some can take 2-3 headshots before dying, without helmets?

Assuming you're playing on Master and running ZRP (helps with some inconsistency) armour might cover the head even without visibly showing helmets. What calibre are you using? Also note that the AI is invincible during hit animations (i.e. ones that occasionally play after you shoot them). I don't believe this was ever fixed.

Yeah I'm on master with ZRP. I went through the modifier and changed everything I thought I needed, anything with value input I skipped though.

I was using the AKS-74. I didn't know that during their little stumble/stunned animation they were invincible though…that's a really odd feature that they added unless it's just an unfixable bug.

Also on that note, I tried using ZRP with Absolute Nature and Absolute Structures, which works fine, but if I try to add AMK it destroys itself. Is AMK incompatible with either ZRP or Absolute?

I do seem to remember some mods tweaking it and it's never been hugely apparent to me but it's there in some form. The AKS-74 with default ammo isn't excessively good against armour so it could also be that. Also SoC doesn't have the extra-clear tracers of CS and CoP so it's harder to see where your shots land though you probably aren't missing if you've played a bunch.

Were you on patch 1.0004? AMK requires this and most copies of the game come patched to 1.0005. If so see picrelated on a clean install. Otherwise I'm not sure though AMK doesn't require ZRP so you could try with the graphical overhauls only. You could also try doing AMK then the graphics mods rather than the other way around.
However I'd suggest AMK: Autumn Edition over a clean SoC install for headache-free prettiness with AMK shooting: moddb.com/mods/amk-autumn-edition

Yup, already had it patched down to 1.0004.

Does AMK:AE already come with graphics improvements and bug fixes that ZRP provides?

AMK:AE is mostly designed to be a combination of a graphical improvement mod and as much of ZRP as can be used without issue so yes. Autumn Aurora, the mod it is combined with, is rather pretty and is the other mod recommended for a second playthrough (AA2): moddb.com/mods/autumn-aurora-compilation-mod

There are other ways to pretty up AMK but it's by far the easiest. The 1.4 version will have a more active Zone while 1.4.1 tones this down (still a bit more lively than vanilla). Personally I recommend 1.4.1.

I'll give AMK:AE 1.4.1 a go then

Good call. I'll be around for a few hours if you need a hand but shit should be easy if you follow the readme and use a clean install. Do double check that the readme doesn't say to use 1.0005 before you downgrade though. Some AMK merges prefer you to do that, others prefer 1.0004.

Shit I just started and it looks great

It's way fucking spookier though, it looks more like another planet than it does the Zone on Earth which is cool. The weapon animations and recoil is way better too.

Something I did notice is I took damage and my camera spun around like 50 times, is that normal?

what the hell kind of monitor is that

You can turn that off mostly, look at the options in menu so just press esc and you'll see them turn dynamic hit effects off, this will also cause you to drop your weapon as well which apparently people like because it's realistic but for me in was infuriating.
I also hated the medkit animations, as well as any other sort of consumable item you can have with you

I did notice how the medkit took forever to use which may get on my nerves. I'll keep playing and see how it goes.

I couldn't get normal AMK 1.4.1 working though I would guess the idea for the medkit is don't ever use it in a fight which is bollocks to be had considering how easy it is to bleed but hey that's me.

I don't have dynamic hit effects in my game settings, I remember reading something somewhere about the spinning though and it had to be changed in one of the config files.

Slav monitor. Slav tvs are also poor.

Yeh the whole Zone in Autumn theme really works. Reminds me a lot more of how the book portrayed things rather than the film.3.

You might be able to disable this by digging into the scripts. At the very least you could turn the time down. You'd have to ask an user more knowledgeable with AMK's internals but it's really just as simple as finding the relevant number in the file and changing it with notepad. I just don't know which file or where to look for it and most of the documentation is in slav.

Nevermind I'm retarded. Dynamic hit effects were already off though which is weird.

A huge part of vanilla stalker is chugging medkits in firefights so this is going to take some time to adapt to

I'm not entirely sure I hated the spin effects wobbling me around like a spastic on crack that I had to stop playing, I was far too angry with it. I just couldn't hop back into cover, or move out of the way of the bullets I'd wobble if it was a good hit on me and be stuck, it wasn't very fair honestly.

I still haven't read the book yet because most digital stuff loses my attention really quickly, unlike physical books it's just due to my mind wanting to do something else as soon as it can sometimes how does the book portray the Zone?
I watched the movie recently and it really makes me want to read the damn book but I just end up playing the damn games.. it's quite the conundrum.

Yeah but with the amount of enemies and quick mutants the animations really don't blend well with the overall flow of gameplay. Look it up I'm sure you'll find something somewhere.

The first thing to change is always going for bandages first to stop the bleeding (they're faster anyway). I find CS and CoP are much more liberal with first aid kits that stop bleeding as well as heal and get you into bad habits of relying on them only. AMK's lower weight limit will also be a change. Don't carry lots of shotgun ammo is the biggest tip for that as shit is heavy.

You really should. It's quite short so worst case pick up a physical copy for cheap.

More alien in style rather than industrial I'd say. Obviously the film has elements of that too but it's mixed in with influences from the USSR's style of industrialisation.

So with AMK you can't have a primary and secondary equipped, you have to open your inventory and switch them manually?

what no, what do you mean?
SoC unfortunately only allows use of a main arm or a pistol at the same time not to main arms. So you can equip both at one time and press 2/3 (where it's default at least) and you'll swap the two guns, pistol and whatever else.

I can swap them with the keys as normal. You might be confusing it with CoP where you can have any two weapons. SoC and CS only let you use a handgun in the secondary slot. AMK might let you use sawn-offs and some light smgs too though I forget if that's AMK in general or ZoA-specific.

That's what I mean, there's the slot in your inventory at the top for your equipped weapon but there isn't another slot for your pistol, you can only have one equipped. Trying to put a primary and a pistol in the same box swaps them out. I'm running AMKAE 1.4.1

Also

i got spooked hard

Know what I wonder if it registers the sawed-off as a secondary and I'm trying to equip the sawed-off and the pistol but both are secondaries and it's conflicting.

Oh I hadn't realized Roadside Picnic was short I can read lengthy books it's just I lose my attention span when it comes to digital ones. Yeah I figured it would be more alien which I gotta say I would have rather had in the games with a mix of what we got it would have been great.

It was probably a controller I thought you just started how the hell did you see one of those that quickly or a Burer? that's wonky, I can't get over those medkit animations or hit animations though fuck that.

I just did the first mission where you get the flash drive from the guy you rescue from the bandits and picked up his side mission to find his suit, but I ran back and turned in the main mission first. On the way back to the side mission which is just up the road from the main mission the Controller shows up.

Which definitely doesn't happen in vanilla.

Yeah a controller isn't even supposed for spawn in Cordon that's not right at all.

Nobody told the amk devs apparently.

there were actually 2

You can knife them down in eight strikes actually otherwise prepare for pain

That might be it. The workaround to have a secondary that isn't a pistol is a bit complicated so that's probably the trade-off.

Yeh the game goes for more of an urban exploration theme which benefits from the Chernobyl setting but does lose some of the more mindfucky parts of the book. The occasional space anomalies were fun but it'd have been nice to have an entire game like that.

Chimeras and Pseudogiants also spawn at random and the former wasn't even in the vanilla game. 1.4.1 was largely to address the sheer spam old AMK used to do.

How does one just get the plain AMK 1.4.1 working because Autumn Edition pissed me off. Shame about the loss of the mind fuckery parts but what can you really do about that?
I lost my power for a moment and I heard a jolt and a pop I would assume meters away from my house, a power box or some such might have exploded.

How would I even knife them that many times when they can kill me in three attacks and you're stunned for half the time.

I think amk and amkae have the same install process. Are you already downgraded to 1.0004 and vanilla?

I'm 1.004 as I have a 1.000 install so I don't need to downgrade. As far as I can tell AMK has an install, AMK: AE has some files to move and AMK 1.4.1 has files to move as well but the translation I had was shit.

you'd need cover, there's also the fact if you flash them with your flashlight they'll get perturbed and turn their backs on you so you can hit away but it only works one on one in a corridor or somewhere in a building so you can hide after belting him in the face a few times.

AMK REQUIRES 1.0004 so patch to that then just copy AMKs appdata, gamedata, and fsgame something or other to your stalker folder. Don't use any other mods with it

So I want to play Clear Sky since I completed Shadow of Chernobyl. What mods/fixes should I get?

Reclamation patch, same as SoC, makes it a hell of a lot more stable to boot.

Is the one on moddb the latest version?

right well I didn't use anything with AMK 1.4.1 Arsenal mod which had a patch for AMK 1.4.1 which made all guns OP as all hell, I now grasp balance

It should be, but I'm not sure so I can't tell you honestly. Should be though.

Ok I installed Clear Sky and then SRP but the game takes a full minute of black screen to get to the starting menu and then 5 minutes to get to the loading screen when I click on new game. Apparently it has something to do with DX10 but the game looks like shit without it. Tried the fixes from SRP and they do nothing.

Apparently the problem is exacerbated by SRP as without it the game works fine apart from my keyboard inputs not being registered

nvm fixed it