The Stalker 2 modding gold rush was always gonna be a sight to behold, and with plenty of stuff to fix and adjust, it certainly hasn’t disappointed. Following an intitial post-release period full of attempts at stopping the stuttering, the community’s now moved on to tweaking how tough life in The Zone is, as well as casually messing with time itself.
If you missed it, as players were busy delving into GSC Game World’s work for the first time, modders were busy starting to unleash their own fixes for some of its launch issues, and the onslaught of stuff coming from them doesn’t look like it’s gonna slow down anytime soon.
The Stalker modding community looks to have tweaking the gameplay experience on offer as its unofficial main goal now – specifically giving people the option to tune some of the more difficult elements of life in The Zone to their liking.
Mods like Grokitach0’s ‘Grok’s less tanky bloodsuckers and poltergeists’ and FESilencer’s ‘Lower Mutant Health’ have been gaining traction among those who’re specifically after less of a tough time battling the ghame’s horrors. There’s also SnNakeEe’s attempt at brutally rebalancing the way healing items work, if you wamt to go the other way and have a really, really painful time.
Meanwhile, if your enemy is the fact you can’t keep your guns in good nick, ‘Reasonable Weapon Degradation by Vaxis’ might be worth a look, while another of FESilencer’s mods, ‘Unrestricted Equipment Upgrades’, looks like a bit more of a cheeky way of giving yourself an extra advantage gear-wise.
For those who want a kind of all-in-one mod that does a bunch of rebalancing in different areas, ‘Grok’s Balanced Difficulties’ looks like it could be worth checking out, especially if you’re playing on veteran.
Then there are three – okay, two plus one that’s already been declared obsoltete two days after the game came out- different mods that offer the chance to make days in The Zone longer. ‘Longer Days (no longer updated)’, ‘Even Longer Days’, and ‘Jake’s Longer Days’. Yup, the word longer now sounds weird to me too.
If you’re still unsure whether to give Stalker 2 a go yet, make sure to check out our review. We’ve also got an array of guides that can help you survive by doing stuff like efficiently looking after your gear and learning about anomalies.