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General Tips

  • Pick the right server for your playstyle. If you play Multiplayer games for a well populated environment and playerbase, lots of clans, wars, drama and traffic, the greatest pool of gear and fairly low prices, then MSK (Moscow) as the biggest and "main" server is for you. If you wish for a more deserted zone where stalkers aren't around every corner, but the gear pool is smaller and prices are higher, pick SPB (St. Petersburg). If you want to start on a new-ish server that is young and doesn't have a long history of progress, pick EKB (Ekaterinburg).
  • If you're a newbie: Take your time! In the first couple of hours, just play it slow and don't take on too many mutants at the same time. Explore, do quests and try getting to know the first map Liubech City and later on also Liubech Neighborhood, Airport and Vezuvius. Detailed knowledge of the maps is key for fast and efficient movement later in your journey through the Zone. You can help yourself remembering places and NPC locations by putting markers on your map. Mark Guide NPCs that lead you to other locations or maps!
  • Always carry wood and matches or a bonfire on you at all times. The zone is huge and your character will get hungry. You can use mutant parts like dog heads, spider legs, boar legs, bear heads, and mushrooms you find in the zone as edible food once cooked. Also carry water bottles to replenish your thirst level until you can buy a survival kit off the market board or from a trader. These kits can be used at wells (clean water) or any water source (dirty water). When you get next to a water source, open inventory and right click your survival kit and hit fill. If you filled with dirty water you can cleanse it by cooking the kit on your bonfire. To craft a fire, press P and fill choose "craft a fire" and fill in 1 wood and 1 match. You can only place bonfires on a level surface.
  • Get a kitchen knife as soon as you can. In order to cut parts - which you can cook or sell - off dead mutants, you need to have a kitchen knife equipped. Buy a grindstone as well, you can sharpen (repair) your knife on the run a 100 times with it and grindstones are dirt cheap. Later in the game, you should get a hunting knife to butcher mutants faster. Traders will sometimes sell hunting knives for about 130k each in perfect condition. Protip while cutting: move your camera around you and focus on people that are sneaking around you. Some players might occasionally try to get a cheap kill on you while you're cutting, so always be aware and prepared to cancel the cutting animation by pressing ESC.
  • Hunt artifacts only if you need them for a specific quest. The times where finding a few rubbers a day would make you some decent cash are gone. Due to radiation and low sales prices, artifact hunting has become a very slow and tedious process of making money. The developers decided to compensate players for that by increasing the money payouts for all quests in the game. So if you need money, just do every single quest you come across - you will also level up a lot faster this way. For more information regarding artifacts and artifact containers, read this as well.
  • Be very careful about your Reputation with NPC factions. Quests can positively or negatively influence your reputation among multiple factions at once, keep an eye on the chat window when finishing a quest. Once you gain -1000 rep. with any faction, the NPCs of that faction will become hostile toward you and shoot you on sight. You also won't be able to take a safezone respawn point when a hostile faction is around that spot. Do repeatable quests for said faction to repair your reputation with them. If your reputation with a certain faction is extraordinarily bad (-10k and worse) you can talk to Expert NPCs found across the maps to cleanse your reputation for a chunk of money (-10k = 2kk rubles).
  • Make sure to always have a medkit, bandages, antirads and antidotes. You can drag any med from your inventory to a player you are close to offer that person aid. You can also use medkits to revive down players by pressing your use key over them and using drugs. If you are revived in this way you will have a debuff on you where you only have 1/3 of your max health. This debuff must be removed by staying inside a safezone for a bit. Bleeding and Poison must be removed by bandages and antidotes respectively as these debuffs do not fall off. Once you move into areas where lots of anomalies and artifacts are around, you absolutely must have antirads in order to stay alive, since getting close to any anomaly will radiate you.
  • Items placed in gadget slots do not drop from you. No matter which equipable item you put in a gadget slot, these items will never drop in case of death. Do not risk the loss of your precious hunting knife because you had thrown it into your backpack - place it in a gadget slot!
  • Vendors stocks are dynamic. While in earlier versions of the game, you would f.e. run to the Aegis Camp in Vezuvius to buy the advanced MGD right away, you now want to wander all around the Zone every day, checking every trader you come across. Their stocks might even hold some surprises for you...
  • The trading board is free for everyone. You can place 3 items at the same time on a sale. Before you sell the item, go to a board, hit "Sales" and check the current price. Then put your item in a warehouse, from which you can right click on "sell". The board also has the "hunting" option to pick bounties of Player Killers.
  • You do not need to carry around valuable items! If you need to bring items from one safezone to another, just use the postage, which can be accessed from any warehouse. You can only send and read postage that either was sent from the location you are at or has been sent there.
  • You can use emotes and sit by pressing the numpad 0 key and choosing one of different two sitting emotes.  Sitting near a campfire also raises your healing rate significantly.
  • The chat window has a built-in translation feature. Mark the russian text in your chatbox and then click the little translate symbol up right to have it open the translation window. Press the RU->EN button to translate. You can also translate from EN->RU and have it copy that text to the chat window if you need to communicate something to a russian speaker. Keep in mind that these translation often aren't very accurate.
  • Sounds are important. Dogs barking either means one has aggro'd, or one has spawned nearby. Pay attention to what you hear - it can save your life.
  • Skills can be reset once every 24hours with the command /ichangedmymind


PvP Tips

  • Beware of Players with red names. They are marked as PK (Player Killer). You gain Karma points for killing any player whose status is neutral (=white name, neither blue nor red), getting more than 200 karma points will instantly turn your name red. Always monitor your karma in PvP stats by pressing "U". If you shoot somebody your name will always turn blue. It will automatically reset back to neutral after a certain amount of time where you have not fired a shot at somebody. You can clean your Karma to lose the red name and become neutral again by killing mutants. The stronger the mutant you kill, the more your karma points will decrease. If you get killed by a red named PK who has more than 200 karma, you can place a bounty hunt on his head. Other players can take the hunt from any trading board across the zone. A player that gets killed by a hunter while having a bounty on his head respawns in Jail, from where he only can escape by giving 20 prison tickets to the prison guards. Prison tickets are earned by carrying around stones inside the prison.
  • Learn how the PvP mechanics work BEFORE you engage. You can now shoot your guns inside a safezone - just don't ever do it! Your name will turn blue and all NPCs around you will start firing at you resulting in your instant death. Always holster your weapons when running into a safezone to prevent unintentional firing! The basic rules: If you shoot a player and a your name turns blue, you can then be killed by any player without your opponent gaining karma points. Generally speaking, anyone who is blue or red is a karma free kill, but you should not engage any other player who is blue or even red - chances are high the player is already in a battle with someone else and does not mind you. Always keep your head cool and decide if an engagement is necessary or if it can be avoided altogether. Staying neutral most of the times is the best way to stay alive. If you want to hunt Player Killers it is better to check the board for bounties than to engage random people.
  • But maybe you like to be a bit more aggressive? On the other hand, if you want to enjoy the bandit playstyle and just kill players as you see fit, you should never do that if you do not have enough karma reducing mutants nearby. It is no fun to get pinned down at a fire by a mob of randoms and noobs hunting you down just because of your red name. Pick places that allow for quick karma cleansing and not too much player traffic if you want to murder other players. Once in a battle, try to provoke your enemy into turning red and then camp them and kill them over and over until they log out to cry. Keep in mind that common acts of banditry might make you a (bad) name and lots of enemies on the server you play on, resulting in people trying to shoot your character in the back much more often than usual...
  • All NPCs shoot red-named players on sight, except for Bandit NPCs. If your name is red you will not be able to enter any safezone held by a faction unless the safezone is held by bandits. Bandit NPCs, unlike all others, do NOT open fire on red players. Therefore Player Killers can safely pass by any Bandit guards and get into safezones occupied by the bandit faction; such as Swamp Island, Bandit Cave or Vezuvius Old Distillery. Player Killers can even buy supplies from traders in there. Keep in mind that your bandit reputation has to be better than -1k for this to work.
  • If you are looking for more serious PvP on a larger scale, JOIN A CLAN, preferably one that has the manpower to fight over a base on Saturdays... Before you do that, take your time to gear up and also level up your character to levels 12-12-12 since it is highly recommended to come prepared. You will get to fight a lot of high level players that are also highly geared and experienced, so naturally your experience will be better if you can somewhat compete. If you want to start your own clan, visit the registrator in Liubech City. Keep in mind though that clans can declare war on each other, meaning they can kill each other karma free, everywhere.
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