STALKER Complete 2009 mod for S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

A texture overhaul featuring the "Photorealistic Zone", a total rework of every texture in game by Argus over a 9 month period. Special attention has been given to preserve the game’s original look while textures have been replaced with higher quality versions and manually bump edited files. Textures are heavily optimized to reduce performance drop.

• Locations - all textures replaced with higher quality photographs with partial use of original files and assets from S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky.
• Living Creatures - mutated creatures have soaking wet flesh showing through wounds, it's almost disturbing. All humans in Zone have been retouched down to finest details, armor, shoes, wrinkles, faces, even eye balls.
• Vehicles - 20 year old vehicles in the Zone now appear realistically rusty and abandoned.

(authors: Argus-textures.ru, Domestos)

STALKER's notorious reputation of bug-ridden-like-an-anthill title ends here. Over the past 2 years, a joint community effort has accumulated fixes for most known bugs and "crash to desktop" exits left out by developers after patch 1.0005, with release of the unofficial community patch, called Zone Reclamation Project, which in addition adds numerous positive gameplay tweaks, like real weapon names, reduced head bobbing, increased actor's height, expanded carry weight limit, extended quest time, etc. (the list is endless).

(authors: NatVac, Fatrap, Victim, DC-, silverpower, omero, Decane, fitzroy_doll,
motiv-8, BobBQ, Snowball, TSL16b, Eggchen, barin, Alex-Tommy, GSC forums...)

Artificial Intelligence received major interworking:

• New abilities - NPCs can avoid anomalies, remove dead bodies from camp sites, throw grenades, change armor, heal other NPCs. You can also give weapons and armor to NPCs by selling or dropping it near them and giving them a privacy to change, they may not accept it based on preferences, if they do, they will use new stuff.
• Early detection - removed the ability for NPC's to notice you at unrealistically large distances.
• Stealth - knife and other critical sounds such as falling dead bodies, grass, footsteps, have been properly commented to reduce their sound radius.
• Death panic - reduced the sound distance of death cries, in original game it was the cause of panic of the whole camp population, once one member was hit, as it was set to 40 meters).

(authors: xStream, BAC9-FLCL, KoGar, Darius6, {imperialreign}, MulleR, Mongol)

Mod replaces massive amount of sounds in game, including weapons, anomalies, equipment clatter, footsteps, nightlife, bullet fly-by sounds and more with high quality equivalents. Adds unique ambient sounds for each weather cycle, repetitive NPCs only pronounce their lines once, i.e. "Get out of here stalker", hundreds of additional ambient sounds like bar kitchen cooking, horror night and fog sounds, etc.
(authors: Darius6, {imperialreign}, MulleR, Mongol)

New music collection, featuring 84 additional acoustic guitar compositions added to the existing set plus a few vocal songs in authentic language, unique to each faction. This is the only music mod where compositions have been performed live and recorded specifically for this game by a musician, no MIDI or generic karaoke tracks were used. This is live music with human touch that blends seamlessly with ambient soundtrack and makes you wish spending more time near camp fire. In addition, 19 authentic music tracks can be heard on the radio and megaphones throughout the Zone. NPCs will randomly play harmonica.

(authors: Dolgov Studio, MulleR, Mongol)

STALKER is not exactly a textbook example when it comes to localization. Misspelled words, typos, grammar errors, and humor lost in translation can be charming at times given the context, yet creating unnecessary difficulty when attempting to understand. Most of this mod’s text received a grammar-friendly rewrite, providing a much improved English localization.

(authors: Tharawdeal, Onionradish, Dethtoll)

A successful graphic overhaul mod can't be complete without custom user interface, this is why we are proud to present our very own new Main Menu, Loading Screen, and redesigned HUD, created by a our graphic design firm, incorporating existing in-game art and photographs of real Chernobyl tragedy artefacts, adding unique art style and authentic feel. Certain buttons have been conveniently reorganized for more intuitive access and new shortcuts added, such as ESC+S which works like a “smart quick-save” creating a separate save file with level name, in-game date, and time (example: 01_escape_2012-05-01_0535.sav) each time it’s used.

(authors: Dolgov Studio, NatVac)

• Sleeping Bag - it's always in the inventory and allows the player sleep in game.
• Ragdoll Physics - natural death and hit animation, kills will no longer cause corpse ragdoll to fly backwards.
• Bulb tweak - now you can shoot the lights out!
• Gnomus' Scopes - high resolution scopes for widescreen and standard monitors.
• Repair Kit - a special item to the game that allows you to repair weapons and armors out in the Zone. The only way to get this item is to loot it from a NPC's corpse.
• Repair Services - Bar trader and Screw now sell weapons and armor repair services.
• Chernobyl TV - replaced TV animation with actual footage about Chernobyl.
• Elite Nightvision - black & white nightvision based on the psy_antenna postprocess effect. This one really makes you see in the dark.
• ZRP Teleport - ESC+J shortcut lets you jump between the points in the environment.
• Third-Person View - press F1, F2 and F3 to cycle through camera views; numpad + or - to zoom in/out (by default this feature enables camera toggle only, add -psp switch to a shortcut to activate a third-person gameplay, check Technical FAQ #20 for assistance).
• Other features - authentic food and drinks skins, ability to drag dead creatures' bodies, ability to carry selected explosive fuel cans, barrels, and more.

After your journey ends with "good" ending, you'll get the dialog that will let you continue the game in freeplay mode, allowing creatures and NPCs migrate freely, it will be a living and breathing zone with self sustained A-Life and unscripted events. This feature doesn't remove the ending scene so you can enjoy it. You can skip the entire story line from the start by pressing ESC+T while in game and teleporting to last map or by clicking  Freeplay and "equip for level" to start from the first map.

There is also a large number of small subtle changes that make big difference in overall experience. ReadMe contains extended list of mods and their respective authors who contributed to this project.