Hints and Tips for success in Misery 2.0 Thread - MISERY mod for S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat

I came onto the forums looking to see if there was a patch for some of the crashes I've been experiencing with misery, and found, somewhat to my surprise, that a lot of people are having problems making progress in the game, or are finding it unreasonably difficult. This surprised me because while I have noticed the bugs I'm sure everyone has (yanov crash, giant item descriptions, missing item descriptions, some... questionable accuracy choices with rifles) I haven't actually had much issue with the difficulty. I started as a sniper with the black road start, and after about a day or so of playing I have a clear sky suit, a saiga, a modern SKS fully upgraded, and have explored the iron forest and the dredge station for artifacts, as well as the swamp helicopter crash. Progress is slow, certainly, but very steady.

I think, from reading a lot of the posts, that this is probably because I seem to naturally default to a close-to-ideal way of playing the game. I did find the game a bit inscrutable at first, and there's a massive amount that you need to know to play it effectively. I thought I'd share some tips that may not be necessarily obvious, and would likely be a bit frustrating if you didn't know them. I think other people could do the same too, it might help people get into the game, as I haven't yet found any need for a difficulty reduction.

Point One: READ EVERYTHING!

The mod includes a lot of rather odd, but quite well documented mechanics. The trick is that a lot of them are documented in places you wouldn't think to look. Hover your mouse over the various resistance meters in the bottom of the inventory, and they will give you a massive spiel about how that resistance works. This is extremely helpful for figuring out why your particular armor is doing bugger all against anomalies, and also why your bullets aren't working on enemies. This also applies to item descriptions, especially ammunition, as all ammo tells you how good it is at doing various things, and if you shoot heavy armor with insufficiently powerful bullets, it will more or less just bounce right off, unlike regular stalker. Reading and familiarising yourself with every bit of information you can and thinking carefully about how this applies, that'll let you make some much better decisions about how to attack the world. As an instant idea, did you know that getting baked off your ass on weed gives you about +50 psy protection for ten minutes? Enough to beat the crap out of the new erm, 'friends' over at the iron forest and have a go at clearing it out? Well, I didn't, but once I found out that weed would stop my brain leaking out of my ears if I so much as look at a controller, well, I bought a baggie from beard and went and cleared the area. Look carefully at your information to make the best choices.

Point Two: IF IT ISN'T WORKING, TRY SOMETHING ELSE.

The mod has a lot of things in it that will just straight up murder you if you don't have the right equipment, and even if it doesn't murder you, it'll cost you a lot of money. Perhaps the most obvious of these is the burner anomaly. In vanilla, burners are surrounded but this annoying damage field which slowly prickles away at your heath until you keel over, unless you stick a fireball on your artifact bar, then you're fine. In misery 2.0, burners are surrounded by a HORRIFINGLY MURDEROUS DEATH ZONE which is explicitly described (in the fire resistance bar) as being hotter than the core of a campfire. If you are hoping to survive there, you will need a firefighter suit. If you don't have a firefighter suit, don't walk into the physics-defying oven. This explains why most suits don't work on them, as it's really hard to protect against that kind of heat. No amount of bashing your head against it will help I'm afraid, so keep away from the boiler until you've got a damn good suit.

Instead, try something else, many of the other anomalies are much easier to protect against, electrical anomalies don't have any field around them, as in vanilla, and they're fairly easy to avoid, so they make a fine first expedition, also they produce very lightweight artifacts so you don't have to lug around the 13kg miniature black hole you pulled out of the gravi anomaly. Radiation, similarly (again as in the resistance bar) is quite easy to protect against with a simple gas mask. It doesn't generally damage the mask much either, as filters don't degrade fast and most of the radiation danger is from inhaled particles, as outlined in the radiation info bar. So buy a cheap gas mask and go explore the radiation fields, you can find some good loot in there and you won't incur a fortune in equipment repairs.

For enemies, if your bullets aren't working, generally this will be because you're using bullets that don't quite penetrate the enemy armor. Buy some AP rounds (the journal hints tell you this) and keep them handy for tougher enemies. If you want a cheap-ish option, shotgun slugs work on most armors, and still hurt like hell, and a shotgun at point blank will make most anything stop and think. Even AP pistol rounds will make short work of most enemies if you hit them in the head, but buckshot and low-grade pistol ammo will not do much otherwise against even light armor. P+ rounds for pistols are actually WORSE against armor than basic ones, but they hurt a lot more on mutants/unarmored opponents, make sure you're using the right ammo type.

Pistols, SMGs, and shotguns are very common weapons and zone armor is designed to proof against them. Enemies don't actually have that much health but there are lots of them and only one of you, so facing off against whole squads you NEED to buy every advantage you can. Enemies don't have to worry about equipment repairs (because you kill them) and they don't have to worry about wasting all their ammo on you (because you kill them, or they kill you, at which point the game stops) so it's stacked against you in that regard. Using your awesome human brain is the only advantage you have, which leads me onto my next point:

Point Three: Think carefully about what you're doing.
I'm not being facetious here, in vanilla stalker (and misery 1) you didn't really need that much thought, and you didn't benefit from it overmuch either. Misery kind of necessitates it because it takes every other advantage away from you, but it actually gives you more reward for thinking, and here's why. Take hunting for example, hunting is an awesome way to earn early cash, but a lot of people are saying it's completely unprofitable, but I know for a fact you can get more worth in drops from boars than it costs to kill them with ammunition, even factoring in gun repairs. So what's the problem?

Well, I can only guess that people are using, well, the wrong type of ammo and gun. Hunting is probably not going to work with anything but a shotgun and buckshot. Why? Well, because anything else more or less is armor piercing ammo to some degree. 9x18 makarov ammo, for example, has class II penetration and medium tissue damage, which means it'll hurt a bit and punch through light armor. Wonderful for taking on bandits because your pistol is probably quite accurate, but the bullets are priced to take this into account. They cost a lot because you're able to kill some quite nasty enemies with them, so don't spend them on mutants.

Buckshot is very cheap, 1000 rubles per 10 shots, most mutants will die in 2 shots (a controller will go down in 3 or so, if you can get close enough ) and will drop, generally, a few hundred to maybe a thousand rubles worth of loot, if you sell it to the right man (protip, owl will pay a lot more for pelts and parts while beard will buy food a bit higher). Boars are a great target early on as they're easy and drop lots of legs. But again this needs thought, if you have some spare ammo you're not using, well, sell it off OR, pick up a crappy gun that fires it and go hunt with it. DON'T eat into your main combat rounds with hunting, or you'll go broke real fast. Use the right ammo and weapons for the job, you can use others but it'll cost you in efficiency, and inefficiency will hurt a lot in the misery zone, it ain't your friend.

In firefights with dangerous opponents, also think about what you're doing.
- Say you bought that gas mask, are you keeping it on? It doesn't have very high protection from bullets and, well, it's not going to work very well with holes in it. Why not take it off? You can see better for one thing and it will stop it getting damaged.
- Say you can't afford any armor, only a crappy jacket. It costs a lot to maintain so, why should you really bother? It's not like it really does anything at full health anyway. But it does have that nice pocket for an addon in it, so stick a big steel plate in there, that'll stop bullets pretty well and moreover, it doesn't break when the jacket does, you can sell it back when you're done with it.
- Say you want to fight some gunmen, and you've got a rifle. Chances are they're all carry semi auto/fully auto guns, and your rifle is great for ammo efficiency, but it only shoots one bullet a second. They can shoot a lot more than that and even though most of them miss, with a hundred bullets coming your way, chances are they're going to hit you a bit, and it'll bloody hurt, so the trick here is not to sit and have a pitched gun battle with them. No amount of aim is going to outdo the sheer chance of five bullets from you versus two hundred from their squad, but that first shot, that was where you had the advantage, so keep that advantage, move after shooting. That's how snipers work in real life, they don't sit and outshoot people, they shoot and move. The AI has actually been really overhauled so that you can shoot someone, run back down into cover, move around to a new posiiton, and the enemy will keep advancing on your OLD position, even grenading it to shit in the process, because they don't know you've moved. Stay crouched low and move carefully, then when you're a good distance away, take another shot. This way you can take on more than your weight in enemies, and really start to even the odds.

Thinking and being, well, realistic about your approach to things will take you an amazing amount of distance in misery. The guns aren't perfect 1:1 recreations, but the overall experience is pretty amazingly realistic in how you have to play the game, especially from what they started with.

Point Four: SEARCH EVERYWHERE.
I said I started black road, and oh my god does that dump you in the shit. I don't think it's possible to just start out from there if you don't do this last point, because you simply won't have enough stuff to get you going. But search everywhere is the solution to that.

The devs have added a lot of new loot to the game, a lot of new stashes, which aren't marked as stashes and you can't find by holding F, you have to actually look really carefully, every shelf, every room, every climbing puzzle, every toilet stall (yes, toilet stalls have loot in them) and you will find backpacks, boxes, and other little storage things that contain lots of awesome loot stashes. Most will not be terribly useful but ALL will be worth something at the store, so searching is the best way to get early loot, money, and occasionally useful items. Artifacts are great but you can't eat them. Stalkers will pay good money for decent food and booze, which is what most people will stash in their bags, and you can even eat it yourself if you want to.

Those are off the top of my head, some of the first ideas I can think of to help you into misery, if anyone else has any helpful tips, post them here and let folks know. As I said the only real issues I have with the mod are actual bugs, the gameplay itself is working pretty well for me, providing a good challenge but not being annoying, and I'm not even that good at FPS games so I think a lot of it is down to playstyle. Thanks to the devs for making the mod and I look forward to the patches which will let me play past zaton.

No. 1 advice, never ever look at stash location posts and or maps outside your in game PDA = it will ruin your game

No.2 advice always do Black Road start, if you don't ask yourself 'why am I playing Misery Mod vs. vanilla or some other mod'

So how to proceed:
--> escape to safety
--> find an NPC alone with a good weapon
--> knife them
--> take the weapon and headshot their friends
--> take their weapons
--> take and sell loot
--> save up for the good stuff
--> rinse and repeat
--> go artefact hunting when you can afford SSP suit
you'll then have suit and weapons of your choice pretty much, I could be more specific but I feel it would spoil the game

I have my own Black Road Start techniques.

First: Grab the makarov and other supplies from the bag next to you when you start the black road.
Second: Go into the main room and climb the ladder to the attic. Up there you will find a few essentials.
Third: This might not work very well for you, but what I did was run to the tower and climb the ladder and on the opposite side you will find a stash.
Fourth: Climb down from the tower and head to the building with the campfire inside it. You will see a tractor. Look on top and behind it.
Fifth: Leave the sawmill and down the road will be a campfire where(most of the time)there will be a group of stalkers chilling there.

From here, you decide to do whatever.