Desolation
Desolation is a global overhaul mod, focusing on realism, survival, and emergent storytelling. It introduces punishing mechanics, changes, new and expanded systems, and a dynamic, evolving Zone to challenge you while rewarding ingenuity and adaptability.
Beta Disclaimer
This is an initial release of the mod, where it is not in a stable 1.0 version yet. This bares some responsibilities with it, when downloading it in current state:
Keep you normal playthrough saves backed up or better yet, have a separate profile for modded playthroughs in case of possible corruptions.
Be ready for bugs, inconsistencies, millions of typos (and maybe even crashes?) which will be fixed in time.
The balance might be all over the place. The mod was tested in sterile “development conditions”, so it might behave differently in a normal playthrough. This is a thing that will change over time.
I will be playing through the game once again with my mod, alongside you, to see the changes that need to be made and addressed personally. So dont worry, we’re both in the same boat.
The updates might not be frequent at all, or happen in quick succession. Many circumstances outside of my modding hobby can affect the development.
At the moment of the release the initial supported languages are English and Ukrainian
Most likely you won’t be able to recover your save after playing with desolation due to the things it edits, so this is a one way trip. Once again, do your backups.
Whhat is desolation
Desolation is a Global Hardcore Overhaul mod for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 Heart of Chornobyl. The main focus of the mod is to expand the game via in-depth mechanics, content additions and overall fluid blending of gameplay, world and lore. Though focusing a lot on “realism”, the main focus of it is to generate stories for the player, put them into tense situations in a punishing environment, while overall keeping the goal of it feeling like an even playing field for both the player chatacter and other non-playable characters.
Aside from the hardcore survival mechanics Desolation will introduce a lot of new features, approaches to usual things as the mod evolves. My goal is to create an overhaul where the Zone will be a being that will punish everyone inside of it mercilessly for their mistakes, bend and break them at every chance they give it, yet reward the curious and smart stalkers in moment’s of it’s grace. And the playing field will become even for both player and other chatacters.
Features
Overhauled NPC Weapon and Grenade Profficiency
NPCs used to have their own separate weapon properties, now they are mostly identical to the player which should even the field out, making the game harder and at the same time getting rid of aimbotting shotgun dudes that hit you with 100% of the pellets.
NPCs grenade usage was reworked, with newbies, experienced and veteran stalker all using grenades with different frequency.
Overhauled NPC Gear Progression
A sophisticated and in-depth gear generation system is injected in place of the vanilla loot tables, featuring over 190+ items to loot from stalkers, stashes and buy from traders for variety and sell value.
The Zone will now evolve with you and as you increase your rank, the stalkers around you will also advance, getting their hands on better gear while keeping diversity of the different Zone population mix in place. No more exoskeleton-only users in late-game, no single rank will overshadow others completely whiel still keeping the sense of world progression.
Overhauled Medical System
Bleeding now drains your health faster and the medicine costs much more.
The existing medical items were overhauled while additional items to fill out the gaps were added.
The bandages are now used to combat bleeding only, providing no health regen. The vanilla medkits are more suited for a calm environment and slow and steady health recovery. Injectors were introduced in their place to fill out a role of a crude, effective and quick way to heal in combat.
The ways to combat radiation have expanded in terms of available items, which are also tiered and have their own drawbacks at lowest quality.
Overhauled Traders
The traders have had their available stock redisigned taking into account their location, how hard it is for supplies to get to them, their roles and lore.
Traders now progress from a rich stock of some items in the areas near the border to borderline on the brink of collapse in the harshest places where not many dare to journey.
Not every trader is interested in everything you’re selling, so now you got to take into account how much their offer and their demand when selling your spoils.
At the same time, the traders are now much more oriented towards offering a certain stock based on their background. So don’t expect to find a lot of medicine and/or food at your local weapon trader, or be ready to fork out bigger amounts of Koupons if you happen to find some in their stock.
Supply and demand could potentially be useful, if you want to risk getting some items at safer places and delivering them to those that are in dire need of them.
Artifacts are now your universal go-to currency when looking for something that everyone and their mother will fork out Koupons for, no matter the location, unlike more specific equipment.
Trader restock time is changed, also based on the logic of how far away they are from the nearest supply line and how specific their goods are.
Mechanics are now also able to buy up your busted gear, though your ordinary technician won’t pay a lot, much less then you were to find someone who just buys junk in bulk, infact.
New Gear, Items and Gear Mechanics
New sleeping bags with varying quality, properties and benefits provided after sleep.
New outfits, headwear are now available to aquire from looting or vendor stock. These are designed to fit into the game world visualy and logically.
Weapon and armor field repair system is added. It features new pistol, rifle and armor repair kits, as well as smaller versatile items to patch up the damage.
More than 200 new and unique items to loot from npcs, buy from traders and find in stashes. Some are just for selling and flavour, others are useable with their own mechanics.
Mutant Looting Overhaul
Mutant looting system has been added back in, with a lot of new parts you can take as trophies from the fallen monstrosities, including mutant-specific meats, general trophies and hard to come by very expensive samples.
Stash Loot Overhaul
The stashes are now much more diverse, offering a lot of potential spoils to those lucky enough to get to them.
The stashes are designed in a way to offer a rollercoaster of reward and dissapointment range, which is intentional. Though you still can stumble upon a stash with half a bread, a bottle of water or even less, there are good odds of finding yourself some nice gear from these, including artifacts stashed away by their paranoid owners.
Sometimes, apart from good condition gear, you’ll stumble upon some little inventory-storytelling, based on the items you find in one of the chests.
Mod Compatability
Desolation comes prepackaged with a Mod Loader ini that it also uses, configured to support all the mods that require it to my knowledge. This only includes the Mod Loader support and will not patch the mods between themselves on its own!
Desolation will include the latest available Community Localization Project content integrated into its localization files. This only includes localization files and will do nothing on its own!
Both of these files will keep getting updated with relevant versions and tweaks along with the main mod update.
The only directly overwritten file in Desolation that may cause conflicts is CombatSynchronization.cfg
General Changes
The ammo should now be more scarce than in the base game.
Sleep is now a much more prominent player in the overall gameplay loop, though with the scarcity of beds available, some ways to combat it in the field still remain, while new ones were added.
Instalation
MANUAL INSTALLATION
Download the mod from the Files section on this page.
Navigate to your S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 Heart of Chornobyl installation directory.
There, make sure this path exists: ..\S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 Heart of Chornobyl\Stalker2\Content\Paks\~mods
If you don’t have a “~mods” folder or other folders in the path, create them.
4. Drop the following contents of the downloaded zip file into ~mods folder:
ZZZZ_Desolation_P.pak
ZZZZ_Desolation-Localization_P.pak
ZZZZ_Desolation-Localization_P.ucas
ZZZZ_Desolation-Localization_P.utoc
ZZZZ_Desolation-Textures_P.pak
ZZZZ_Desolation-Textures_P.ucas
ZZZZ_Desolation-Textures_P.utoc
MOD MANAGER
Use the mod manager of your choice and follow it’s generic installation procedure.
Future Plans
Consider this a much welcome alternative to a Roadmap that limits certain feature additions to certain timeframes and puts constraints on developer. The features planned below here are not representing the complete final feature list, as it may grow or shrink over time. Instead, they are here as a post-it note for me and a peak into the possible feature of the mod for you. Most of these will start development once the official Modding Tools are released by GSC and if we get a proper access level for some internal important mechanics.
Radiation Sickness Rework
A complete overhaul of the effects of being irradiated. No longer will you just drop dead at a 100% rads, though don’t think that it won’t mean death at some point, if you dont know how to counter it.
A more in-depth staged system of radiation effects, based on the study of real life radiation progression. Yeah, get ready for that bloody diharrea in-game execution.
Sleeping Mechanics Expansion
Add more static beds to sleep at.
Introduce the ability for dreams to happen, which will also affect the sleep quality of the player’s character.
Return of Old (Modded/Build) Features
NPC chatter in the Stalker Network
Ability to use the Stalker Network
Ability to use artifacts
Many more I’ll remember along the way
Storage System Overhaul
Move away from a more arcadey “accessible anywhere” chests that the game has, going back to how things were in previous games where each chest at each safehouse was it’s own storage.
Remake of the “accessible anywhere” storage system as an optional service to pay the traders and have stalkers deliver some loot to the desired stash, pricing varying by how far it is and the overall weight of what you want delivered. This wont be an instant delivery and will require time to get to your destination.
Technician System Overhaul
Add demand for certain tools back to some technicians that could use them.
Possibly add a timed repair system for gear at a certain point of damage. A really battered up armor is not gonna be some quick patchwork even when done by a professional.
Weapon System Overhaul
Expand on the possible addons that can be installed on weapons.
Rework possible upgrades at technicians.
Add a modular condition system with certain parts condition affecting how the weapon performs overall.
Armor System Overhaul
Implement attachment system to armors that will function like the weapon addon system. These will range from things like cevlar plates to an attachable camelpacks.
Equipment System Overhaul
Implement slot system that is similar to Anomaly, where a player has a backpack slot, device slot, melee slot and many others.
Possibly split up the belt attachments from the artifact slots into its own slot system.
Artifact Overhaul
Rebalance of the stats to make them much more of an interesting and needed part of equipment without only debuff being radiation and only having one-two buffs tops
Dynamic artifact system. Have artifacts be able to generate with stats dynamically set in a certain range, making hunting for that 10/10 artifact to sell for a big sum of Koupons its own journey and likewise, keep a certain level of disapointment when getting a pretty useless artifact, which leads into..
Artifact modification and crafting. Utilizing anomalies and knowing the right way to “metamodify” cetrain artifacts, have the player be able to combine some unwanted, lower tier artifacts into better ones, including some unique ones that will be able to be obtained only through this system.
Add radiation emmitance and other damage for some artifacts carried in backpack just like that, requiring you to use different tires of artifact containers to safely transpot them around.
Overall Future Expansion
Add in custom animated actions.
Add a spohisiticated, Project Zomboid inspired Crafting System (where you can use the various items from the same category as specific components).
New content in the form of: quests, lore, locations, npcs, usable gear and equipment, items, weapons, monsters and mechanics. This will all depend on how powerful the official Modding Tools will be, but I trust that GSC will bring a beastly editor to us, allowing us to do some crazy things!
Balance tweaking, going for creating a real challenge for the player.
Fixing a bunch of errors I’ll make along the way of the mod’s development.
Extra Stuff
Organize a place to post development progress updates (Discord server?)
AI USE DISCLOSER
Desolation at it’s core uses many different AI-powered tools to generate foundational material that is later heavily edited by me to produce the final result.That being said, I know not everyone is a fan of this technology and it can be a pretty hot topic of discussion. I myself view is as nothing more than a powerful and useful tool in the right pipeline, but not a replacement for any handmade creative work. For me it has become an important tool, allowing me to achieve many things much quicker than my life schedule would ever let me otherwise, while also helping solve the issue of social anxiety and the want to work solo (for the forseeable future).
This is written here so that if you are against the use of AI, I am upfront about it’s use and you won’t waste your time downloading Desolation.
FAQ
– Can I help with the development of the mod? At the moment my aim is to keep it a solo hobby project, but that can change in the future!I don’t like X addition, can you remove it? Unless it proves an actual technical issue I will probably stick to my changes, though you are free to make a patch removing anything you don’t like! Check the PERMISSIONS section for my stance on Desolation tweaking.
– Why do many traders have a bunch of useless items for sale? It clogs up the inventory. I added them with an intention to bring a little immersion to the stock available, making it so that you’re actually looking at everything they have on display, searching for the things you need. As for the items being useless, that is because I’ve decided to start making the base of the mod while the official Modding Kit is not out yet, but once it releases I plan to make many of these items actually useable by the player. So these are just filled items at the moment, though you are free to make a patch removing anything you don’t like! Chech the PERMISSIONS section for my stance on Desolation tweaking.
Can we cook the various mutant meats we harvest? At the moment I don’t have the planned crafting system implemented, so these are just for sale, though you can get your hands on cooked mutant meats at some traders, who have the right skills to make them into something edible.
– How frequent will the updates be? When is the next version release date? I usually give no ETAs and priorities to make small posts on the development progress instead. As with anyone, I am sadly a subject of real life factors that can drasticly change my time available to develop the mod. So updates may happen any time, multiple in quick succession or none at all for quite a while, though with every update, the old version will be available for download in the Archive/Old Files section so that you can keep playing the one you liked the best and not have your save broken by the latest update being the only available!
– The inventory bloat with useless items is mindnumbing! As a Project Zomboid player I actually enjoy variations even of mostly useless items that can be found around in containers or on npcs, making them feel more alive, adding personality to them, so sorry to say but this is one of the core points of the mod which will keep getting bigger, not less.
