Inventory Management in STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl

Key Takeaways:

1. Preserve Early Game Loot: Use the Blue Safe trick to keep essential tutorial items, ensuring you have a strong start post-intro.
2. Stay Light for Survival: Maintain inventory within the green zone (under 55 kg) to avoid stamina penalties and reduced movement speed.
3. Expand Storage Wisely: Utilize artifacts or temporary boosts like Hercules to manage weight effectively when carrying heavier gear.

How to Keep Your Loot After the Tutorial

STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl throws you into a survival challenge where every item matters. After the opening missions, you lose almost everything, which can feel like a punch to the gut especially for loot-savvy players. Luckily, there’s a way to safeguard some of your precious supplies.

The Blue Safe Trick

To keep tutorial items intact, look for a Blue Safe near the third waypoint of the Scanner mission. Before triggering the cutscene (where your character gets ambushed), stash your loot in this safe. Here’s how to do it:

1. Locate the Safe: Navigate around the building near the waypoint. Jump over boxes to access the safe room.
2. Deposit Items: Drop consumables like Medkits, bandages, ammunition, and food into the safe. Only broken or about-to-break weapons will survive this process; others will disappear.
3. Retrieve Your Loot: After completing the Anomaly disruption tutorial and regaining control, return to the safe to collect your items.

This trick also works with other containers in the area, but the Blue Safe is closest to the save point, making it the most convenient.

Inventory Management Basics

Once you step into The Zone, you’ll quickly find yourself swimming in items ammo, medkits, bandages, and survival essentials. While this abundance might feel rewarding at first, the game’s limited inventory system forces you to make tough decisions. Understanding how the inventory system works is the first step to survival.

How Inventory Works

Opening your inventory isn’t as straightforward as pulling up a menu. You need to press a specific button, prompting your character to open their backpack. The inventory layout is divided as follows:

• Center: Equipped gear, such as weapons, armor, and artifacts.
• Right Side: All other items in your inventory.
• Left Side: Items found in nearby bodies or containers.
• Weight Bar: Located below the right panel, showing your total carried weight.

The weight bar is divided into three zones:

• Green (Under 55 kg): Optimal for stamina and movement.
• Yellow (55-80 kg): Encumbered, leading to faster stamina depletion.
• Red (Above 80 kg): Severely slowed movement and rapid stamina drain.

Managing Weight

To stay mobile, aim to keep your inventory in the green zone. Exceeding this limit makes running and jumping more taxing, and overloading (red zone) can severely hinder your ability to escape danger. To offload excess weight, you can:

• Store items in private storage at bases.
• Sell surplus gear to traders.

Strategies to Expand Inventory Capacity

Unlike some RPGs, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 doesn’t offer many options to increase your carrying capacity permanently. However, there are a few tricks to work around the system:

Use Artifacts

Certain artifacts found throughout The Zone can increase your maximum weight capacity, albeit with a tradeoff reduced radiation resistance. Here’s what to look for:

• Low, Medium, High Weight Artifacts: These provide weight boosts of varying levels. A medium artifact, for example, raises your limit to 86 kg.

Rely on Hercules

The Hercules item temporarily increases your carrying capacity by 20 kg for 300 seconds. This is especially handy when dealing with mandatory heavy items. Keep an eye out for Hercules in areas with significant loot or objectives requiring heavy lifting.

Practical Tips for Item Management

• Prioritize Essentials: Medkits, food, water, and ammunition should always take precedence in your inventory.
• Sell Excess Supplies: Items like extra ammo types or lower-quality gear can be sold to traders for cash.
• Rotate Storage: Use base storage frequently to stash items you might need later but don’t want to carry.
• Keep Consumables Handy: Bandages, anti-radiation meds, and vodka are lifesavers in a pinch.

Why Developers Might Keep the Blue Safe Trick

Some might wonder if the ability to stash items in the Blue Safe is intentional or a bug. While it feels like an exploit, the fact that only consumables remain (and not weapons or high-value gear) suggests the developers might be allowing this as a way to ease early gameplay challenges. For now, use it while you can it might be patched out later!

FAQs

1. What items can I save using the Blue Safe trick?

You can save consumables like Medkits, food, water, vodka, and ammunition. Only broken or worn-out weapons will survive the transition.

2. Can I permanently increase my inventory space?

Not permanently, but artifacts can temporarily boost your weight limit. The Hercules item also provides a short-term increase.

3. What happens if I exceed the weight limit?

Exceeding 55 kg (yellow zone) reduces your stamina regeneration and sprint speed. Carrying over 80 kg (red zone) severely hampers mobility.

4. How do I find artifacts for inventory expansion?

Artifacts are usually located in anomaly fields. Equip a detector to locate and retrieve them, but be prepared for radiation and hostile encounters.

5. What’s the best way to manage inventory on long missions?

Plan ahead by carrying only essentials and leaving surplus items in base storage. Keep Hercules on hand for emergencies.