It was another day of STALKER progress, and I started it off by doing the tasks necessary to join the factions. Normally, joining one makes you hostile to the other, but after a bit of digging I found discussion about a way you can exploit the quest system and join both Duty and Freedom. Doing so was actually fairly simple, I just had to:

– Go to the warehouses area, talk to the Duty commander there, and accept the mission to take out a nearby sniper.
– Kill the sniper, return to the commander, but don’t accept the next part of the mission and make sure you click the ‘See you’ option to quit the dialog (i.e., don’t hit escape to do so).
– The Duty team goes ahead and assaults the Freedom base without you. Wait for them to fail (they don’t really stand a chance), and just make sure the Freedom leader survives.
– Once the Duty team is dead, go to the Freedom leader, report that there’s a Duty outpost nearby, and then tell him that you’ve ‘already taken care of them’.

It took me a few tries to pull off successfully due to some glitches, like one Duty member retreating and causing everyone to remain stuck in battle mode. Once it’s done though, you can now continue to do the Freedom leader’s quests and you’ll become friendly with them, and can still go back and do Duty quests to become friendly with them too. Just avoid the ones that require you to assault the others’ bases or assassinate their leader…

After that I did various quests for Freedom and the barkeep, and picked up a GP 37 rifle along the way. It was definitely a big improvement over the TRs 301, with good accuracy and a scope built-in. I also got a sniper rifle off of one of the dead Freedom troopers, though ammo for it is a bit scarcer.

Then it was finally off to the west to reach the X16 lab. To get there I had to go through the Wild, where I rescued a scientist under attack by mercs and escorted him to the next zone line, including going through an area filled with flame anomalies. Upon arriving in Yantar, I headed to the mobile science base and got a protective suit as a reward for saving the scientist, and then had to help him collect radiation readings by escorting him around the zone. This zone is filled with ‘zombified’ soldiers who move slowly, but can still use their weapons (though a bit less effectively), and take more hits to kill, and also a bunch of ‘snorks’.

After helping out the scientists, they gave me a device which would let me withstand the psychic attacks and enter lab X16 itself. Unlike X18, this one was fairly linear and didn’t have too many anomalies, just a lot of zombified soldiers and more snorks. Towards the end there was a timed part where I had to shut down the four parts of a machine before it broke through my protective device, but that wasn’t too hard. Getting out was a bit of a pain though, since I had to drop down into a secret tunnel that was filled with even more zombies and snorks, and I was starting to run low on ammo. The soldiers dropped a type I couldn’t use, I didn’t have the carrying capacity to take their weapon type, and I didn’t want to throw away the GP 37. I finally made it out with just barely enough ammo, though.

Then I had to head south to meet a ‘guide’, as mentioned by the recording a stalker named Ghost left in X16, and he directed me towards a doctor, back in a hidden spot I’d previously visited. Upon meeting him, there was a big revelation about Strelok, what’s happening with some kind of ‘Monolith’ near Chernobyl, and some advice about what to look for in the north.

I think I’ve done pretty much all I can in the southern parts, so it looks like I next have to head north and continue investigating this Monolith, and deal with this ‘brain scorcher’ thing along the way. There are only three zones left that I haven’t visited yet, so this is probably getting close to the endgame.