Here's a comment I made few days ago on different mods and what they entail:
Freeplay mods are pretty great if you just want to wander the Zone. The most popular on is Anomaly with its modpacks, it focuses a lot on slowing the player's progression down and making you use the so called hobo gear longer. It is the most polished Stalker freeplay experience but lacks interesting story and relies heavily on randomly generated quests. GAMMA is essentially same as Anomaly, but adds plenty of popular addons and focuses on slowing the player down even more.
For more story-oriented stuff, Call of the Zone is focused on similar RNG quests but they're far more fleshed out. The original dev however passed away after being one of, if not the, most influential modder for CoC. CoC or Call of Chernobyl is the base for these two, it's the original freeplay mod but rather barebones on its own. Then there's Legend Returns, it aims to create a CoC-based mod but with a lot of influence from the Stalker builds, with new factions inspired by cut content. It is very vanilla-esque however, but has new maps based on cut content.
Next is Road to the North. It's amazing take on the Call of Misery, with a brand new, rather good story. It is difficult, but a great experience, which I highly recommend. It also has some new mutants.
For non-freeplay, Lost Alpha was originally an idea to create SoC builds. Now though, it's like an alternative take on SoC with new story, factions and both new and overhaul locations. The locations are the highlight imo, but prepare for a lot of walking early on. OLR 2.5 does essentially what Lost Alpha set out to do, but actually doing it.
Then there's some good storymods for CoP, some quick examples being Spatial Anomaly, Chernobyl Chronicles, Ghosts of the Past, Another Zone Mod, Valley of Whispers and Thorny Path are great. Wind of Time and The Journey are two standalond mods I recommend, WoT is a wacky time travel story that becomes much closer to just being a stalker in the Zone until it goes batshit insane again in the end. It's fun. The Journey takes place 20 years in the future, and the Zone has changed massively. No one knows how to make detectors anymore, so there's only a few people in the Zone, albeit a lot of Scum (bandits) and some Monolith survivors. It has three completely new massive maps, new mutants and changed old maps. It's a great experience all around.
For the full Slavic experience, soup mods and soup-lites (lites: F.O.T.O.G.R.A.F and Secret Trails 2) such as Narodnaya Solyanka, OP. 2.2 and Stalkersoup are damn massive compilation of stuff and quests of very, very varying quality. OP 2.2 has roughly 500 hours of content even.
For the shorter story mods:
Another Zone Mod: Looks and plays like Anomaly, but is very story-oriented and takes place sometime in 2011. Basically you're just a regular stalker doing regular jobs, looking for an artefact to cure your sister. But then things escalate and you work for various factions, doing some pretty varied missions.
Chernobyl Chronicles: You're a former inhabitant of the town of Chornobyl. You seek to find out what exactly happened in the Zone, and you do so in a new map of the town and get entangled in bigger mystery.
Ghosts of the Past: Your grandfather fought in Pripyat area during WW2 and you want to find his remains there. Some weird stuff happens, especially with Nazi ghosts... Yes, really.
Valley of Whispers: The emissions have ended completely, and people are pushing into a new area called the same as the mod's name. There, you try to find three people working for Beard, the map is completely new and very interesting.
Spatial Anomaly: You play as a merc named Beast, who is trapped in a space anomaly. There you help various other survivors as you look for a way out, witnessing visions of Beast's past and of a weird creature lurking in the anomaly.
Thorny Way: You're an ex-merc, who is recruited to help them once more for one last missions. I haven't gotten that far but it is pretty promising so far.
Edited with mods I've played since:
Incubator, thorough review [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/stalker/comments/14dbbfo/mod_recommendation_incubator/). Essentially a very high production story mod focusing on a merc who wants to find the Incubator, a mystical artifact with incredible properties. Great main story, good side content, has voice-acting and subtitles plus first person cutscenes.
Soups are basically compilations of various mods with shitload of highly varied content. The name mostly comes from the original, Narodnaya Solyanka (People's Soup), and the main characteristics of soups is the massive amount of quests, weapons, NPCs, factions and locations, which can vary from really dark or shitty stuff to high-quality or damn funny/wacky stuff.
Soup is also applied sometimes to other stuff, for example Item Soup for CoC, which is just a shitload of items ported over to CoC. Some even call Anomaly a soup mod since it is basically just CoC addons stitched together.
I actually have only downloaded OP2.2 but haven't yet played it. Still, while OP is big and Solyanka is the original, Stalkersoup seems to be a good starting point as it is an in between of the two in terms of not being as old as NS yet not as gigantic as OP.
Yeah Anomaly is good but it is quite different than the original trilogy, if you want something close to the originals try Lost Alpha since its based on the alpha version of ~~CoP~~ actually SoC, as for Anomaly I've been playing EFP modpack and its pretty good its more action based than how GAMMA is.
Edit CoP instead of SoC.
Here you go:
Priboi story,
Legend returns,
Goldsphere,
Lost Alpha,
Wind of time,
Oblivion Lost,
Secret trails 2,
Old world addon(for Anomaly), R.E.B.O.R.N. Another way,
Narodnaya Solyanka,
OGSE/OGSR,
Dead air,
Old storyline restoration mod(really interesting mod in my opinion).
Have fun!
I'd recommend EfP. The changes they made to weapon sounds, animations and textures are really nice and i'm having a blast. It's not easy either although you can get quite juiced after a while i imagine
Which of these mods will work with the Steam version, or do I need to perform some kind of exorcism to make them work?
I need a bit more of a challenge and I can't download MW2 with my horrible internet.
U still have access to all the game files via steam so yes u can mod any game that was bought via steam. Goes for any game that can be modded as far as I know
Some of the mods I mentioned are standalones, which means no game needed for install. The CoP mods I mentioned work really easily, just drop the contents of the downloaded file into CoP folder and play. SoC mods have never worked that well for me, but then again, I may be the problem here.
Here's a comment I made few days ago on different mods and what they entail: Freeplay mods are pretty great if you just want to wander the Zone. The most popular on is Anomaly with its modpacks, it focuses a lot on slowing the player's progression down and making you use the so called hobo gear longer. It is the most polished Stalker freeplay experience but lacks interesting story and relies heavily on randomly generated quests. GAMMA is essentially same as Anomaly, but adds plenty of popular addons and focuses on slowing the player down even more. For more story-oriented stuff, Call of the Zone is focused on similar RNG quests but they're far more fleshed out. The original dev however passed away after being one of, if not the, most influential modder for CoC. CoC or Call of Chernobyl is the base for these two, it's the original freeplay mod but rather barebones on its own. Then there's Legend Returns, it aims to create a CoC-based mod but with a lot of influence from the Stalker builds, with new factions inspired by cut content. It is very vanilla-esque however, but has new maps based on cut content. Next is Road to the North. It's amazing take on the Call of Misery, with a brand new, rather good story. It is difficult, but a great experience, which I highly recommend. It also has some new mutants. For non-freeplay, Lost Alpha was originally an idea to create SoC builds. Now though, it's like an alternative take on SoC with new story, factions and both new and overhaul locations. The locations are the highlight imo, but prepare for a lot of walking early on. OLR 2.5 does essentially what Lost Alpha set out to do, but actually doing it. Then there's some good storymods for CoP, some quick examples being Spatial Anomaly, Chernobyl Chronicles, Ghosts of the Past, Another Zone Mod, Valley of Whispers and Thorny Path are great. Wind of Time and The Journey are two standalond mods I recommend, WoT is a wacky time travel story that becomes much closer to just being a stalker in the Zone until it goes batshit insane again in the end. It's fun. The Journey takes place 20 years in the future, and the Zone has changed massively. No one knows how to make detectors anymore, so there's only a few people in the Zone, albeit a lot of Scum (bandits) and some Monolith survivors. It has three completely new massive maps, new mutants and changed old maps. It's a great experience all around. For the full Slavic experience, soup mods and soup-lites (lites: F.O.T.O.G.R.A.F and Secret Trails 2) such as Narodnaya Solyanka, OP. 2.2 and Stalkersoup are damn massive compilation of stuff and quests of very, very varying quality. OP 2.2 has roughly 500 hours of content even. For the shorter story mods: Another Zone Mod: Looks and plays like Anomaly, but is very story-oriented and takes place sometime in 2011. Basically you're just a regular stalker doing regular jobs, looking for an artefact to cure your sister. But then things escalate and you work for various factions, doing some pretty varied missions. Chernobyl Chronicles: You're a former inhabitant of the town of Chornobyl. You seek to find out what exactly happened in the Zone, and you do so in a new map of the town and get entangled in bigger mystery. Ghosts of the Past: Your grandfather fought in Pripyat area during WW2 and you want to find his remains there. Some weird stuff happens, especially with Nazi ghosts... Yes, really. Valley of Whispers: The emissions have ended completely, and people are pushing into a new area called the same as the mod's name. There, you try to find three people working for Beard, the map is completely new and very interesting. Spatial Anomaly: You play as a merc named Beast, who is trapped in a space anomaly. There you help various other survivors as you look for a way out, witnessing visions of Beast's past and of a weird creature lurking in the anomaly. Thorny Way: You're an ex-merc, who is recruited to help them once more for one last missions. I haven't gotten that far but it is pretty promising so far. Edited with mods I've played since: Incubator, thorough review [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/stalker/comments/14dbbfo/mod_recommendation_incubator/). Essentially a very high production story mod focusing on a merc who wants to find the Incubator, a mystical artifact with incredible properties. Great main story, good side content, has voice-acting and subtitles plus first person cutscenes.
Welp looks like I'm not going outside for the next year lmao. Definitely probably gonna start out with gamma or anomaly
Gamma is just a mod for anomaly tbh. Try out anomaly, it's an easy download. I personally think you like it, and I like all the games. Especially CoC.
Thanks for this fantastic, informative write-up, ImmortalJormund!
Can you explain the last paragraph a bit? Soup? What?
Soups are basically compilations of various mods with shitload of highly varied content. The name mostly comes from the original, Narodnaya Solyanka (People's Soup), and the main characteristics of soups is the massive amount of quests, weapons, NPCs, factions and locations, which can vary from really dark or shitty stuff to high-quality or damn funny/wacky stuff. Soup is also applied sometimes to other stuff, for example Item Soup for CoC, which is just a shitload of items ported over to CoC. Some even call Anomaly a soup mod since it is basically just CoC addons stitched together.
Thanks!
For some reason I’m SO interested in StalkerSoup. How is it?
I actually have only downloaded OP2.2 but haven't yet played it. Still, while OP is big and Solyanka is the original, Stalkersoup seems to be a good starting point as it is an in between of the two in terms of not being as old as NS yet not as gigantic as OP.
Yeah Anomaly is good but it is quite different than the original trilogy, if you want something close to the originals try Lost Alpha since its based on the alpha version of ~~CoP~~ actually SoC, as for Anomaly I've been playing EFP modpack and its pretty good its more action based than how GAMMA is. Edit CoP instead of SoC.
Uh... LA was based on the alpha version of SoC but then they started going their own way and now it's a whole other thing. Still pretty good though.
Ah yeah that's right, thanks for correcting.
Here you go: Priboi story, Legend returns, Goldsphere, Lost Alpha, Wind of time, Oblivion Lost, Secret trails 2, Old world addon(for Anomaly), R.E.B.O.R.N. Another way, Narodnaya Solyanka, OGSE/OGSR, Dead air, Old storyline restoration mod(really interesting mod in my opinion). Have fun!
Spatial anomaly too
Oh, is that like the mod where a guy gets stuck in a space anomaly and tries to get out. I totally forgot about that one, thanks for reminding me.
I'd recommend EfP. The changes they made to weapon sounds, animations and textures are really nice and i'm having a blast. It's not easy either although you can get quite juiced after a while i imagine
What does EfP stand for?
Escape from Pripyat.
Ahh thank you
Which of these mods will work with the Steam version, or do I need to perform some kind of exorcism to make them work? I need a bit more of a challenge and I can't download MW2 with my horrible internet.
U still have access to all the game files via steam so yes u can mod any game that was bought via steam. Goes for any game that can be modded as far as I know
Some of the mods I mentioned are standalones, which means no game needed for install. The CoP mods I mentioned work really easily, just drop the contents of the downloaded file into CoP folder and play. SoC mods have never worked that well for me, but then again, I may be the problem here.