S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Shadow of Chernobyl

[Necromancer]

Army Warehouses

If you skipped to this section of the guide from the table of contents, then be sure to do the Find The Guide quest (listed on the page previous to this) before proceeding on through this zone. You can always return and do it later, but it'll be more difficult to walk backwards.
What Barkeep didn’t tell you was that there are actually two opposed questgivers in the Army Warehouses district. In the southwestern corner of the district, to the right of the road as you enter the zone, will be a small farmhouse with Duty officers in it, while the main army warehouses will feature a large contingent of Freedom soldiers. You can speak to Skull at the Duty base to get quests from him, or head over to the warehouses and enter the central building to speak to Lukash, the main Freedom soldier. These questgivers are mutually exclusive; if you take a quest from one, you’re naturally going to be prevented from doing so from the other.

Tip: If you just want to head to the Brain Scorcher, simply head to the northeastern corner of the zone and bypass the Freedom barrier there. You can leave the zone without any problems, even if you don’t do any of the quests here.

Your choice here is somewhat meaningless in the grand scheme of thing, but it does give you a chance to show off your combat acumen. We’ll cover both options.

Freedom Quests

None of these missions over a material reward; you simply get cash for your efforts.

Freedom Quest I: Destroy the Duty Company

After speaking to Lukash, he’ll tell you to speak to Max, who groups together a bunch of soldiers to the entrance to the facility. Max will guide you and the rest of the grunts around to the farmhouse, where you’ll assault the Duty officers. When you arrive, the Freedomers will attack the Dutyers, but the Duty soldiers won’t attack you until you open fire on them. That will allow you to approach them, throw a grenade or two at them, then run away and get behind cover. When one of the Freedom soldiers dies, grab their excellent GP 37 rifle and use that to help finish off the Duty soldiers, then return to Lukash.

Freedom Quest II: Kill The Rat

One of the Freedom soldiers is an informant, and Lukash wants him taken out. Before you kill him, though, he wants you to follow the rat to an abandoned farmhouse and see who he’s been airing the dirty laundry to.
When you get close to the farmhouse, you’ll have to sneak up enough to make the snitch start moving into the farm buildings. Just sneak up in crouch mode until he starts moving, then retreat a bit and try to get an eye on him with your binoculars. The closer you get to him, the more likely he is to open fire on you, which will prevent you from completing the mission.
Anyway, the soldier will eventually radio for his contact to arrive. When that happens, run into the building and kill him, then get ready to deal with his contact, who’ll be running down the road from the west, accompanied by a few bodyguards. Kill them all to complete the mission.

Freedom Quest III: Assist At Freedom’s Barrier Outpost

Head to the outpost and speak to Cap there. He’ll tell you that Monolith forces have been attempting to breach the barricade that the Freedom soldiers have set up, and that they’ll be attacking again soon. You’re to help drive them off. This can be a somewhat difficult fight, as the Monolith soldiers wield weapons similar to the Duty soldiers you fought recently, and it can be difficult to spot the enemies in the forest at night, but if you simply stay back behind a protective covering and take potshots at them as they arrive, you shouldn’t have too many problems surviving, even if it does wind up being a long fight.
When this is over, you can speak to Cap for a reward, and will be able to proceed on into the Red Forest zone, if you like.

Duty Quests

Quest I: Kill The Tower Sniper

The Duty soldiers in the farmhouse wish to deal with the Freedom soldiers in the warehouses, but they can’t move out of the farmhouse until they deal with the sniper in the tower nearby. So, they assign you the task of taking him out.
Your goal here is to kill the sniper without entering the compound here; doing so will cause all sorts of problems with scripting and the like. If you still have your TRS 301 rifle with a scope (which you should’ve obtained in the Wild Territory from one of the mercs atop a building), you can use that in single-fire mode to take down the sniper. Run to the northeast of Skull to reach the ruined cars there, find a good vantage point on the sniper, and put one in his head.

Quest II: Kill Lukash

Now that the Duty soldiers can move, they’re planning to blow a hole in the wall of the Freedom compound and wipe the area clean.
There are, unfortunately, any number of ways in which the scripting on this mission can break, so you’re going to have to be pretty lucky in order to actually beat it. If the soldier who lays the explosives at the wall gets shot through the wall by an enemy before he can set them, the mission will simply be screwed up. If one of the other soldiers happens to take out Lukash before you can, you’ll likely be unable to get credit for it. If Skull dies during the assault, you might not be able to move on in the quest chain, etc.

Your main goal here is to kill Lukash, but you’re also tasked with taking down three snipers here. There’s one off to the left, near the main entrance to the camp; one on an exposed tower near the middle of the camp; and one off to the right in another sniper’s roost. You have much better aim than your compatriots, so you should try to focus in on these guys and take them down before heading to the main building and taking out Lukash. There are around 25 soldiers in the area, though, so you’ll have your hands full, and as we mentioned, you probably won’t be able to get your reward for this.
It’s a tricky business, but if nothing else, you should at least attempt the mission and try to clear out the camp, even if you don’t wind up getting a reward for it. This is due to the fact that you’ll be able to pick up one of the excellent GP 37 rifles that the Freedom soldiers wield. These little guys use the same ammo as your older rifle probably does, but has a built-in scope and seems to deal more damage. You will also be able to walk around to the sniper towers and grab the SVUmk2 sniper rifles and the ammo for those, if you wish.

[Necromancer]

The Red Forest

Whether you attacked the Dutys or the Freedoms, you’ll need to head out to the northeast to reach the Red Forest. If you did wind up attacking the Freedom camp, the soldiers at the outpost nearby will likely be hostile to you, but they may have also wound up deserting their position to head back to the warehouses. Even if that’s the case, you will probably have to wind up fighting off a horde of Monolith soldiers as they attempt to flood into the zone.

Tip: The Red Forest has plenty of small radioactive areas scattered throughout it which you’ll be running into. You’ll want to bring along plenty of anti-rad pills (although many of the soldiers here will drop them) as well as any Crystals, Urchins, or other powerful anti-rad artifacts that you have found.

When you do transfer into the Red Forest, you’ll be facing off against a small encampment of Monolith soldiers. Try to sneak up on them by crouching and getting close before throwing a grenade into the middle of them, then finishing them off with your rifle. As you proceed down the road here, watch out for snipers on either side! Check their bodies, and you should find a SVDm 2, an upgraded sniper rifle that uses the same ammo as the rifles that you’ve already been using.
You’ve got two ways to proceed here: along the road, or through the forest to the west. The road is more highly radioactive, and there are plenty of soldiers in your path, including a few more snipers and one that wields a rocket launcher. The forest is filled with anomalies and snarks, but if you hug the eastern wall, you should be able to avoid them.

Disable the Brain Scorcher

Time to find and disable the artifact that’s zombifying everyone that comes this way (except, apparently, for the Monolith soldiers). Both of the paths will eventually lead you to the same place: the base of a road that leads up to the mountainous area to the east, where the Brain Scorcher facility is located. Be careful of the explosive barrels the soldiers drop down at you as you ascend; be ready to nail them with gunfire before they reach you.

When you reach the facility, your first goal is to find the antennaes outside, but before you can do that, you’ll have a little housecleaning to do. Expect snipers in the towers and plenty of soldiers on the ground, as well as a lot of phantasmagoric shades that will run at you. You can shoot the shades to disperse them, but they appear to do no damage to you even when they hit, so don’t worry about them overmuch.
The snipers in the towers are easy enough to deal with, but some of them are spread out in hard-to-spot spaces, especially since your view is going to be bleached out. Use your binoculars to try and get a box around the ones that you can’t spot to countersnipe them. Or, if you’re reckless, you can try to just run towards the entrance to the underground bunker here. It’s located near the eastern wall of the base. If you spot the train tracks leading underground and can find the rail car located on the eastern side of the base here, you can take the ramp up into the car and then down into the hallway beyond.

Into The Facility

The Brain Scorcher facility is mostly empty, and is very linear, so don’t worry about taking a wrong turn. When you spot the nonfunctional cargo elevator, look for the stairwell nearby and take that down. There’ll be a codelocked door nearby; if you’ve been searching the bodies of the soldiers you’ve been killing, you may have the code in your PDA’s Diary section. It’s 342089 - the safe has a number of first aid kits, grenade, and some ammo.
Keep proceeding from there until you find a set of four generators. The last generator will have a stairwell nearby leading to a small corridor. Follow it, step onto the walkways, and flip the switch nearby to shut down the Brain Scorcher.

Escape!

Now comes the hard part: actually leaving the facility. Although it was fairly empty when you came through the first time. Now, however, between 25-30 soldiers are going to be blocking your exit. Backtrack slowly but surely through the facility, using doorways for cover, as you kill your way back out. Don’t forget to use some of the grenades that these guys carry; you can bounce them off of walls and around corners as you claw your way out.
When you reach the exterior of the facility again, the military faction will be waging an all-out war against the Monolith. Both will likely be hostile to you, so try to avoid the bloodshed by circling to the south and west along the walls until you reach the exit to the facility, then sprint back to the road leading down to the east. The Barkeep tells you that he’s holding up a group of Stalkers that are going to try and beat the rush north, which is open to exploration now that you’ve shut down the Brain Scorcher. Head north to the Priyat exit to meet up with them.

[Necromancer]

Pripyat

The stalkers are going to be right by the entrance of the zone here, and indeed they will help you proceed north through Damnation Alley. They aren’t going to take you far, but try to stick with them nonetheless, as they’ll point out snipers in the windows and on the rooftops of the buildings on either side of you. Quicksave as you proceed and reload if you get wasted. Eventually the stalkers will head into an underground carpark, where they’ll stop - you’ll have to go on alone.
Head north across the square after moving up the car ramp nearby, but be careful! Soldiers with gauss rifles will snipe you as you move; if you still have your sniper rifle handy, it’d be useful to take them out before proceeding onward.

Find the Secret Stash in the Hotel

If you talked to Guide in Cordon, then spoke to Doctor in the Agropom sewers, you should have this mission in your log. You’re supposed to reach a hotel in the Priyat district which lies directly north of the carpark that the Stalkers take shelter in. You should have a waypoint on your map for it, assuming you did, in fact, speak to Doctor. At any rate, you can head to the hotel, take the stairs up one floor, find the door on the western side of the hallway that can open, then take the Decoder and the Documents. The Decoder will apparently let you open a secret door in the Monolith control system. Presumably we’ll get to use it later on.
When you hit the hotel stash, you then have to find your way to the north, to the other marker point, that will lead you to Chernobyl itself. You have two basic options here: head up the eastern side of Pripyat, or the western side. Taking the western approach is the less confrontational, although there is a large group of Monolith soldiers inside a building worshiping a Moonlight artifact. Kill them and take it if you want to get +109 Endurance. Heading up the eastern side is much more dangerous, as there’s a soldier with a rocket launcher there, as well as another gauss-rifle wielding sniper in the distance who’s hard to hit.

Reach The Power Plant

After reaching the entrance to the stadium on the northern end of Pripyat, a bizarre little cutscene will occur, and you’ll actually have to deal with a loading screen that will shunt you off to a new area. The military and the Monolith factions are in all-out war outset the Chernobyl power plant, and neither of them are going to stop and verify your identity before taking you. (Although, even if they did verify your identity, they’d probably kill you anyway.)
Your goal now is to reach the entrance to Chernobyl, which can be difficult to do since your map doesn’t function very well here. You have to head far to the west to get there, but that can be difficult since most of the area in front of you as you enter the zone is open space, which will leave you open to sniper fire and the assaults of the helicopters that swoop in out of nowhere. To make matters a bit more difficult, you have a timer that starts counting down after you enter the zone, indicating that a "blowout" is about to occur. After you enter the zone, you have about five minutes before the countdown begins, and then five minutes for the countdown itself, which gives you around ten minutes all told to work through the area.

Chernobyl Exterior

If you want to avoid a fight here, try heading along the curved road to the northeast and avoiding most of the soldiers that way; there are powerful suction anomalies in that direction, though, so do your best to avoid them. If you don’t mind getting shot up a bit, you can just follow the fence to your left and proceed to the north. Both paths will lead to the same direction: a large railway gate leading off to the west, where the power plant itself is located.
See the large building on the north side of this road? That’s Chernobyl. See the buildings on the southern side of the road? That’s where annoying men with gauss rifles will be shooting at you from. Try to stick close to the northern building here; there’s plenty of small structures that will protect you from the sniper fire and the helicopter annoyances. Make your way along the path here, hugging the walls, until you reach the entrance to the facility, then dash to it and head inside. There’s a small hole with a ladder in it here; head towards it to reach the interior of Chernobyl. If you don’t make it to the end before the blowout timer counts all the way down, the entire area will be bathed in radiation, cooking you within another minute or so, even if you do manage to dose yourself with pills.

[Necromancer]

Chernobyl Interior

Many Monolith soldiers patrol the interior, with most of them wearing military exoskeletons. Although the first one you encounter drops a gauss rifle (likely the first one you’ll actually be able to pick up), it, and any other sniper rifles you have, won’t be of much use in the cramped quarters here. Best to stick with your GP 37, if you’re still using it, or another assault rifle, and go for headshots. Even the nice shotguns these guys drop won’t be of much help against their exoskeletons.
Now, if you wish, you can find an exoskeleton here of your own. If you follow the corridors in front of you, you’ll eventually note that it splits off into two directions. Through a door to your left, there’ll be a concentration of four or five soldiers, while around the corner to your right, there will be a couple soldiers with shotguns and a room full of vertical piping. In the corner of the piping room is a ladder leading downward. There’s a stash here with a bunch of ammo and an exoskeleton suit for you, but the exoskeleton suit weighs a full 15 kilograms, and only gives you a 30% radiation protection rating, meaning that you’ll get slowly roasted if you attempt to wear it, at least without a number of anti-rad artifacts on your belt.
After wading through the soldiers through the doorway, in the room that acts as their barracks, look around on the floor; one of them will likely have dropped an FT 200M rifle. It won’t have quite the same amount of accuracy as your GP 37, but will deal a bit more damage. The extra recoil might make it not worth your while; it’s up to you.

The Wish Granter

Anyway, adventure on until you reach a stairwell leading up to a set of square hallways that all connect to one another. There are two paths to take here. One, near the southeast corner of the hallways, will lead you up to the Wish Granter and one way to end of the game. Climb over the rubble and find the ladder leading upwards. When you enter the Wish Granter room, find the small, pulsating white teleporter and jump to it. It'll warp you to the top of the room. Follow the path in front of you around the room until you reach the Wish Granter, then touch it. It'll apparently give you different endings based on certain character attributes. We had over 200,000 RU on our character, so we got a rather negative ending based around our character's desire to be rich.

The Secret Lab

In the northern hallway, though, in the set of square hallways below the Wish Granter chamber, there’s a ladder in a doorway underneath a rotating yellow klaxon light. If you head up there, you’ll be able to use the electronic decoder you obtained in Pripyat. Head to the door up there, use it, then wait 30 seconds until it opens to head through. Soldiers will assault you while you’re waiting, spawned somehow by the Monolith, so hide behind the metal boxes near the door and keep them back with grenades until you can safely make it through to the Secret Lab. If you manage to duck behind the larger boxes, though, you can simply crouch down until the door opens; none of them will notice you and thus you won’t have to fight any of them.

The lab here is, again, full of enemies, and there are some annoyingly long hallways to fight through. After entering the level, you’re going to want to head down the hallway to your left first, so concentrate on taking out some of the soldiers there, then dashing forward to the small alcove across the hallway there, which you can use as cover. There are going to be gauss-rifle using soldiers firing on you from the far end of the hallway, so try to avoid exposing yourself as best you can.
When you enter the hallway to your left, you’ll have to start fighting your way to the corner of each hallway, taking right turns at each of them. Stick to the small off-rooms, but be aware that there are going to be soldiers in some of them, so quicksave often!
Eventually you will reach a control room off to the left of the set of hallways that you're exploring. Grenade out the soldiers inside and enter the small, darkened room here. If you want to visit any parts of the game before the end, then make a full save here, as the door will close behind you after you head through.

The True Endings

When you enter the final room here, the door shuts and you're stuck in a room with six or seven small purple contraptions sticking up out of the ground. Gosh, they look important! You should probably shoot them, then!
As you blast away at the pillars, flame anomalies will open up around you. Ignore them as best you can as you fire away at the pillars. When all of them are destroyed, you'll begin speaking with a Matrix-y fellow who will tell you a bit of the backstory behind your adventure thus far, then offer you two choices. If you agree to join the consciousness project, then the game will end with a cinematic cutscene. If you refuse, however...

Returning Control To Humanity

The consciousness group will teleport you outside of Chernobyl, into the "backyard" of the facility, so to speak. You'll be able to return to the interior zone, if you wish, but all you will find is a locked door.
Anyway, the field outside of where you're teleported is full of junk, and will soon be full of soldiers that will be teleported in to fight you. Protect yourself as best you can from their gunfire, shooting them if necessary, until you can reach another one of the little while teleportation devices here.
At this point, your adventure is only just beginning. Each of the little white teleporters will send you to another zone of the field that you're in. Your goal is to reach a teleporter, warp to another small area, clear it of enemies so that you can explore, find another teleporter, then repeat the process. Some of the teleporters are hidden from sight; for instance, one of them will require you to jump through a broken barricade atop a building and fall through the warp. Finding the warps can be difficult, as can surviving the enemy assaults.
After a long series of warps, though (perhaps 20 or more total), you will eventually warp right into a cutscene that apparently represents the "best" ending to the game.

[Necromancer]