STALKER 2 already has a bunch of mods available (and I recommend many of them)

I’m not saying STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl is perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but I genuinely think it’s going to develop into something beautiful. Granted, the matter of A-Life being borked is still on the table, but the modding💙 scene is already kicking off!

Perhaps this should’ve been obvious from the get-go, given that we had performance optimizing mods mere hours after STALKER 2 came out, but I’m still taken aback by how productive the community’s been in such short order. The main STALKER 2 Nexus website already plays host to over 60 genuinely compelling mods, and some of them I already consider downright necessary. There’s an argument to be made that you shouldn’t really have to mod a game as soon as it’s come out to have an excellent gameplay experience, but I’ve thrown caution to the wind and am happy to have done so.

The modding community has already embraced STALKER 2, suggesting a bright future is ahead

For what it’s worth, I’m still not entirely sure that STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl will be able to entertain quite as prolific of a modding scene as its predecessors have. Unreal Engine 5 isn’t that moddable, and the franchise mainstay X-Ray engine even went effectively open-source at one point in time. Yet, STALKER 2‘s Nexus page already has a huge array of gameplay-tweaking mods that some of you, too, may find indispensable.

Here are a༒ few highlights I myself 🦩have been using so far:

Happy to report that I’ve not had a single problem with any of these mods so far, and installing them’s been easy as pie as well. So, I’m thrilled to say that things are looking up for STALKER 2‘s modding scene already!

With that in mind, there are some caveats worth discussing. For one, all of the mods we’ve seen so far on Nexus concern relatively simple configuration file tweaks and whatnot. It’s going to be substantially more difficult to develop genuinely new content and gameplay features (i.e. new guns, attachments, ammo types, mutants, etc.), and much of that process will rely on GSC Game World’s propensity to release the modding SDK.

As per GSC Game World’s Yevhenii Kulyk, “[the developer is] basically creating and preparing the very big toolkit that will be that will provide the mod makers with basically all necessary tools to create mods from, like the smallest one to, like, big, total conversions.” Kulyk did not provide an ETA as to the mod-kit’s release during the pertinent interview, however, so we’ve got no way of knowing anything about that.

If we want to be cynical, Kulyk also spoke very promisingly about STALKER 2‘s A-Life, only for that to seemingly end up being a confusing dud. This, however, is a developing story and we’ll just have to wait and see what comes of it.

The fact of the matter is that STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl is a genuinely engrossing, albeit obviously undercooked game. The core is there, for sure. Now, GSC “only” needs to push the game into the state it so clearly deserves.