STALKER 2: 12 Essential Mods That Improve Everything

Mods are enhancing the experience of STALKER 2 in ways players are absolutely begging for. From improving stamina regeneration to reducing lag, to changing how mutants drop loot, some mods are tweaking issues before the developers get a chance to release their own patches. And many patches have been released already, changing fundamental features in the Zone. But if those patches aren’t enough for you, customize your experience even more with a whole lot of mods.

We’re going to avoid including mods that claim to improve FPS or enhance performance on PC. While these mods might be extremely useful to you, they’re just a little different than what we’re looking for. We want mods that tweak gameplay in ways that make us wonder — why didn’t the developers do this?

Jake’s Modified Zone Mod

An essential mod for STALKER 2, this early fix extends the time of daylight hours — you can choose variants of 1.5x, 2x, 3x and 4x time. The nights will also last longer, but at least you’ll have more daylight time after sleeping to actually explore before everything becomes impossibly dark.

This mod does a lot of heavy lifting. While the daylight time fix is the marquis change, you’ll also get additional rebalancing — lowered mutant health, improved quest rewards, made traders pay more for loot, made it so NPCs will rarely drop armor, and updated the A-Life system so special events actually spawn sometimes. There’s a lot of change, so check the full playlist below.

Download Jake’s Modified Zone mod here.

Optimized Tweaks S.2 Mod

For anyone dealing with performance issues on STALKER 2, the Optimized Tweaks mod is absolutely essential. This mod works to reduce stutter and improve framerate on any PC. Even if you’re pulling good FPS on your PC, this mod might squeeze a little bit better performance. And it’s always getting updates. There are multiple optimization mods, and this is the most popular. We’ll include a link to another optimization mod below if you’re looking for more options. Both of these mods are worth trying whether you’re into modding or not.

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Download Optimized Tweaks S.2 mod here.

Download Stalker Optimizer mod here.

Reduced Weight Consumables Mod

This mod does exactly what it says — it removes weight or greatly reduces it for basic items like ammo, grenades, food and medical items. Any consumables weigh a lot less, allowing your stalker to spend his time collecting new guns instead of going over your weight limit carrying the bare essentials. Weight limit is such a big deal in this game, you’ll find dozens of mods that alter weight. This isn’t realistic, but so much in STALKER 2 isn’t realistic. And this is just the first of a few essential mods that reduce a little of the monotony of dragging your overencumbered butt to a settlement for selling.

Download the Reduced Weight mod here.

Longer Sprint Mod

Most of STALKER 2 is about slowly sprinting around the zone. Even with energy drinks, you’ll barely be able to run over a single hill before your supposedly athletic Stalker runs out of breath and has to take a break. This mod doubles your sprint length — which still feels like it isn’t enough. The mod lets you choose your difficulty level with 25% / 50% / 75% stamina reduction variants.

Download Longer Sprint mod here.

Better Gunfights Mod

Enemies in STALKER 2 are ridiculously good at shooting you. No matter what range you’re fighting, you’ll be suffering constant damage whenever that red combat alert appears on your compass. If you want to even the odds a little bit, the Better Gunfights makes your adventure a little more tactical by making enemies miss sometimes. They’ll open fire and aren’t guaranteed to hit you with every bullet in their assault rifle magazines.

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Download Maklane’s Better gunfights 2.1 here.

Mutant Loot Mod

In the base version of STALKER 2 fighting mutants is a waste of time. Mutants don’t drop items — so you’re always losing ammo and bandages whenever you fight them. To earn a little something back, the community put together the Mutant Loot mod. Now you can collect loot from mutants. Instead of carrying ammo, mutants have unique materials that are sold for coupons.

Download the Mutant Loot mod here.

And that’s just scratching the surface. Here’s a bunch more incredibly useful mods we didn’t write up entries for — but you really need to try for yourself. The names should give you all the information you need.

• Adjustable Carry Weight Mod
• Reasonable Weapon Degradation Mod
• Sell Broken Stuff Mod
• Readable Ammo Mod
• Axxii’s Stealth Enhancement Mod

With these mods, your STALKER 2 will greatly improve. It’s an amazing game that’s getting patched and improved all the time by the developers — but everyone needs a little extra help, and these mods go a long way toward giving us the ideal STALKER 2.