Gear is everything in STALKER 2. In a grounded and hardcore shooter like this one that's devoid of skill trees, fancy abilities, and zippy movement, one of the only ways you can get a leg up on The Zone's threats is by finding quality gear and implementing it into your loadout. Whether you're up against hostile bands of stalkers, deadly packs of mutants, or lethal fields of anomalies, having good weapons, strong armor, and plenty of ammo and supplies dramatically increases your odds of survival and success.
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Luckily, there's quite a bit of good gear to get in STALKER 2's early game, much of which will surely carry you through a large portion of your playthrough like it carried me. Some of the best gear, though, is found in special stashes left for you by an enigmatic character called the Journalist. You'll get the locations of these stashes marked on your map for you once you finish the main story quest "A Needle in a Haystack" in which you have to find the stalker Squint and recover sensors he stole from the Ward faction, as the Journalist will leave a USB drive in your stash at Zalissya (the yellow box near the bed you can use).
Picking the drive up will begin the side quest "Seek, and you shall find" and reveal the locations of stashes in the Lesser Zone, Garbage, Swamp, Rostok, and Duga regions of The Zone (they appear on your map as white circles with three triangles in them). These have tons of great loot, including pristine PTM (pistol), Viper-5 (SMG), AR416 (assault rifle), and M860 Cracker (shotgun) firearms, some choice suits of armor, stockpiles of ammo, and other valuables.
I didn't prioritize grabbing these as soon as possible in my playthrough, as since their locations are directly given to you, I figured their contents wouldn't be much to write home about. Don't make that mistake. Even though many of the earlier stashes don't always have very unique loot, the fact their guns are in mint condition means you can save money on repairing broken weapons to use. The Light Mercenary Suit in one of the Lesser Zone stashes is also one of the best early game suits of armor there is in terms of a protection-to-weight ratio, and the one in the Swamps you'll approach during main story progress has an incredible Wanderer Suit with five artifact slots and stellar damage reduction.
Another nice thing about the Journalist's stashes is that compared to many other random ones you'll get coordinates to, they're in safe and easy-to-reach places that only require a bit of simple climbing. Because of that, there's no reason not to seek them out as quickly as you can and put their loot to good use.
STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl has arrived on Xbox Series X|S and Windows PC, and is one of this year's best Xbox games and best PC games. It has a $59.99 MSRP, but notably, you can get it for a discount at CDKeys right now. You can also play it through Xbox Game Pass, PC Game Pass, and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate.
