Be strong, Helmut. That radiation is serious business.

Some advice: get yourself a hunting rifle, it'll be your main artillery for a good portion of the early game.

Also, after a few hours in the Swamps you will have the opportunity to move forward into the Cordon, where you will immediately encounter one of the most obnoxious and annoying insta-death traps ever committed to code. Just... be patient. There is a way through. Toggle crouch and cut hard left, creeping forward low until you get to the knocked-down tree, then RUN FOR IT. About fifty attempts later you'll get through. Don't lose faith.

By the way, there's a mod that improves the accuracy of the game's weapons so they're vaguely realistic. I will attempt to track it down for you.

It took me a while to get the hang of the new, busier PDA map, but it's invaluable once you're deep into the open world section of the game, when your participation in the faction wars leads to an ever-changing control landscape. The biggest problem I had was actually with the grenade-o-meter: I could never figure out whether the little arrow pointed in the direction of the grenade, or whether the icon itself did. I got blown up many, many times.

More advice: whenever you enter or leave a region, expect a blowout, particularly in the Garbage. It is quite possible to get stuck in a situation where you cannot reach cover before the emission occurs, so it's wise to carry a few energy drinks for long-term sprints.

You have seen a blowout - your very first mission upon leaving Clear Sky's camp, when you helped that fellow against the wild boars. Believe me, you will know when a blowout is about to occur. It's a thunderstorm from hell. In general you need solid shelter: a building, a tunnel, a... well, a building or a tunnel. They will kill you instantly if you are not sheltered. Usually you have 1-3 minutes, real time, from the first warnings to the moment the actual blowout hits.

Anomalies don't move, but they are nearly invisible in Clear Sky, so you have to get used to tossing bolts around, and listening to the beep of your detector. Artifacts are invisible, and it is well worth the investment to purchase a high-quality artifact detector, because unlike Shadow, artifacts are worth a frickin' fortune in this game. Interesting trivia: the original plan for STALKER, as seen in the 1935 build, was for completely invisible anomalies and artifacts. The developers decided it would be annoying, and they were probably right.

Weapon upgrades are fun and a huge portion of the open world game, because your weapons - being repair-able - become very close friends. Some of the effects are unclear in English due to lack of explanation ("Flatness," for example, reduces the parabolic trajectory a bullet travels over long distances), but doing upgrades is hugely fun.

God dammit, Helmut, now I want to play Clear Sky again, but I have this Demon's Souls problem...

1) Lebedev should have given you a basic (read: crappy) Detector when you went out to help the dude on the tower before your first blowout. Use detectors to locate artifacts within anomalies. Artifacts are invisible in Clear Sky, and some anomalies are damn close. Artifact hunting is one of the fastest ways to get rich and one of the easiest ways to die, as anomalies are much more deadly this time around. You can only bring out your detector when you have a pistol or bolts (or nothing) in the other hand - behold:

That's a top of the line detector, which you should endeavor to purchase asap.

2) Blueprints are hard to find; usually in stashes. I tended to use nighttime hours to locate stashes and daytime hours to accomplish tangible goals. Over time you'll come upon plenty, but one of the many breaks in the game is that GSC forgot to include some of the blueprints you're tasked with finding.

3) Quest churn dies down a little bit later on, depending on which faction you're a member of. Clear Sky and the Stalkers are almost always under attack by someone, hence the "help us" messages. Freedom and Duty tend to only attack each other, and they're separated by the Garbage, so they don't fight much unless you join one. The Bandits, which are extremely hard to find or join, are usually attacking rather than defending, and Monolith sort of does its own thing. You can certainly ignore help request radios, unless you're in the neighborhood or it's on your way. The only reason to do them is that when you help, they'll usually reward you back at faction headquarters.

4) Trade plays a slightly larger role in Clear Sky, as some weapons don't become available as loot until you've bought them or found them in special stashes. This is particularly true of advanced sniper rifles, which are a godsend later on. In general, though, I use most of my cash for repairs and upgrades, and loot for ammo and medkits, much like you.

Yeah, I probably should have warned you about that. The good news is you can get everything back - they're lurking near those big concrete blocks kind of across from the vehicle dump. Look in the box, everything will be there.

Atmosphere isn't nearly as strong in Clear Sky. One of the big complaints I had is how bright and sunny the place is. I mean, I'm sure there are sunny days in the Exclusion Zone, but the game should be gloomier. I suspect this was done in part because this is the "early" Zone, before it started aggressively defending itself. It does get more atmospheric closer to the end, when you visit the Military Warehouses and the town of Lumansk.

That early artifact detector is basically a death sentence, Helmut. It beeps in proximity to artifacts, but doesn't tell you where you are in relation to them. In order to actually find an artifact you have to practically walk right into it - then it appears on the ground and floats there like an artifact from Shadow - and as you say, if you try that with most anomalies you'll get hurt or killed. You might be right next to the artifact, but the anomaly might be between you and it. Your current detector can't tell you where an artifact is, only that one is nearby.

The next available artifact detector gives you direction and proximity, while the third shows you flat out where the artifact is. Even so, artifact hunting is incredibly dangerous and requires patience, quicksaves, and lots of bolt-throwing. The tradeoff is that artifacts can be worth tens of thousands of Rubles, and selling a few will solve your money problems for a long, long time.

I would have thought that boxed versions would, by now, have been patched to 1.5 already. It's been like a year, for crying out loud. The good news is that you have a clear picture of what's going on and you can breeze through already-completed stuff and move on to decide how (if at all) you choose to involve yourself in the Faction War. The back-and-forth of it, watching small strike squads from either side hurrying through no-man's land toward their objectives, is all pretty cool. Once it begins to get dull, the game essentially tells you it's time to move on, so it's a very well-implemented system all around.

I'd pbe playing Clear Sky with you, Helmut, but I have this... relationship with Demon's Souls, and it doesn't let me leave the room or visit another device to "protect my honor." I also have to wear a burqa, and damn but these things make you warm.