That was quick. Just a few days after patch 1.0.2 addressed a bunch of mission bugs, patch 1.0.3 arrived for Stalker 2 this morning to… well, to address a bunch more mission bugs. Look, Stalker 2 is a buggy game, so this is gonna take a while. And it's gonna take a lot of bandwidth: today's patch is about 20GB.

Hopefully it'll result in a better experience for all you artifact hunters. The patch makes "multiple" fixes to crashes and memory leaks, disables mouse smoothing and mouse acceleration to decrease input lag for PC players, and tackles a bunch of problems with the main mission and side missions.

Most of these fixes involve spoilers, so I'll redact them below, but you can see the full if you want specifics. Vaguely put: a dead monster was despawning too quickly and players who needed to recover something from its corpse were unable to, some enemies were chasing players further than they should, a couple of essential characters were dying when they shouldn't, and one dude was becoming insta-hostile if they noticed players using stealth. These are all progress-halting issues, so it's great that they're being resolved, especially so quickly after the last patch.

There are also a couple fixes for AI—no, not the complete repair of , unfortunately—such as an issue with NPC stalkers annoyingly blocking doorways and monster bodies acting strangely while being shot. A vendor also wasn't selling certain ammo types so that's been fixed as well.

I haven't gotten back to Stalker 2 yet myself—I played about 8 hours last week but decided to let a few more patches roll in because, surprise, I kept losing progress to bugs. Glad there's progress being made in that department, [[link]] so maybe I'll head back into the Zone sometime [[link]] soon.

Here are the patch notes:

Crashes and memory leaks:

• Multiple ACCESS_VIOLATION_ERROR fixes.
• Multiple LowLevelFatalError crash fixes.

Controls adjustments:

According to your feedback, we adjusted following parameters/values to decrease input lag on keyboard+mouse input:

• Mouse Smoothing is disabled by default.
• Mouse Acceleration is disabled by default.

Additionally, default values of mouse sensitivity were updated to allow a predictable default experience for our players with new values of two parameters mentioned bellow:

• Camera sensitivity: 25%.
• Aim sensitivity: 15%.

Main and side missions:

• Fixed issue with [spoiler] that were able to chase player outside [spoiler] during the In Search of Past [[link]] Glory mission.
• Fixed an issue where the NPCs [spoiler] and [spoiler] would die after trying to enter a building during the mission On the Edge.
• Fixed issue with [spoiler] which could despawn before player loots a collar from it during In the Name of Science mission.
• Fixed issue with player potentially locking oneself during Dangerous Liaisons mission.
• Fixed issue with [spoiler] becoming hostile upon noticing a player [spoiler] during King of the Hill mission.
• Fixed an issue when [spoiler] despawns in front of the player after the dialog in the bunker during A Heavy Burden mission.
• Fixed issue with NPC's despawning when player successfully finishes Legends of the Zone mission.

AI:

• Fixed an issue with mutant bodies stretching after a shot from an automatic weapon.
• Fixed an issue that caused NPCs to block the doors during the Back to the Slag Heap mission.

Balance:

• Fixed issue with  not selling certain ammo types.

Saves:

• Fixed issues with missing player saves after a hard reboot of the PC/Xbox.