Interesting Experiences

[Master Bates 0]

Hello, everyone. I've been a lurker on this forum for quite some time, and just recently decided to register in order to show some support for what is easily my absolute favorite Stalker mod. Keep up the excellent work!

 

Anyway, I recently started a new playthrough of SHOC with the latest English release of AMK, along with the AMK Arsenal mod. I've equipped myself with a PP-19 Bizon submachine gun and a Mosin-Nagant M1891/30 rifle (easily one of my absolute favorite guns ever; I own one in real life and it's incredible), both taken from deceased bandits at the Cordon car park. After clearing the car park with Petruha, rescuing Nimble, and retrieving the reinforced bandit jacket for him, I spent some time wandering the Cordon, completing jobs, scavenging for useful loot and just generally exploring. While returning to the village one day to stash some goodies, I noticed a green dot on the minimap where no green dot should normally be found - namely, heading towards the military outpost, apparently running full tilt.

 

Following this dot and peering at the individual it represented, I noticed it was apparently Nimble, either trying to escape the Zone or attempting a one-man assault on a hostile barricade defended by a number of elite troops, two armored personnel carriers and an attack helicopter while equipped with nothing more than a shotgun I sold him and a rusty old Makarov. Unsurprisingly, the poor fool was cut down by fire from the outpost as soon as he got into range - before he was even able to get a single shot off. I then watched as a Spetsnaz bastard strolled casually out of the base and proceeded to loot my friend's corpse. Soon after, soldiers began to stream out of the outpost, led by the Spetsnaz soldier in question. I counted well over a dozen heavily-armed men converging on the village. I drew my trusty rifle, quickly switching out my old surplus rounds for the five precious high-quality bullets I had 'liberated' from a local bandit. Settling into a comfortable position behind the cover of a large tree, I waited.

 

I didn't have to wait long - I noticed, astonishingly, fire coming from the rookie village at something to my right - and, even more surprisingly, bodies began to appear there! First one, then two, and finally - after one phenomenal grenade throw by one of the rookies - five army bastards lay dead before I even got the chance to see the enemy, and without a single one of ours lost! It wasn't over yet, of course - the army still had many more men to throw at us, and they put them to good use, with two approaching up the road and four or five more coming at me from my left flank - the east side of the village, in other words. I took a deep breath, leaned out from behind the tree, and sighted in on the two closest enemies, a pair of Spetsnaz troopers creeping down the road, in the open, with no cover whatsoever. It was almost too easy. Two bullets, two headshots, two dead enemies.

 

Assuming I would soon be forced to repeat this ritual, I spun to my left, just in time to see two of the Ukraine's finest get sucked into a Mincer anomaly and killed, while a third was mauled to death by a wild boar. It was pitifully easy to mop up the remaining few, and checking my minimap revealed that my comrades in the village had managed to eliminate two more soldiers while I was busy! It seemed that we had defeated the counterattack, and all we lost was my moron friend, Nimble!

 

I let out a triumphant shout, putting away my rifle and eagerly running forth to loot the bodies of the slain soldiers. I had just reached the fresh corpse of my first kill when a rocket barrage from a passing helicopter killed me.

 

So after reloading from my quicksave, I let out a triumphant shout, put away my rifle and eagerly ran forth to hide in a basement, where I stayed until the helicopter went away. Astonishingly, despite essentially being a flying tank, it didn't successfully kill anyone (although Wolf ended up needing a medkit). I went out and looted the bodies of all the soldiers who had died outside the range of the BTRs, including the one who I had seen looting Nimble's body (getting me back the bandit jacket and a pair of artifacts I had sold to Nimble). I distributed their weapons - a mix of AKS-74U carbines, AK-74 assault rifles, a single AN-94 Abakan, and the usual assortment of pistols - to the village's inhabitants, along with most of their ammunition, food, and medical supplies. The military has never hassled us since, nor has anyone or anything else, what with everyone in the village being equipped with a vast assortment of military-grade hardware.

 

Tomorrow, I tell you the story of 'The Pack', the largest grouping of wild dogs I have ever seen, and how it brought down Major Kuznetsov's extortion racket.