There are three episodes in the Stalker series of games, each of which gives you access to the open world with an abundance of locations that you can visit and quests that you can complete. Moreover, each of them has an exciting storyline that will last quite an impressive amount of time and will not bother you even for a second. Of course, it will take you far more than a dozen hours to complete all these three games, but at some point they will end, you will completely explore the worlds provided to you, find all the secrets and complete all the tasks. And the peculiarity of "Stalker" is that you will still not have enough: you will want even more adventures, which you can get thanks to special modifications created by users. But for this you need to learn how to install mods on "Stalker: Shadows of Chernobyl."
Compatibility check
The first thing you need to do if you want to figure out how to install mods on "Stalker: Shadows of Chernobyl" is to check the compatibility of the modification with your version of the game. This can be done very simply, since the versions of both the game and the mod are always in the most prominent place. It is very important that they coincide completely. Otherwise, there is a very high probability that the mod simply will not start on your game client. Accordingly, you need to look for either another mod, or install a different version of "Stalker". Moreover, it is necessary to check the presence of the Gamedata folder in the Stalker directory: it is she who is responsible for modifying your game client. If you have one, it means that you have previously installed mods on your client (or it was already supplied with preinstalled mods). This raises the question of the next test, because some modifications are incompatible with each other, so you have to abandon one of them. After all the necessary checks, you can begin to figure out how to install mods on "Stalker: Shadows of Chernobyl."
Installation through the installer
The installer is the best thing you can think of in this case. The fact is that it will greatly facilitate the process of learning how to install mods on Stalker: Shadows of Chernobyl. This is a special file that will do almost all the work for you. From it you will learn how much disk space the modification you are going to install will take, and you can also specify the exact directory with the game, into which the automatic installation will be performed. You just need to wait for its completion and start the game. For the game "Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl," the best mods can be found on popular fan sites, because these add-ons are not official, and the developer will not tell you about them, as they would if they released an official patch and so on.
Manual installation
Unfortunately, not all mods are equipped with an installer, so you have to go a little deeper into the study of this topic in order to understand all aspects. For the game "Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl", new mods are almost all equipped with an installer, but if you decide to install some old version or episode, you will have to do it manually. To do this, you need to unzip the archive downloaded to your computer with the modification. There will be a Gamedata folder, which was already written about earlier. Its contents need to be copied to a folder with the same name in the game directory, if it already exists, or simply copied as a whole if there are no mods on your client yet. In the game "Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl", story modes are usually delivered with installers, but small modifications of textures, weapons, and so on usually need to be installed using the described method.
Fix Fixes
For mods, their creators constantly release fixes that fix errors. Many users think that they need to be installed in some special way, but this is not so. All fixes are installed in the same way as the modifications themselves.