The Stalker Location Tier List | S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Anomaly, EFP and GAMMA

Hey, In this video I rank all the Locations from S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Anomaly including both the EFP and GAMMA mod pack. Please give any feedback either live while I'm streaming or in the comments. Thank you and enjoy the video.

00:00 - Intro
00:17 - Agroprom
00:33 - Army Warehouse
00:57 - CNPP
01:16 - Cordon
01:34 - Darkscape
01:55 - Dark Valley
02:07 - Dead City
02:32 - Deserted Hospital
02:43 - Garbage
03:01 - Generators
03:11 - Great Swamps
03:31 - Jupiter
03:51 - Limansk
04:02 - Meadow
04:11 - Outskirts
04:26 - Pripyat
04:34 - Radar
04:50 - Red Forest
05:03 - Rostok
05:15 - Truck Cemetary
05:26 - Wild Territory
05:37 - Yantar
05:48 - Zaton
06:04 - Agroprom Underground
06:16 - Lab X18
06:27 - Lab X16
06:33 - Lab X19
06:44 - Jupiter Underground
06:52 - Lab X8
07:04 - Sarcophagus
07:18 - Outro

[MattStevens]

I think it's unanimous among Stalkers. If you want a beginner to be so scarred from a first playthrough, tell them to go to the Red Forest.

[bierrollerful]

Red Forest really tickles the monkey part of my brain... scanning the area for the silhouettes or signs of predators.
In most other zones enemies are easy to spot, but in Red Forest enemy camouflage actually works annoyingly well.

[EdTheDragonSlayer]

If you're one of the "good guys" (Mercs and Banditos), Dark Valley is a great comfy place to farm for money. Both Sultan and the Bandit merchant give lots of quests, and they're usually local.

The best quest chain is when Sultan gives you a quest to kick out some Stalkers at the farmhouse, and sometimes he gives another quest to off some stalker in the same location. He also gives you 4 guys to tag along every time. And if you go talk to the merchant he would give you a mutant hunt quest and/or contract on some military in the factory, basically on your way to the farm house. And Dark Valley is one of the smaller maps with least anomalies, so it's a 2-3 minutes run to the farm house (5-10 minutes if complete the mutant quest and the factory quest). All the targets basically sit at the campfire waiting to be mowed down. Sometimes if Mercs were already at the farm house they'll just kill your objectives for you. And you get to keep the extra 4 gunmen Sultan give to you indefinitely until you turn in the quest.

That's 4 quests (basically 35, 000 rubles in the bag) with minimal effort that you can knocked out in a straight line, along with free extra help for whatever. Granted, you either have to be Merc or Bandit but Dark Valley is definitely S-tier resort retirement community for me.

[vitezslavslavik]

Great swamps, Radar, Dark Valley, Truck Cemetery are all very atmospheric location representing the true danger of the zone. Definitely at least the C tier for all of them.

[anthonychase]

CNPP is one of the coolest maps in the game in my opinion, not every area has to be something densely packed with factions, jobs, etc. It's cool for being the goal of the first game to reach, and the real life and lore significance of it to the disaster that started the zone

[vladbat]

I like Dark Valley as an early game place to do missions on a Bandit character or a faction that's neutral with Bandits. I've had 2-3 missions stacked onto the farm location and having the free companions makes them a breeze, it's a great path early game for stashes, loot, and money. Often there's a mission to kill military outside the Labs location with them often dropping pretty decent stuff. So I think it could rank higher given the possible loot and early game progress to be made. :P

[freddymedina-uimm]

One of the biggest perks of setting up your base at yanov station in Jupiter is that for some reason it has two mechanics, so you'll get double crafting materials especially if you give them both tools. Also my man did the red forest dirty. Yes it is dangerous as heck but boi is it fun

[graywolf]

Red forest is at least A tier. It may not have the greatest number of artefact spawns, but the sheer scale of enemies to kill means you can fill up on loot very fast. Perfect for farming monolith and mercenaries.

[windowlicker]

One thing about the Sarcophagus, after killing Monolith there, with enough time passed mutants do actually spawn, and worst of all - plenty of Poltergeists which often take a huge chunk of time to reach whilst they're all chugging everything that is on the ground. If anyone is doing an Invictus run or wanting to return for gear, highly recommend avoiding it or at least carrying a lot healing items with you and preferably entering from the northern side

[blastmanutz]

Oh man I'm not sure about Limansk... To me this is also an S tier location. There's so many monoliths there usually that it's very nice to just go there and farm them. They will drop a lot of suppressors and scopes + other good loot (including meds), it's a very lucrative way of making money without even doing quests. Given it's narrow design (mainly the outpost chokepoint), this makes for very good cover and it's nearly impossible to get flanked if you know how to tactically approach this map.

I'd say to an experienced anomaly player, Limansk is easily at least A-tier for loot, for me probably S.

Tip: Just make sure to bring some companions with you, you will want their carrying capabilities as well. You really do get that much loot on average.

[capital-j]

I really feel like there's few areas that capture the butthole-puckering tension of Stalker better than The Red Forest. It's where I go when I want to show my friends on discord what Stalker is all about. Intense patches of radiation, anomalies everywhere, Monolith waiting everywhere in ambush, the howls of mutants surrounding you as you inch your way through the dense thicket of trees... I'm on edge the entire time I'm there, but that unique sense of tension and impending danger is precisely why I choose to enter the zone every time. The Red Forest will forever be 'S' tier in my book.

[pecadorr]

Cordon for me its S tier. Nostalgia at its peak

[hilburnlayton]

Keep up the content. The best S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Anomaly content creator right now.

[TheKaragatzuClan]

I'd also tier locations based on building accessibility. If an emission erupts, places like Truck Cemetery, DarkScape, or even Jupiter or Zaton can be hell if you haven't planned accordingly. I always check the PDA messages tab to see when a Stalker has alerted you to an emission or psy-storm. The PDA also give you an in game clock to keep track of the hours until an emission.

[Voidbeep]

Always nice to see a fellow toaster enjoying their time in The Zone! My personal favorites are of course Army Warehouses and, for a sneaky early game trick, Wild Territory, in which I start in Rostok, hope that a random duty guy gets killed by a pseudodog by the Wild Territory entrance, yoink a gun off their corpse and go to get possibly easy early sneaky headshots on the two mercs sniping from the building as early game there's a good chance the snipers at the entrance wont be there yet, usually gets decent stuff at the start. Nothing to G36 in two to three minutes possibly. Anyways, love your content! Keep em coming!

[mrquang]

Radar... got to say it was the tough one. You can go with the road and encounter lots of Monolith or walk in the forest and got chased by 2 chimera at a time. But you can find a lot of artifact after few night. If you take time to prepare before going to radar, the time you get there will be raining artifact.

[Jaka.Ellinsworth]

There's one trader near the mine in Red Forest where you can create stash there, sleep safely and basically farming ALL the monolithians while throw ALL those items in said stash.

[novAviator]

The vine anomaly apartments in the outskirts is where I usually put my base in late game non Ironman runs so I agree with the A tier

[dylanwight]

Worth mentioning that Agroprom has an additional semi-independant underground area. There is very little reason to explore it although it's arguably as visually interesting as the Jupiter-Pripyat Tunnel.

[Sssquatch]

Just started playing and I'm moving my portable workshop stash to garbage. For starting out I think it's a perfect place to set up since it's kinda in the middle and you can go to all the beginning spots with no problem from there.