I reverted to the save where I left the 2nd stash and this time when I got to the 3rd it finished properly with a guy there that was hostile until I spoke to him, then offered a Vodka. I also gave him an anti rad too so he could move on and hopefully stop his whining.
Last thing I did before ending my session was collect a few more stashes. The final one had a pretty good enviro suit down in Burnt Forest. After all those crazy anomalies I'd had enough at that point. I ended up leaving my SEVA V with rad and phys protect upgrades in the chest.
Really getting tired of walking slow everywhere due to being bogged down, and the guides want too much money to fast travel. This game is way more of a grind than the first. It really wears on your nerves. The foliage is nice and all, but I'm starting to dread the way it makes it hard to see
enemies.
Still though, I survive the battles, albeit it often with a few retries after dying. I ended up dropping difficulty to Rookie to dash to the suit in burnt forest though. I almost picked up a Vintar rifle that one enemy dropped in yellow condition (only 4 rounds in it!). I ended up with too much weight to carry it back though.
I also have only 60 9x39 rounds in my safehouse chest, so I have to ask, once a weapon is in your inventory, does the game spawn in enemies with that type of gun/ammo, or at least make it appear in caches? I honestly can't recall if the original series did since it's been so long since I played them.
The more powerful weapons seem to spawn with enemies once you progress further into the storyline and further out from the starting area - it's not always the case, but generally holds true for the most part.
Money can be a pain to get your hands on for a while. Pick up and collect the smaller things such as food, vodka, bandages, medkits and ammo of all kinds and sell, sell, sell. The small items don't take up a lot of weight so you can generally pick up lots of these things. The other end of this is that these items don't sell for much, but if you're constantly getting and selling a few dozen bandages, medkits, stacks of ammo you're not using every time you stop to visit a trader it can really help. Also, selling artifacts that are not really beneficial to you early in the game (like ones that offer weak protection). To me it's hard to justify holding weapons in hopes of selling them because of how much weight they add and the low amount the seem to sell for. Weapon mods are also good things to sell if you don't have an immediate weapon to use them on.
Repairing armor/weapons - the more expensive your items are, the more they cost to repair them. I'd suggest not really worrying about upgrading things much, if at all, when starting out. Just use your weapon/armor as it comes to keep repair costs down. What some people do is just use dropped weapons and discard them when they break.
One thing that does irk me about stashes in the game - almost all of them carry next to nothing useful. Bandages, medkits, vodka, some ammo and that's about it. Rarely do you find a stash with a weapon and the only time you find armor is in a handful of spots throughout the game world and the armor itself isn't even in the stash, it sits next to the stash on a desk/floor/ground. This pretty much kept me from even bothering to track down most stashes after playing the game 30+ hours.
As for being encumbered, you can overcome this some with the right artifacts and also with an exoskeleton armor suit with the right upgrades, but even then it is too easy to hit the encumbrance barriers that slow you down. I found it best to carry as many bottles of water and some energy drinks as I could without impacting my carry weight too much. Energy drinks give a high stamina regen for a short duration (maybe 60 seconds) after you drink one so I'd run until my stamina was depleted, then stand still for about 3-4 seconds to let my stamina quickly fill back up, then run until my stamina was depleted, stop, wait for it to refill - I'd do this 3, maybe 4 times before the energy drink wore off. Then I'd drink another do repeat the process. After a few energy drinks you get the hungry food icon showing up on your screen, then I'd shift to drinking water. Drink a water and run until my stamina was depleted, slam another water and repeat this a couple of times. Water gives you a small food boost and a stamina boost. Then I'd switch back to energy drinks, then to water..... It was tedious as hell, but that's what I did to manage with all the running in the game.
The main thing I recall causing bugs in the original was the use of certain mods. It's funny, I remember thinking at first that hostile AI following you from one region to another was a bug, but then I read that's how the devs made the AI, which was fairly advanced for it's time. Maybe not as advanced as the AI were in original F.E.AR. for it's time though.
The original STLAKER: SoC had a lot of bugs, some were game breaking and even after a couple of patches there were still bugs that caused problems. ATI owners had a lot of problems even playing game until a couple of patches were released. The AI was hit and miss, if you would duck under a pine tree you could generally shoot NPCs and they would never find you. There were bugs. Folks just tend to forget about them over time.
Then there was the "perfect grenade throw" bug in Clear Sky - NPCs could hit you with a grenade from 30 yards out, through a small opening in a roof that you are hiding in and using for cover. By the time the grenade indicator icon showed up on your screen it was too late because the grenade was thrown from so far away it was fully cooked (why it didn't explode in midair is baffling) so it instantly exploded and killed you. Took them a while, but this bug was eventually fixed.
Then the broken faction system of Clear Sky - it was never resolved from official patches, you need to use a mod that someone put together that fixes up 95% of the faction war bugs.
I could go on, but as you see, the original STALKER games were filled with bugs.
