Repairing weapons in STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl is critical, as you don’t want to find yourself in the irradiated wasteland with broken tools.
In this STALKER 2 guide, we’ll walk you through how to repair weapons and detail what to do with broken weapons.
How to repair your weapons and gear in STALKER 2
As you use your items or carry them around the wasteland, they’ll lose durability. After a time, they’ll develop a little yellow icon, indicating they’ve been beaten down, at which point you should consider repairing or selling them. If you continue to use them, they’ll degrade even further and become broken.
To stop that from happening, you can visit a technician, which is indicated by a little wrench icon on your map in any major town. The first technician you’ll meet is in Zalissya, the first village you come across in STALKER 2 (and also where you’ll start “The Poppy Field” side quest). His name is Lens, and he’ll teach you about how to make use of a technician’s services.
While interacting with Lens, hit the button prompt in the lower right corner to enter his upgrade menu. Here you can pay to upgrade your gear, but you can also pay him to repair it. The cost of repairs escalates more and more as your items break, so it’s best to visit a technician regularly to keep one item from becoming too expensive to ever reasonably recover.
What to do with broken gear in STALKER 2
Unfortunately, the best thing to do with broken gear in STALKER 2 is to not let it break in the first place.
Once an item has a red shield mark over it, it means the durability has fallen to such a degree that it’s considered broken or near-broken. At this level, vendors will no longer buy these items off of you, and they’ll be extremely costly to repair, requiring thousands of Coupons for a single item.
When you find an item that’s broken out in the wild, or an item that you’re using becomes broken, your best bet is to unload the weapon (which is an option when hovering over it in your menu) to reclaim any ammo that’s in it, drop it on the ground, and move on.
If a weapon or gear piece that’s particularly precious to you breaks, throw it in your stash until you can afford to fix it. But given just how much of a resource sink broken items can be, you want to keep your threshold for “precious” very, very high.