As a first-person shooter, if you don't have any ammo in Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl, you won't be doing much shooting. The game's economy is also such that you're often better off spending your hard-earned money on upgrades, healing items, and repairs than ammo. Knowing where and how to get excess ammo is therefore paramount, especially on higher difficulties.

It's lucky, then, that amassing huge piles of ammo is fairly easy, even if the quality of the ammo might be lacking. There's no hack to getting massive stacks of the best ammo in the game, but neither is it difficult to do. There are more than enough enemies out in the world more than willing to part with their bullets, and several other simple methods of collecting the ammunition you need to progress.

Buy It

The obvious answer, yes, but there's no more consistent way to get ammo in the Zone than to visit a settlement and buy it. Every weapon merchant in Stalker 2 will have several stacks of ammo of various kinds, with the more remote and dangerous-to-reach locations having more and better choices.

Keep in mind that buying ammo is also the least optimal use of your money. Repairing and modifying your weapons and armor should be your primary concern, but there will be times after a long run in the Zone when your stores are exhausted and spending some coupons is the only option you have to put the fire back in your firepower.

The other benefit of buying your ammo rather than scavenging is that you're only likely to need to spend money on bullets after you've spent a long time in the wilderness and have lots of loot to offload. There are few things more satisfying in Stalker 2 than returning to safety, selling your collection, and leaving with more cash than you came in with.

Loot It From Enemies And Their Guns

Most of the enemies in the early game don't have the best ammo, but they are plentiful, and they'll always have at least a few rounds on them when looted. You can also unload their weapon's magazines by opening the contextual menu on the inventory screen and selecting Unload or holding down the interact button when looking at a weapon on the ground.

That's all there is to actually looting enemies and their weapons for ammo, but here's a trick to making a bit of extra money while ammo farming. Whenever you take out a human enemy and go over to loot them, pick up their weapon before rifling through their things.

Once you're in the inventory screen, quickly check to see whether the gun you picked up has a yellow or red broken shield icon. Red ones you can't sell right away, but yellow ones you can. Empty them of bullets and then, if you have the inventory space and weight limit, add it to your pack.

As long as you can make it back to a settlement safely, you've collected extra ammo and made a tidy profit by selling the guns.

Loot Loose Ammo And Crates In Enemy Bases

The least efficient but most high-value method of gathering ammo is to explore the world and loot all the enemy bases that litter the Zone. Look for warehouses in the distance, broken-down factories, and other large structures that don't seem like they'd be on the main story quest.

Make sure you check every room for the green boxes on shelves and on the floor. These are ammo crates, and you'll know them by the yellow bullet symbol on their tops.

You can break these boxes open by shooting them or, preferably, by hitting them with your knife. Some will have sub-par ammo, and others will have the good stuff.

Enemy bases are also likely to house plenty of loose loot as well, from food to ammo of all kinds. Whenever you clear an optional enemy encampment, search every open room and floor for spare rounds. You're bound to come away with more than you expect and can use.

Loot Stashes

Stashes are one of the many optional loot sources in the game, and there are dozens of them per region in the Zone, many of them respawning or randomly assigned. Most stashes, even in the Lesser Zone, have a dozen of rounds from weapons you can find in that region, and if you're hurting for ammo, anything will do.

The bespoke stashes, those linked to PDAs or optional quests in the open world, will always have more and better ammo than the ones the game generates and sometimes have weapons to boot. Even if all you do is sell the contents of the stash, you're closer to a stack of better ammo no matter what.

Don't Waste What You Have

One of the best ways to always have ammo on hand is to not use what you already have, and if you have to fight, only use the absolute minimum of what you need.

In practice, that means keeping all of your weapons in single-fire mode, even against mutants. Firing full-auto can quickly cause your aim to be go off-target, but tap-firing remains an efficient way to fight without wasting bullets.

You can also stick only to your favorite pistol and keep your primary weapons for tougher fights like heavily armored humans or the tanky Bloodsucker and Poltergeist mutants.

Consider keeping a powerful single-shot primary weapon handy for mutants, as well. A rifle or SMG is good for fighting other human enemies, but because mutants tend to stick relatively close to you and have such high health pools, a shotgun can be a better choice of supplementary firepower than another rifle.

That's not to say there aren't moments when you should mag dump an enemy, and against something like a Controller, you'll need to put a lot of lead downrange to put the beast down. That, among many other reasons, is why you should always have as much ammo for your equipped weapons as you can get your hands on.