Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl Gets Patch 1.4 With Over 700 Fixes

Patch 1.4 was released for Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl by the game’s developer and publisher, GSC Game World, featuring over 700 improvements and fixes with a main focus on combat.

Improvements to human combat include fixes to numerous bugs and problems with cover usage by NPCs, who can now properly use available cover, will always try to hide before shooting, avoid rushing forward unnecessarily, and also use trees as cover.

Combat and cover animations have been updated to look more fluent and fast. Flanking pathfinding and transitions to close combat have been improved as well. Close combat has become tougher on the Veteran and Stalker difficulties.

Issues in communication and action synchronization between squad members have been resolved. Characters now communicate tactical actions and reactions more clearly during combat.

On top of that, human characters now throw grenades when they want to flush out targets instead of doing so on cooldown. Squads have a finite number of grenades, depending on their rank and faction, with bandits having significantly fewer than the military.

Human characters can now attack mutants in melee using kick attacks against smaller mutants. They can also kick crouched foes. After combat ends, human characters now look around briefly to search for enemies before proceeding to post-combat activities like looting and healing the wounded. Humans can no longer snipe with shotguns, and problems with pellet dispersion and unrealistic ballistic distances have been fixed as well.

Besides that, Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl got AI and balance improvements, multiple crash and performance fixes, and debugging of several side quests, open-world encounters and main missions.

Notably, developers spotlighted such improvements as a fix for an issue where shooting at sausage props would produce blood particles. Another fix addressed a problem where ducks could fly into the water after being shot at.

Launched on Nov. 24, 2025, for Xbox Series X|S and PC, Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl sold 1 million copies within 48 hours of its release. By March 4, 2025, the game had surpassed 6 million copies sold.

As of the time of writing, the game featured a “Very Positive” rating on Steam with 85,386 reviews and an all-time peak of 121,335 players, according to SteamDB.