Summary
STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobylupdate 1.3.1 is now available for download. The game’s second patch for March 2025 introduces nearly two dozen changes, largely fixes forSTALKER 2bugs.
Ukrainian developer GSC Game World has released 11 updates for its latest title in the three and a half months that followedSTALKER 2’s November 2024 release. Its patching practices have so far adhered to a pattern of having one major update, followed by one or more minor revisions that further refine it.
This trend has now continued with the March 27 arrival of the 1.3.1 update, which builds onSTALKER 2’s1.3.0 patch from March 18. The new version of the game introduces 22 changes, most of which are bug fixes. A few of these solve critical mission blockers that had a chance of soft-locking players, such as a weird issue where one major character would be missing at a certain lab that the protagonist visits over the course of the Visions of Truth mission.
On a similar note, the 1.3.1 update addresses a known bug in Dawn of a New Day, one ofSTALKER 2’s mid-game story missions, where the task of obtaining the Control Emitter wouldn’t pop up following a certain character’s death. Other missions that have received bug fixes as part of the late March 2025 patch include The Boundary, Chasing Ghosts, Let No One Leave Unsatisfied, Hot on the Trail, Once More unto the Breach, and Dark Times. Ditto for Legends of the Zone, Extreme Simplicity, and The Road to the Foundation. The 1.3.1 update also resolves an issue with an NPC blocking a certain watchpost entrance during a mission whose name spoils one big story event. The patch includes 15 quest-specific fixes in total.
The 1.3.1 update also includes half a dozen fixes for technical issues with various game systems. For instance, it resolves a bug that sometimes preventedSTALKER 2NPCsfrom returning to wherever they were before running to cover due to an Emission. Likewise, the patch revises the Ribs anomaly, whose sound effect should no longer have a chance of getting stuck in a loop and repeating every 10 seconds even after the player is long gone from its general area. Another batch of “Exception Access Violation” errors has been fixed by the update, though some ostensibly remain unresolved given how GSC has been dealing with this particular category of memory access bugs since the game’s release.
The Ukrainian developer has previously committed to providingSTALKER 2with extensive post-launch support, including at least two paid DLCs. In terms of patching efforts, the 1.3.1 build marks the game’s 12th update in four months.
STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl Update 1.3.1 Patch Notes
Technical Fixes
The rest of the update 1.3.1 changelog contains STALKER 2 story spoilers, including boss names and references to a certain character’s death in some playthroughs.
