It’s a big day in the Zone: Stalker 2’s mega 1.5 patch is here, bringing with it a suite of improvements to the game’s ever-so-slightly busted and dearly missed A-Life system, a load of fixes, and some new content.
But frankly, I’ll deal with that in a separate article, because what I want to speak with you about is the concurrent release of the Stalker 2 Zone Kit: what GSC Game World is calling its “phase 1” in modding tools for one of my favourite games from last year (even if it did launch kind of on fire).
“Shape the Zone in Your Way with the Stalker 2 Zone Kit,” says the store page, “Modify existing content or create new experiences — animations, weapons, mechanics, and even wonders of the Zone.”
Which sounds great! I’d love to do that (in a magical alternate world in which I have useful skills like ‘coding,’ ‘design,’ and ‘programming’), let me just whack that download button and make sure I have a free… 700 gigabytes?
That’s right, folks. In what I feel must be some kind of record, the modding toolkit for Stalker 2 wants nearly a full terabyte of space to really stretch out on your hard drive or SSD. That’s according to its system requirements on Epic, anyway; when I tried to install it myself, it asked for a 471 GB download which would unpack into 659 GB on the drive itself. Which is much more reasonable. That’s fine, then.
For reference, Stalker 2 itself wants a svelte 160 GB to get comfy on your PC, and you could fit other modkits into Stalker 2’s more than 10 times over. Starfield’s Creation Kit? A mere 20 GB, 32 times smaller than Stalker’s. Baldur’s Gate 3’s toolkit? 150 GB: hefty, but not anything you’d go slack-jawed at in 2025. Frostpunk 2’s FrostKit (another UE5 game, no less)? 100 GB.
So Stalker 2’s mod tools are certainly a bit out of the ordinary, size-wise. I have to imagine the explanation is that they’re crammed full of uncompressed assets, but I’ve reached out to GSC to ask, like, what the hell, and I’ll update this piece if I hear back. Or once I finish downloading them, which I’ve scheduled for Q2, 2026.
I poke fun, but I’m genuinely thrilled to see Stalker 2 get continued development and to see modders get their hands on proper mod tools, and GSC says it’s not stopping. “we launched the Zone Kit as Phase 1, because we want to develop it together with Mod Makers,” wrote a GSC community rep on Reddit. “It already has a lot of features, but still this is Phase 1. On Phase 2 there will be even more things to do with the Zone via the Zone Kit.”
At which point, I don’t know, you’ll have to invest in a NAS to house the thing, I guess.
Read the full article here
