grEdit – NPC AI Redux v3.2.0

grEdit – NPC AI Redux v3.2.0

---

NPCs notice you, pursue the actual threat, and behave differently by faction, role, and weapon. The mod uses the game’s config-patch system, replaces no assets, requires no editor, and does not affect saves. It is 2.1.0 compatible.

Features

• Fully modular. The installer asks which options to install, or the files can be installed manually. Only Core is required; every other file is independent.
• NPCs hear gunfire at long range. With an AK and you behind cover, this is about 150 m across open ground, 99 m for a camp among buildings, and 67 m into a walled compound. Vanilla is about 13 m in the open. Rain, fog, thunder, suppressors, weather, rooms, weapons, and obstacles affect the result. Footsteps, voices, and reloads are untouched.
• Explosions carry as far as gunshots, but a heard blast makes a camp investigate instead of triggering full alarm.
• One heard shot turns heads and starts a search. Two send a man over and call the squad. Three identify you. A round landing next to someone counts in addition, so shooting at a camp is answered on the second round.
• Squads already fighting mutants or another group can learn about an unseen shooter. Humans now carry the threat entry needed to react to a shooter on their flank and swing onto the shooter on the second shot.
• How fast you are seen depends on how much of you shows. Peeking over cover or around a corner is slower to spot than standing in the open.
• Darkness provides more protection without making NPCs miss you at arm’s length. NPCs see up to 70 m by default, with faction and role differences.
• Rookies land fewer perfect shots than veterans. Rookies get a quarter fewer at every range, experienced NPCs get a quarter fewer at long range, and veterans, masters, and snipers keep theirs.
• An NPC fighting mutants or another group keeps fighting them, sees you, and comes for you when you become the bigger threat or the fight ends. After you hurt an NPC, it remembers you for 12 seconds.
• Camps inside buildings hear gunfire outside without hearing footsteps through the wall.
• Squads share a contact a second sooner and drop what they are doing faster when alarmed.
• Close range is no longer a blind spot.
• The lone-survivor escape routine is disabled for every human. Squads fight to the end instead of standing behind cover ignoring you.
• Squads cycle flanks and approaches faster. The push wait stays vanilla.
• NPCs reconsider their position when shot in the open, and open ground scores worse when they choose their next position.
• Flankers register sooner. They need two and a half times the normal evidence instead of four to five times, in a zone twice as wide.
• After an NPC loses sight of you, it stops seeing you across its whole view cone and forgets faster.
• Named story characters play as the game built them.
• Accuracy, grenade reaction, and trigger discipline differ by faction on fields the game already has per NPC. A bandit with an AK is a worse shot than a soldier with the same AK. Shots at your hips count like shots at your chest instead of being near-certain hits.

Specifications

• Patch tuning: 2.1.0, with the live NPC circle increased from 100 m to up to 200 m.
• NPC sight distance: up to 70 m by default instead of 80 m.
• Gunshot range: about 150 m.
• Memory after being hurt: 12 seconds.
• Shotgun engagement distance: 15 to 20 m.
• Rookie perfect shots: a quarter fewer at every range.
• Experienced NPC perfect shots: a quarter fewer at long range.
• Named camp NPCs with gunfire reactions enabled: about 1,550.
• Combat re-check setting in Better Ballistics Redux: 25 there, 14 to 19 by faction here.
• Detection after line of sight is lost: two seconds instead of four.
• Vanilla lone-survivor escape routine: up to twenty seconds, now disabled for every human.
• Vanilla approach cooldown: up to forty seconds, reduced here for flanks and approaches.
• Flanker evidence requirement: two and a half times the normal evidence, in a zone twice as wide.

Faction and role flavor

grEditBetterNPCAI_FactionFlavor.pak, highly recommended.

The faction and role settings give NPCs different personalities and combat behavior.

Tactical Militaries, Duty, Mercenaries, Varta, Corpus

• Disciplined and drilled. They see further, think faster, coordinate, flank with intent, lay down suppressive fire, and push in like trained professionals.

Aggressive Freedom, Monolith, Noon, Spark

• Guerrilla instinct over discipline. They favor commitment over caution and keep moving rather than seeking the clever angle.

Sloppy, Bandits, Scientists, Diggers

• They rely on numbers rather than skill, see a little less far, rarely use complex tactics, and shoot worse. They lack tactics, not common sense.

Shaped by experience, Loners, Neutrals

• They have no fixed personality. A green recruit and a grizzled survivor from the same background feel like different people.

Role matters in addition to faction. A sniper holds position and picks its moments, a scout watches a wider angle, and a front-line rifleman pushes forward and reacts fastest up close. Guards and camp NPCs carry the same identity as everyone else in the fight.

Core

grEditBetterNPCAI_Core.pak

Always enabled, with no choices to make. It contains the hearing, detection, threat, target, squad, movement, cover, flanking, and visibility changes described above. It is tuned for patch 2.1’s larger circle of live NPCs.

Camp awareness

grEditBetterNPCAI_CampAwareness.pak, recommended.

Named camp NPCs hear gunfire. Nearly every named NPC in the Zone, which is most of the people encountered in camps, ships with its reaction to gunfire switched off. This switches it on for about 1,550 of them. Characters built for a single story scene are left unchanged. It is enabled by default; untick it if something in a quest still behaves oddly, and say which quest.

Combat dynamics

grEditBetterNPCAI_CombatDynamics.pak

Vanilla keeps seeing you for four seconds after real line of sight is gone. This changes it to two seconds.

Grenade discipline

grEditBetterNPCAI_GrenadeDiscipline.pak

Each faction gets its own grenade habits, and every faction throws less than before.

Weapon combat doctrine

grEditBetterNPCAI_WeaponCombatDoctrine.pak

The weapon in an NPC’s hands influences how it fights. Shotguns close the gap, pistols and SMGs close in, rifles settle around 50 m instead of plinking from 60 to 100 m, machine guns work at 60 m, and shotgunners hold fire until you are within 15 to 20 m.

Mutant and zombie AI

grEditBetterNPCAI_MutantZombieAI.pak

Zombies react properly at point-blank range while retaining their blindness at distance, so crouch-sneaking past one still works. Prey animals act like prey. Mutants retain their behavior, and a bloodsucker’s decloak attack registers as the threat it is.

Sound discipline

grEditBetterNPCAI_SoundDiscipline.pak

Suppressors affect how NPCs hear you.

Terrain stealth

grEditBetterNPCAI_TerrainStealth.pak, off by default in the installer.

Moving through grass and undergrowth makes less noise, and grass, forest grass, and leaves block NPC sightlines more than in vanilla. This shipped through 2.x and was pulled in 2.3.8 because its sight changes affect how every NPC sees through foliage. It is available as an optional choice rather than a default.

OXA compatibility

grEditBetterNPCAI_OXACompat.pak, only if you run OXA – Prototype.

OXA replaces which NPC archetype spawns for most human factions, so the faction personality file cannot reach an archetype it does not know. This applies the same personality, accuracy, reactions, and escape-off behavior to OXA’s archetypes. It requires Core and Faction and Role Flavor. It works with OXA – Prototype 3.0.8.

If upgrading from OXA 3.0.0, its pak names changed. Delete the old Za, Zb, Ya, and Yb files and their utoc and ucas files by hand, or two versions of OXA will run at once.

Installation

Delete your old version first. 3.2.0 replaces everything that came before it. Some files are retired rather than updated, so an old installation can leave orphaned files behind.

Removal

In Vortex, remove the old grEdit – Better NPC AI entry and deploy. Then open Stalker2ContentPaks~mods and check that nothing named grEditBetterNPCAI_ remains. A replaced or deleted Vortex mod can leave files behind.

Manually delete every grEditBetterNPCAI_*.pak in Stalker2ContentPaks~mods, including these if present:

• grEditBetterNPCAI_SelfPreservation.pak
• grEditBetterNPCAI_SquadMorale.pak
• grEditBetterNPCAI_TerrainStealth.pak
• grEditBetterNPCAI_DetectionOverhaul.pak
• grEditBetterNPCAI_TargetSwitchingExperimental.pak
• grEditBetterNPCAI_QuestCharacters.pak

Install with Vortex

1. Download grEditBetterNPCAI_3.2.0_Installer.zip.
2. Drag the zip onto the Vortex Mods page, or use Install From File.
3. Click Install. The installer asks about add-ons, then shows an OXA page only if Faction and Role Flavor was selected.
4. Enable the mod, then Deploy.

Manual installation

1. Copy the desired .pak files from the main download into Stalker2ContentPaks~mods.
2. Core is required; all other files are optional.
3. Load order does not matter, and no file needs a priority number in its name.

The mod works on existing saves.

Files

The pack is modular. Apart from Core, choose the files to install manually or through Vortex.

• Core: grEditBetterNPCAI_Core.pak, required.
• Faction and Role Flavor: grEditBetterNPCAI_FactionFlavor.pak.
• Camp Awareness: grEditBetterNPCAI_CampAwareness.pak.
• Combat Dynamics: grEditBetterNPCAI_CombatDynamics.pak.
• Grenade Discipline: grEditBetterNPCAI_GrenadeDiscipline.pak.
• Weapon Combat Doctrine: grEditBetterNPCAI_WeaponCombatDoctrine.pak.
• Mutant and Zombie AI: grEditBetterNPCAI_MutantZombieAI.pak.
• Sound Discipline: grEditBetterNPCAI_SoundDiscipline.pak.
• Terrain Stealth: grEditBetterNPCAI_TerrainStealth.pak.
• OXA Compatibility: grEditBetterNPCAI_OXACompat.pak.

Removed files

Named Quest Characters was retired in 3.2.0. Story characters play as the game built them. Delete grEditBetterNPCAI_QuestCharacters.pak if it was installed.

Detection Overhaul was removed in 3.0.0. Its two edited detection curve files were in a plain pak, but the engine loads cooked files like those through a different container format, so the file never loaded.

Target Switching, experimental, was removed in 3.0.0. Two of its three parts targeted the table that decides who an NPC shoots at. Version 3.1.0 showed that a whole-file replacement reaches it, and that work now lives in Core. The third part, earlier flanker registration, has been in Core since 2.4.1 at a milder setting.

Since 2.3.0, the faction personality file had written 319 patches into the base game’s tables for characters that only exist in Cost of Hope. A patch targeting a missing name creates a new half-built record. Two crash reports came from Cost of Hope quest labs, and one named an affected character. This is fixed, and the build refuses to package itself if it happens again.

Compatibility

grEdit mods, Hunger System, Ballistics Redux, Weather and Emissions, Day/Night Cycle

• Fully compatible, zero shared fields, any load order.

Maklane’s Better Gunfights / Better NPC Range

• Fully compatible, only touches weapon damage and dispersion.

Better Ballistics

• Core shares nothing. Better Ballistics Redux shares one setting, how often an NPC re-checks its enemy, 25 there and 14 to 19 by faction here. Whichever loads last sets it.

Shay’s Living Zone

• Compatible, including his EnhancedNPC chain, with one overlap on grenade budgets for Bandits, Army, and Humanoid. Load Grenade Discipline after Shay’s if this mod’s lower grenade counts should win for those three factions, or before it if Shay’s numbers should win.

OXA – Prototype

• Compatible. OXA replaces which NPC archetype spawns for most human factions, so the faction personality files do not reach those NPCs by default. The OXA Compatibility page in the installer covers this. Works with 3.0.8.

Grounded Combat AIO

• Fully compatible, only touches HP and bullet falloff by range.

Stalker Unlimited / Ze Infinity

• Fully compatible, a loot and economy overhaul that only touches damage-model fields.

tinbtb’s NPC NoDispersionBypass, Only and Balanced

• Both set the same perfect-shot counts this mod tunes by rank, so whichever loads last wins, and Faction and Role Flavor’s accuracy differences mostly disappear under them. Balanced also changes NPC weapon spread, which conflicts with Ballistics Redux.

Axii’s Stealth Mod

• The tuning for visibility while crouched, walking, and running does not overlap with anything here. Axii’s mod redefines the whole settings block directly rather than patching individual fields, the same file this mod writes into. Depending on load order, one mod’s changes may override the other’s rather than combine.

NPC Combat Overhaul

• Not recommended alongside this mod. The two conflict across vision, threat, hearing, cover, flanking, retreat, target choice, and weapon behavior.

Real A-Life

• Conflicts. It sets the same combat fields on 75 archetypes, and its own archetypes bypass Faction and Role Flavor.

Feedback

Every number is a starting point. If a faction feels too sharp or too blind, too brave or too eager to run, report which one and what felt wrong.

Changelog

v3.2.0 Patch 2.1 update

• Tuned distances for the live NPC circle increasing from 100 m to up to 200 m.
• Added visibility based on how much of the player is exposed.
• Reduced NPC sight distance from 80 m to up to 70 m.
• Added darkness protection.
• Adjusted rookie and experienced NPC perfect-shot counts.
• Added 12-second memory after an NPC is hurt.
• Added weapon-specific combat distances.
• Shotgunners now hold fire until 15 to 20 m.
• Gunshots and explosions carry about 150 m.
• Retired Named Quest Characters.
• Restored Terrain Stealth as an optional installer choice.
• Added shots-at-the-hips handling.

v3.1.0 Target and threat changes

• NPCs are no longer everyone’s first target.
• NPCs fighting mutants or another group continue fighting until the player becomes the bigger threat or the fight ends.

v3.0.x Threat and hearing changes

• Threat values work correctly.
• Hearing was measured in game and rebuilt around the measured values.
• Named camp NPCs that shipped deaf to gunfire now hear it.
• Two files that did nothing were removed.