Pilgrim / Voyageur / Stalker Map
Interloper / Misery Map
Interloper and Misery strip away safety nets. This map is for route planning, rope management, and avoiding assumptions that worked on lower difficulties.
Welcome to the Toxic Wasteland
Zone of Contamination doesn’t feel abandoned. It feels corrupted.
Ponds sit filled with sickly orange runoff, residue from whatever was pumped and dumped here before everything fell apart. Vegetation nearby is dead or dying. Herbivores are gone. The landscape looks chemically exhausted.
Major roads and rail lines are littered with ruptured barrels, their contents hardened into puddles of toxic sludge. Step into it unprepared and your footwear won’t last long. Chemical Boots aren’t optional here — they’re access.
Radiation builds slowly across sections of the region, particularly near the research infrastructure. It doesn’t overwhelm immediately. It accumulates. Time spent exposed must be deliberate.
Below the surface, the mines are worse. Caustic vapors fill deeper sections, thick enough to suffocate anyone without proper protection. A Respirator isn’t convenience — it’s survival. Without it, the tunnels become short-lived experiments.
Wolves still roam, but they’re not normal. Poisoned and desperate, they move through chemical hazards searching for prey that no longer exists. If they attack, the danger isn’t just the struggle. Chemical Poisoning can follow, adding another layer of attrition to an already hostile region.
Glimmer Fog rolls through here as well, flattening depth perception and muting distance in terrain that is already unstable. When fog and contamination combine, movement slows and mistakes multiply.
This is also where the Buried Echoes tale unfolds. The research facilities are more than loot locations — they are part of something larger. Hidden chambers, sealed sections, signals buried under corrosion. The narrative draws you deeper into contaminated ground than comfort would normally allow.
There is no comfortable base here. Research outposts can function as temporary staging points, but this is a region you enter with equipment and intention.
Zone of Contamination doesn’t chase you. It erodes you. Every minute inside must justify itself.
Survivor Incognito 