Wanna make mods for Stalker 2? That'll be 700 GB of hard drive space, please

Scar looks ominously into the camera, face bathed in a flame's red glow.

(Image credit: GSC Game World)

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.

A smiling man in military fatigues — (Image credit: GSC Game World)

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 reached out to GSC to ask, like, what the hell, and a studio spokesperson told me that "The size of the mod kit is a result of the in-game assets being uncompressed for the mod makers. It's a big game, and the assets are many, resulting in a considerable size of the download.

The Zone Kit is currently in phase one, so we'll explore the opportunities to optimize its size (if possible) in the future."

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.

One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.

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