S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 stashes: where to look, which codes and what is inside

Half the questions about stashes in the sequel sound the same: "I have the coordinates and there is nothing there" or "everyone writes about the stash for a rainy day and everyone means a different spot". Both come straight out of how the system is built, and once you know that, searching gets easier. Below: the mechanics, twelve named stashes and a table of twenty three keypad codes.

How the stash system works

Stashes come in two kinds, and that is the main thing to know. Generic ones exist in the world on their own and are already filled: you can walk up and loot them without ever being given coordinates. Quest-tied and special ones do not spawn at all until the game hands you the lead, so arriving early and finding nothing is normal behaviour rather than a bug.

Contents deserve a separate note: the wiki says they are fixed per stash, while players describe loadout bundles, sniper or assault kits, that seem to roll at random. Neither side has a definitive answer, so do not count on a specific gun turning up in a generic stash.

Garbage: the Shah's stash and Panas's caches

The Shah's stash. The most searched-for named one. Docent gives you the coordinates at the end of No Honor Among Thieves, but only if you spare him. Kill him and the backpack never spawns. Inside is Shah's Mate, a unique Viper-5 with a fixed fifty-round drum, twenty percent more damage and its own finish. It carries a hidden achievement, and the gun later opens the way into The Brood's base during King of the Hill.

The sources argue about the spot: the Poisonous Hole page says a tunnel south of the anomaly, while the pages for the weapon and the achievement both say a tunnel north-west of the Maze. Most likely it is the same tunnel described from different landmarks, but check both directions.

Panas's caches. The Budmo! quest, handed out by Misha and Grisha at the bar: plant vodka in three of Panas's stashes. The first sits in a tunnel west of the Poisonous Hole with an Optician gas mask, a Buket S-2, two grenades and ammo. The second is at a power transmission pylon with a Hilka detector and a couple of artifacts. The third is by a pile of concrete blocks with an APSB, a suppressor and a scope.

Detail worth knowing: whichever one you visit third is always empty. And if you leave all three alone, Panas pays around 1,600 coupons, with roughly the same amount from Grisha afterwards.

Lesser Zone: the Poppy Field and around Zalissya

The Poppy Field. There are two different caches here, which is exactly why the guides contradict each other. The wiki describes a blue trunk in the attic of the boarded-up barn south-east of the field, holding a TOZ-34 and ammunition. Game8 describes a dilapidated house in the southern part of the field, reached by a ramp and a jump onto a shed roof, holding medkits, grenades, ammo and a tactical pistol silencer. Two different places, and both exist.

Both sources agree on one thing: bring energy drinks. The poppy field puts you to sleep and then kills you in your sleep.

The energy drink stash. Directly south of the field, against the side of a ZIL-130 truck. Inside is a note with instructions and several cans of NON STOP. A fun touch: Buckwheat back in Zalissya reacts separately to whether you take things from it or leave things in it.

Zhorik's stash. In the wreck of the fallen helicopter north of the Post Office, a safe inside the remains with a Viper 5 and ammunition. The coordinates arrive when you accept Dangerous Visitors.

Gloomy's stash. Magnetic Cave, western side, a backpack on the ground. The lead sits on Gloomy's own PDA, and his body is at the Boiler House.

Baptist Hill. Hidden in a stove in the split house on the south side. The hint note lies next to a body in a destroyed house west of Zalissya.

Chemical Plant: the Central Elevator and Stechanka

The Central Elevator. A grain elevator south of Rostok, linked to it by rail. The stash sits on the top level of the main building, next to a PSZ-20W Convoy suit on a couch. Getting up there means the rooftop catwalk, which is thick with Electro anomalies: a bolt clears one for a second or two, which is enough to pass. Bloodsuckers and snorks patrol below.

Stechanka. A village in the south-west corner of the region, on the border with Duga. No coordinates needed at all: three teleport anomalies sit in the village and each leads to its own small stash. One portal hovers above a ruined house in the north-east and is entered through the gravity anomaly beneath it, dropping you on a roof with an APSB. Another, by player accounts, lands you in a garage holding a stash PDA.

A warning from the same players: do not head south from Stechanka, you get one-shot. And an honest caveat, the wiki page for Stechanka is nearly empty, so the contents of two of those three caches are documented only in video guides and confirmed nowhere in text.

Code 2468 and the other keypads

The Railway Maintenance Facility in western Zaton is the best known keypad in the game, and it plays fair: all four digits are painted in white on objects around you. The two is on the side of a trailer in the north-east corner, the four is on the roof of the shack at the eastern entrance, the six is on the MTP-71 excavator and the eight is on a train car near the towers. The door itself is in the building in the south-west corner.

Below is every code that turns up in the game and the expansion. The depot and the six Faraday stashes are confirmed by the series wiki; the remaining rows come from a single code compilation and could not be checked against a primary source. If a code does not work for you, that is the reason rather than a typo here.

The Faraday stashes from Cost of Hope

The expansion brought the most carefully built set of caches in the game. They sit in shacks around the edges of the Iron Forest, and Faraday radio anomalies hand out the coordinates at random when you study them. You can find the shacks without any coordinates, though, because every code is written somewhere nearby if you look around.

PDA stashes and the edition bundles

Vova Cork's stash. Burnt Forest, the Krug Antenna Complex, in the basement. The bag is thrown on top of the higher pipe in a hallway corner, so expect to jump. Inside: a high-capacity Integral-A magazine, three medkits and ammunition. The lead is on Vova's PDA, and his body is inside the complex.

The Journalist's stashes. A story of their own: Seek, and you shall find starts after A Needle in a Haystack, and the Journalist's flashdrive has to be collected from your personal storage box. Caches then seed across the map, and what is in them depends on your edition. Pre-order gives the Tourist Suit and Veteran, Deluxe adds the Wanderer Suit, an SSP-100M and several more guns, Ultimate puts a PSZ-21W Shturm and a line of Monolith weapons on top. The Prypiat one is locked behind code 2021.

Why everyone's "stash for a rainy day" is somewhere else

This is not a guide error or a patch difference. Generic stashes take their name from a shared pool, and the same name lands on different places: "Forgotten Stash", "Someone's Stash" and "Re-Hidden Loot" come from the same bag. In one Lesser Zone list alone "Ordinary Stash" shows up twice and "Unknown Stalker's Stash" three times.

So searching by name is hopeless and searching by place is the only thing that works. For the same reason the stash counts in different guides refuse to agree: one compiler counts seventeen in the Lesser Zone, another twenty six. Neither number should be treated as final.

One last practical thing: stashes often sit in places visible from far away, and a plain pair of binoculars saves more time than any map. We have a breakdown of the binoculars in the game and what separates them, and if a stash is only interesting to you for a particular gun, the list of unique weapons is faster to check.