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Map Structure

The Zone in Stalker PDA is not a single open map, but a set of separate locations, just like in the original Stalker games: Cordon, Garbage, Bar, Agroprom, Dark Valley, Marsh, Military Warehouses, Yantar, and others. The player moves between them through special transfer points, rather than walking "on foot" from one end of the Zone to the other.

What a location consists of​

Each location is a bundle of:

  1. A .tmx file (the Tiled Map Editor format) — a tile map of the terrain: roads, ground, grass, swamp, walls, radiation, and so on. Stored in the pda-assets repository (maps/*.tmx), using a shared tileset, maps/tiles/tiles.tsx.
  2. A GameMap record in the game's data — the location's passport: id, title, level, the .tmx file's name, and the player's starting position on the location (defPos).
  3. Points (points) — static interactive markers: quest givers, traders, stashes, transfers. See Points on the Map.
  4. Squads (spawns) — groups of NPCs from a given faction that patrol the location and can hold territory. See Squads and Territories.

Points and squads can be defined as the location's "base" set and extended by every story chapter — that is, your story can add a new point or squad to an existing map without touching the location itself.

.tmx map layers​

Every map has two layers:

  • tiles — the terrain grid (8×8px tiles), defining passability and the visual environment.
  • objectgroup "objects" — collisions: polylines for walls and passability boundaries, rectangles for obstacle hitboxes. Some objects are marked with the fire=true property — these are campfire spots, where NPCs gather to hang out and talk (a characteristic detail of the Zone's atmosphere).

Tiles carry not just visuals but also a probability for procedural content generation: tile types like anomaly, search (a stash), and radiation_weak/middle/strong have a spawn probability — anomalies and stashes that weren't explicitly placed by a story writer are generated by the game during a session, on top of suitable tiles.

Author-placed points vs. procedural content

Quest points, traders, and squads that you place in a story are explicit, deterministic objects. The Zone's background-noise anomalies and stashes are generated separately and aren't stored in the .tmx as named objects. These are two different layers of map content, and only the first one matters for storytelling.

List of locations as of this writing​

According to pda-assets/maps: agroprom, bar, ch4, darkvalley, garbage, kordon, marsh, military, yantar — the classic locations of the early Zone in Stalker (Agroprom, Bar, Cordon, Garbage, Dark Valley, Marsh, Military Warehouses, Yantar).

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