The Red Forest

Whether you attacked the Dutys or the Freedoms, you’ll need to head out to the northeast to reach the Red Forest. If you did wind up attacking the Freedom camp, the soldiers at the outpost nearby will likely be hostile to you, but they may have also wound up deserting their position to head back to the warehouses. Even if that’s the case, you will probably have to wind up fighting off a horde of Monolith soldiers as they attempt to flood into the zone.

Heading through the forest will eventually lead you to a crack in the fencing.

When you do transfer into the Red Forest, you’ll be facing off against a small encampment of Monolith soldiers. Try to sneak up on them by crouching and getting close before throwing a grenade into the middle of them, then finishing them off with your rifle. As you proceed down the road here, watch out for snipers on either side! Check their bodies, and you should find a SVDm 2, an upgraded sniper rifle that uses the same ammo as the rifles that you’ve already been using.

You’ve got two ways to proceed here: along the road, or through the forest to the west. The road is more highly radioactive, and there are plenty of soldiers in your path, including a few more snipers and one that wields a rocket launcher. The forest is filled with anomalies and snarks, but if you hug the eastern wall, you should be able to avoid them.

Disable the Brain Scorcher

Time to find and disable the artifact that’s zombifying everyone that comes this way (except, apparently, for the Monolith soldiers). Both of the paths will eventually lead you to the same place: the base of a road that leads up to the mountainous area to the east, where the Brain Scorcher facility is located. Be careful of the explosive barrels the soldiers drop down at you as you ascend; be ready to nail them with gunfire before they reach you.

Watch out for snipers up top!

When you reach the facility, your first goal is to find the antennaes outside, but before you can do that, you’ll have a little housecleaning to do. Expect snipers in the towers and plenty of soldiers on the ground, as well as a lot of phantasmagoric shades that will run at you. You can shoot the shades to disperse them, but they appear to do no damage to you even when they hit, so don’t worry about them overmuch.

The snipers in the towers are easy enough to deal with, but some of them are spread out in hard-to-spot spaces, especially since your view is going to be bleached out. Use your binoculars to try and get a box around the ones that you can’t spot to countersnipe them. Or, if you’re reckless, you can try to just run towards the entrance to the underground bunker here. It’s located near the eastern wall of the base. If you spot the train tracks leading underground and can find the rail car located on the eastern side of the base here, you can take the ramp up into the car and then down into the hallway beyond.

Into The Facility

The Brain Scorcher facility is mostly empty, and is very linear, so don’t worry about taking a wrong turn. When you spot the nonfunctional cargo elevator, look for the stairwell nearby and take that down. There’ll be a codelocked door nearby; if you’ve been searching the bodies of the soldiers you’ve been killing, you may have the code in your PDA’s Diary section. It’s 342089 - the safe has a number of first aid kits, grenade, and some ammo.

Keep proceeding from there until you find a set of four generators. The last generator will have a stairwell nearby leading to a small corridor. Follow it, step onto the walkways, and flip the switch nearby to shut down the Brain Scorcher.

Escape!

The military doesn't take kindly to your approaching Chernobyl, and neither does Monolith.

Now comes the hard part: actually leaving the facility. Although it was fairly empty when you came through the first time. Now, however, between 25-30 soldiers are going to be blocking your exit. Backtrack slowly but surely through the facility, using doorways for cover, as you kill your way back out. Don’t forget to use some of the grenades that these guys carry; you can bounce them off of walls and around corners as you claw your way out.

When you reach the exterior of the facility again, the military faction will be waging an all-out war against the Monolith. Both will likely be hostile to you, so try to avoid the bloodshed by circling to the south and west along the walls until you reach the exit to the facility, then sprint back to the road leading down to the east. The Barkeep tells you that he’s holding up a group of Stalkers that are going to try and beat the rush north, which is open to exploration now that you’ve shut down the Brain Scorcher. Head north to the Priyat exit to meet up with them.