Pripyat

Be careful not to get hit by snipers on the rooftops.

The stalkers are going to be right by the entrance of the zone here, and indeed they will help you proceed north through Damnation Alley. They aren’t going to take you far, but try to stick with them nonetheless, as they’ll point out snipers in the windows and on the rooftops of the buildings on either side of you. Quicksave as you proceed and reload if you get wasted. Eventually the stalkers will head into an underground carpark, where they’ll stop - you’ll have to go on alone.

Head north across the square after moving up the car ramp nearby, but be careful! Soldiers with gauss rifles will snipe you as you move; if you still have your sniper rifle handy, it’d be useful to take them out before proceeding onward.

Find the Secret Stash in the Hotel

The secret stash will unlock the door to the game's best endings.

If you talked to Guide in Cordon, then spoke to Doctor in the Agropom sewers, you should have this mission in your log. You’re supposed to reach a hotel in the Priyat district which lies directly north of the carpark that the Stalkers take shelter in. You should have a waypoint on your map for it, assuming you did, in fact, speak to Doctor. At any rate, you can head to the hotel, take the stairs up one floor, find the door on the western side of the hallway that can open, then take the Decoder and the Documents. The Decoder will apparently let you open a secret door in the Monolith control system. Presumably we’ll get to use it later on.

When you hit the hotel stash, you then have to find your way to the north, to the other marker point, that will lead you to Chernobyl itself. You have two basic options here: head up the eastern side of Pripyat, or the western side. Taking the western approach is the less confrontational, although there is a large group of Monolith soldiers inside a building worshiping a Moonlight artifact. Kill them and take it if you want to get +109 Endurance. Heading up the eastern side is much more dangerous, as there’s a soldier with a rocket launcher there, as well as another gauss-rifle wielding sniper in the distance who’s hard to hit.

Reach The Power Plant

After reaching the entrance to the stadium on the northern end of Pripyat, a bizarre little cutscene will occur, and you’ll actually have to deal with a loading screen that will shunt you off to a new area. The military and the Monolith factions are in all-out war outset the Chernobyl power plant, and neither of them are going to stop and verify your identity before taking you. (Although, even if they did verify your identity, they’d probably kill you anyway.)

Your goal now is to reach the entrance to Chernobyl, which can be difficult to do since your map doesn’t function very well here. You have to head far to the west to get there, but that can be difficult since most of the area in front of you as you enter the zone is open space, which will leave you open to sniper fire and the assaults of the helicopters that swoop in out of nowhere. To make matters a bit more difficult, you have a timer that starts counting down after you enter the zone, indicating that a "blowout" is about to occur. After you enter the zone, you have about five minutes before the countdown begins, and then five minutes for the countdown itself, which gives you around ten minutes all told to work through the area.

Chernobyl Exterior

There are some very large anomalies in this area, so keep an eye out!.

If you want to avoid a fight here, try heading along the curved road to the northeast and avoiding most of the soldiers that way; there are powerful suction anomalies in that direction, though, so do your best to avoid them. If you don’t mind getting shot up a bit, you can just follow the fence to your left and proceed to the north. Both paths will lead to the same direction: a large railway gate leading off to the west, where the power plant itself is located.

See the large building on the north side of this road? That’s Chernobyl. See the buildings on the southern side of the road? That’s where annoying men with gauss rifles will be shooting at you from. Try to stick close to the northern building here; there’s plenty of small structures that will protect you from the sniper fire and the helicopter annoyances. Make your way along the path here, hugging the walls, until you reach the entrance to the facility, then dash to it and head inside. There’s a small hole with a ladder in it here; head towards it to reach the interior of Chernobyl. If you don’t make it to the end before the blowout timer counts all the way down, the entire area will be bathed in radiation, cooking you within another minute or so, even if you do manage to dose yourself with pills.