Greetings fellow Stalkers!

Like many of you, I'm looking forward to the release of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chernobyl and I decided to start another playthrough of the STALKER series.

Alas, as much as I love Shadow of Chernobyl, she is beginning to show her age and so I decided to do a bit of mod shopping. I was looking for a mod that offered a close-to-vanilla experience without doing anything too crazy. Fortunately, I discovered the wonderful Autumn Aurora (AA) mod and have thoroughly enjoyed roaming in The Zone in a beautiful autumn setting.

AA is a great mod for those like me looking for a vanilla-like experience, whether you're a veteran of the franchise looking to spice things up a little or a newcomer to it. However, as good as the mod is, there is one potential area of improvement that could be made for newcomers, which is restoring the HUD info that vanilla STALKER displays: ammo count/ammo reserve and the PDA counter. While this may not be an issue for veterans, I imagine it can be frustrating for newcomers not knowing how much ammo a weapon currently has, how much ammo is in reserve, how many enemies are in the area and hardly being able to read the ammo type of the current weapon.

I couldn't find any information regarding how restore the vanilla HUD info in AA, so I decided to do a bit of research and see if I could figure out how to do it myself. Thanks to some inspiration from Restore Ammo Count fo AA2.1 MOD I found that you can restore ammo count/ammo reserve, PDA counter and clean up the ammo type simply by tweaking a config file!

So let's begin...

If you like what you hear and just want to install the mod, then you can head on over to Mod DB and download the file there. Installation instructions are included: Vanilla HUD info for Autumn Aurora 2.1

If you're interested in a step-by-step tutorial then continue reading! This can be very useful if you want to make further tweaks such as larger text, different text colors etc.

Before proceeding, I suggest that you make a backup of your maingame_16.xml file. This file is located at gamedata\config\ui in your STALKER installation directory.

Next, you'll need to open the maingame_16.xml file in your favourite text editor (I suggest Visual Studio Code[code.visualstudio.com] or Notepad++[notepad-plus-plus.org]). We'll go through the modifications step-by-step and observe the effect it has on the HUD (or you can just skim through the tutorial and apply the config changes all at once if you want). Be sure to save the file modifications before you launch the game!

As you can see, no ammo count/ammo reserve, no PDA counter and the current ammo type is hard to read (at high resolutions, at least).

Firstly, let's clean up the ammo type by making the text bigger and aligning it to the right of the screen. To do this, find the static_weapon node and replace it with the following:


You should see this as a result:

Secondly, let's add ammo count/ammo reserve underneath the ammo type. To do this, find the static_ammo node and replace it with the following:


You should see this as a result:

Lastly, let's add the PDA counter in the bottom left of the screen to the right of the minimap. To do this, find the static_pda_online node and replace it with the following:


You should see this as a result:

...and we're done!

As you can probably figure out by looking at the various attributes that are available for each node, you can change the positioning (by modifying the X and Y values) and color of the text (by modifying the R, G and B values). Just be aware that some of the positioning is relative. For example, static_ammo is relative to static_weapon.

If you want larger text, you can try setting the font values to graffiti32 (as opposed to graffiti22). Just bear in mind that you may need to tweak the positioning of static_weapon and static_ammo so that they don't overlap with other HUD elements.

I hope this has been useful!