In STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl, quest items have a checkmark-type dark color icon on the top left of the item. They serve one purpose: to advance the plot or complete specific objectives in a mission. In most cases, they are undroppable as long as they are relevant to your missions. This way you don’t accidentally sell or drop something important you need later in the questline.
Why Can’t You Drop Quest Items?
Sometimes quest items don’t revert to “normal” after you’ve finished the associated mission. Instead of turning into harmless inventory clutter you can drop, they stay around taking up space including PDAs, pistols, and other trinkets that seem to have no purpose but are still marked as quest items. One user on the Steam community page said he was stuck with a 0.2 kg PDA after the quest was completed. Another reported a quest related pistol was undroppable in inventory.
Quest items are for specific objectives or story arcs in the game. The developers don’t let you drop them to keep the game’s integrity. The quest items that can’t be dropped might have use later in the game and will be dropped after that.
Losing a critical item will strand you in progress for a few missions; this is a safeguard to keep the story flowing. But sometimes items that were critical to a completed quest don’t revert to a non-essential state and are undroppable even when they have no use. It is an unintended behavior that causes frustration as they take up inventory space for nothing.
STALKER 2’s limited inventory space is part of the challenge, but when quest items you can’t use take up your precious kilograms, it gets complicated. So one of the things to consider and understand is how to manage your inventory smartly by keeping useful gear and dropping some parts to free up space.
Quest Items that are Undroppable
- Regenerator: This item remains marked as a quest item after its associated quest is complete. You can drop it after The Boundary or later on after completing the Escape from the Cage mission.
- PDA: Frequently associated with some missions, these devices often stay in the inventory long. Despite their lightweight, they still raise the whole burden.
- Quest-Tied Weapons: Weapons such as pistols (i.e. Skif’s Pistol) provided for specific quests also stay marked as essential items in some cases. Even when better weapons are unlocked and collected, these undroppable items keep eating slots.
- Documents and Mission-Specific Artifacts: Miscellaneous documents and artifacts are also a requirement for many tasks to finish the missions and these are some of the sticking items in the inventory without any further use.
The un-droppable nature of these quest items has become a problem and annoying part of the game for many players. Every item adds weight and unnecessary undroppable items can force players to leave behind more valuable loot. Furthermore, you can check more guides including STALKER 2 In the Name of Science mission walkthrough and how to get the Weird Bolt artifact from Tornado.
