In the Bloodsucker Village in SoC a small shrine is set up, with a fire in the middle and some dead stalkers and heads on sticks scattered around. The thing is that Stalkers don't stay long in that village, much less do anything more than to tell people to avoid it. Which only lets one possible builder open.
After the events of Clear Sky, virtually the entire Clear Sky faction vanishes from the face of the earth. They're never mentioned in Shadow of Chernobyl, and are given an oblique reference in Call of Pripyat. Only two Stalkers you encounter are confirmed to be former members: Nimble, who goes from exhausted rookie Stalker to rookie Stalker in need of rescue to masterarms dealer; and Novikov, who disappears after Clear Sky and reappears working as a technician for the Ecologist faction. Doesn't seem like too big a deal, until you realize that the Monolith faction had a surge in manpower right after the events of Clear Sky.
Throughout the entirety of Shadow of Chernobyl you must kill around a company worth of Ukrainian soldiers. If and when you get out of the Zone, you'll have a massive warrant on your head in Ukraine and most likely the entire world. Have fun needing to be an outlaw for the rest of your life. Then again, considering the good ending of Call of Pripyat...
Vodka in Call of Pripyat, if not taken properly, can starve you to death. It's possible that the developers were trying to implement Korsakoff's Syndrome into the game, albeit in a rather fuzzy way.
Despite the common knowledge being "the Zone gets more and more dangerous as you get closer to the CNPP," the northern areas of the Zone (those appearing in Call of Pripyat) are ironically less dangerous than the southern area (from the previous two games), taking Pripyat as the relative midpoint. Zaton and Yanov have fewer bandits, fewer mercs, virtually no Monolith presence outside Pripyat itself and less in the way of roaming hostile wildlife (although what wildlife there is tends more towards Demonic Spiders or Boss in Mook's Clothing than Goddamned Bats). Monolith's relatively scant showing can be chalked up partially to the massive hit Monolith took at the end of Shadow of Chernobyl, but the rest doesn't make much sense.
Considering that most of the stalkers seem to be entering from the south, as the northern parts were virtually unreachable until the Scorcher was taken down, it makes sense that most of the wildlife (which are supposedly controlled or at least directed by the Zone) would be concentrated in the south, where the greatest number of intruders were. The community in the northern part of the Zone is in its infancy, hence the lesser number of bandits and mercs. This also explains the reduced Monolith presence - the bandits and mercs and Monolith troops took each other out, depleting all their numbers.
The stashes. When you first start playing the game and find PDAs pointing you to loot containers on the bodies of people you just filled with lead, it seems like a very gamey mechanism to get you to trek around and provide you with progressively better gear. After all, why wouldn't that guy have all that handy stuff on him ? Then as the game goes on, you start getting overloaded with ammo that you're not using right now but might need later, guns and armor that are too nice to just sell (esp. in the first game where you can't repair them), med supplies that you'd be happy to have back after a heavy fight empties your stocks... and that's when you start stashing stuff all over the place like a crazed squirrel yourself, just in case. Congratulations, you're like a real stalker now!
Sometimes the damage detection can get a little bit...finnicky, to the point that an entire magazine of 9x19mm rounds to the chest won't do much more than piss that Ukrainian military trooper off. However, this can be rationalized (or handwaved) by simply assuming that most of these guys have artifacts on them that are simply destroyed or damaged when you finally manage to put them down.
The labs, the behavior of the wildlife, and the experiments all tie together once you start fishing around in lab X-18. In one of the side rooms, you can find (thankfully empty) versions of the tubes you see the PC being placed in if you join C-Consciousness at the end. On the opposite wall are cages holding dead Zone wildlife. Granted, all of this will be long before you've seen anything but vaguest hints about the true nature of the Zone and it's origins, but on a second playthrough it's absolutely mind-blowing.
In the endgame of Shadow of Chernobyl, you'll find yourself facing tons of Monolith troops, hardly any of which have medkits or bandages on them, while most Loners or Bandits would have at least one bandage. Why the lack of medical supplies? Because Monolith doesn't care about casualties. Their troops, being Brainwashed and Crazy, don't feel pain and can fight when everyone else would be dead, and their recruitingmethods ensure that they can always get more troops.
Why does the game prevent to pick up armours of dead stalkers, bandits, and soldiers? The armour worn by someone killed (whether the cause of death being a gunfight or an encounter with the local wildlife) is very likely to be torn or pierced, losing most of its protective qualities in such a place.
The hideout of Strelok's group is situated in the Agroprom underground, which at first glance doesn't make a lot of sense since the area is frequently the theater of battles between the Military, the Bandits and the Loners (in fact, the first two are always spawning down there) as well as chemical anomalies, a few bloodsuckers and a Controller for no other reason than giving you a challenge when you explore it. Then it dawns on you: of course nobody is going to notice the ladder hidden in a ventilation shaft that leads to the hideout, since explorers would pay more attention to the ground, to make sure they don't step in an area where gravity is 100 times stronger or where their whole leg will melt like an effervescent tablet in a glass of water, or the corridors, to avoid ending up face-to-face with a face-eating tentacled beast, a psionic creature that can make your brain pop by staring at you, or the business end of a Kalashnikov/shotgun. And as extra precaution, there's a booby trap on the ladder.
