Contributing

## Welcome!

If you want to contribute, no Fandom account is needed. However, an account can be useful to:

* hide your IP address from the publicly available edit log
* switch your default editor type (visual/source)
* see red links (links to the pages that don't exist yet)
* hide the right bar by default, and generally customize the interface

For simple edits, you can use the visual editor. For more complex edits and creating new pages, be sure to familiarize yourself with the basics of source editing:

* Basic Wikitext syntax
* Tables
* Infoboxes

Text color can be changed in the source mode with the {{Colors}} template, like this:

* {{Colors|red||example text}} becomes red text without the background

* {{Colors|red|green|example text}} becomes red text on green background

* {{Colors|#ffffff|#000000|example text}} becomes white text on black background

All images should be uploaded into the Cumulative Pack 2 Wiki first before you could insert them into articles. Check the dropdown menu in the navbar for the upload page as well. Images can be also uploaded on this page: Special:NewFiles.

For videos, use the {{#evu:}} tag, see https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:EmbedVideo for details.

## Creating new pages

Check the bar at the top right corner for the link to add a new page to this wiki. Or follow it from here: Special:CreatePage. Or click on any red link (referencing a non-existent page), you have to be logged in to Fandom to see them. You could also have a look at Special:WantedPages to see what pages are linked to the most but are missing.

If you are creating the article for a missing topic, **be sure to switch to the source editor first** (any of the two available).

At the bottom of the editor, you'll see the Preload template option; choose the appropriate template for your article, and it will fill your editor with instructions. This feature doesn't work in Visual mode. If you don't see the appropriate template for your case, just create the page as you feel appropriate.

Most articles need infoboxes with the data filled in. If you don't have the data or an image, or simply don't want to bother now, that's fine - somebody, or maybe even you, will eventually fill everything. Just check that you have an infobox. All infobox template are available at Category:Infobox templates.

Don't forget to leave the backlink in the corresponding overview article, for example a quest from OP-2.2 should be linked to in OP-2.2 quests.

After creating, be also sure to check that the page falls into appropriate category, for example a page about some NPC should be in Category:NPCs. Look at the bottom of the page to add categories if your page doesn't have one.

## Checklist

When editing and creating new pages about in-game entities, you can follow this checklist to make sure you haven't missed anything:

* Do things referenced in the article have links to the articles?
* Does your article have an infobox with item data?
* For quests, make sure that it's linked properly to the previous and next quests in the infobox.
* Ensure that your article is represented in the overview of the same type. For example, a quest should have an entry in a table in OP-2.2 quests, an NPC article should have the corresponding entry in OP-2.2 NPCs, etc. If your quest belongs to a questline that's not added to the overview yet, add the table for your questline yourself, using the structure similar to others.

## Styling

Avoid link overload. In-game things referenced in your article should have links, even if the articles they link to don't exist yet. But it's usually enough to link them once in a while. For example if you have a paragraph with the NPC name repeating 10 times, it's enough to link the name once.

This doesn't apply to tables and infoboxes, however. They are much more formal and every in-game entity should have a link there.

Use the × (U+00D7 MULTIPLICATION SIGN) to denote quantities: Bandage ×2. Ammo should be counted in rounds, not magazines like in the game.

### Names

Names should correspond to in-game ones, but be sure to replace all non-standard quotation marks with the standard ones (**"**).

For ammo, omit the word "cartridges", for example **9x18mm cartridges** become just **9x18mm**. Don't omit "charge", for example VOG-25 charge should stay as it is.

For artifacts, remove quotation marks, so **"Jellyfish"** becomes just **Jellyfish**.

## Images

If you want to add an image or replace the existing one with a better version, consider the following:

Screenshots should preferably be taken during the day, in clear weather, and capture the essence of what you want to illustrate, so it would be well recognizable when viewed at small picture size (think 200-300px). Use default gamma/brightness/contrast settings, preferably. Hide your interface (press NUM - and NUM + in the game). You might want to crop a screenshot, ensure you have proper lighting, perspective, composition, color contrast to separate your subject from the background etc. Think of it as photography.

Icons for weapons and artifacts should be taken from the game directly, not from screenshots, as game files have proper transparency and the icons are pixel-precise. However you can add even from screenshots, somebody will replace it with a proper version eventually.

When uploading your image, use descriptive names instead of something like "123", so the images can be searched for in the gallery and reused later.

## Filling the data

Wiki is supposed to be more or less accurate, and in most cases you'll need to consult the game data directly.

* For most purposes, it's enough to download the archive with the unpacked text files: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iln\_4azr\_QbF9vVBHsWl5ZiPrb5JRJ0a
I processed some of them with a custom written parser into a separate file, for convenience. Read the README.txt.

* You'll need a good text editor. Visual Studio Code, Notepad++, vim, Emacs, choose whatever you like, just ensure that your editor can do full-text search inside directories, highlight XML (sometimes ill-formed) and Lua, and **detect Windows-1251 encoding automatically**, as most of the Cyrillic names require it. For this reason, I recommend Notepad++ from my own experience, but your preference might be different.

* To add backgrounds for interactive maps, you'll have to unpack the game files with any available unpacker. There's a plugin for Total Commander, standalone unpacker, and a ton of other utilities available to work with STALKER databases, just search around.

### "Known as" field

The game is originally in Russian and in Ukrainian, and a lot of the info on it is available in those languages. The "Known as" field is there for non-speakers to be able to search for the in-game quests on YouTube and the web easily. You can fill it in from the game files:

* Using full-text search in your editor, search for your string in English (for example quest name as it's shown in the PDA) in the config/text directory.

* Open the corresponding XML file, and your string will be inside the <eng> tag. Look at the <rus> tag near it, and it will be the Russian name you're looking for. Make sure your file was opened in Windows-1251 encoding, and you are copying proper Cyrillic characters, not a random garbled string.

### Equipment icons

Equipment icons are kept in ui\_icon\_equipment.dds and ui\_icons\_actor\_amk.dds. To be able to transfer them to the wiki, you'll need:

* The files themselves, here's a Google Drive link with both of them in one zip archive.
* Unpacked text files, link with the archive provided above.
* Image editor that supports transparency in DDS files, for example Paint.net, GIMP, or the Photoshop .DDS plugin (if you disable "load transparency as Alpha channel").

The algorithm is as follows:

* Search for the name of your item in the unpacked text files, using the full-text search in your text editor. (for example `Colt M4A1` as it's shown in the game).
* Look for the entry in the xml file called `string id="` above your item. In this example it's `ars-m4a1`.
* Take this "string id", and search for it inside the **merged.txt**. In two lines above it, you will see the following parameters:
	+ inv\_grid\_x = 17 (icon X coordinate in tiles, inside ui\_icon\_equipment.dds)
	+ inv\_grid\_y = 61 (icon Y coordinate in tiles)
* Multiply those numbers by 50, and you'll have the upper left coordinate of your icon in ui\_icon\_equipment.dds.
* Open your image editor, find this icon at this coordinate, and crop it from the ui\_icon\_equipment.dds.

### Artifacts

You can fill the artifact data directly from the game, not from the configs, as it's easier. The "special" field is for really special properties, like Ruby artifacts which can collapse anomalies, Monolith Idol which changes the weather, Teleport, Black Hole that destroys Grabbers without being consumed, etc.

### Weapons, ammo, addons

For OP-2.2 weapons and ammo, refer to the following table instead of the configs:
 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1me0bO3B\_ZnwHLOYXqZDNyPfdFAL8nqp1oNkrbyFZ7cM
 It's automatically generated from the game files, and can be filtered, sorted, and searched for the convenience. All columns are annotated so you will know exactly what each number means.

### Armor

Refer to the automatically generated table.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1me0bO3B\_ZnwHLOYXqZDNyPfdFAL8nqp1oNkrbyFZ7cM/edit#gid=1028198551