Found: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Lost Alpha Mod Coming This Month

Like old Stalker tales told around the campfire, a lot of strange and wonderful things were once said to be in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, from naked green dwarves to driveable vehicles and a whole extra city. Several mods have restored various bits of cut content, based on leftover files and leaked dev builds, but Lost Alpha is one of the more ambitious. What began as a project to remake and reintegrate these leftovers has blown up into a new parallel story which includes (new) old content and a bits of the creators' own design too.

In response to some ruffian leaking a scrappy old build from November, developers Dezowave Group have decided to release Lost Alpha earlier than planned then keep working on it. It'll arrive on April 26, the 28th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster which started all this.

"Some testers have decided to ruin years of our hard work and have leaked an unfinished render-test build of Lost Alpha to the public," Dezowave explained earlier this month, saying it "crosses out any chances to release LA as an official addon." Which we weren't aware was even a possibility.

They say the release coming in a few weeks "won't be completely finished as we wanted it to be but at least stable and finishing the game would be possible." It'll be nice to see what they've been up to for five years, but a shame that it happened this way.

Here's how the mod looked back in January: