This guide will not make you flawless and at the same time will not break the mystery of the game. It will only give you a better chance of survival, considering you're playing on the intended difficulty.

A lot of the bad reviews Pathologic 2 got on Metacritic are because the game is difficult, what if I told you, the game is intended to be difficult, it's part of the lore. In fact, it wouldn't make much sense without it being difficult.

The developers added lower difficulties because of public demand, but specifically said that that's not the intended difficulty. And for good reason. Lore aside, Pathologic 2 is not your average Skyrim RPG. It's supposed to be hard. It's meant to be more like a Dark Souls but because its' a survival Dark Souls and not a fighting Dark Souls people don't usually see the similarities.

Not only the fun is in the challenge, but the lore is in the challenge.

And about death, yeah, the game got that covered. In Day 1 at Midnight (day 1 so not major spoiler) at the theater the director will say to you "try not to ever, ever die, ever". Well, you will die. It's better not to die, but you will die, and it's going to be interesting. It's part of the game.

As they say, the difficulty is a feature not a bug.

There is plenty of food & water in the first days of the game. But soon, they will become a rare commodity and prices will double each day. So the first days of the game are your chance to stack as much water & food as you can.

You can find bottles in the trash and the fill them up at wells or barrels. Further in the game wells will break and later barrels too.

You can be given food by certain characters and you can buy food at groceries.

The best way to do this is to go and complete quests, and while you are on the road check the trashes for everything, including bottles, and the grocery shops for food. Stack as much as you can.

The best type of foods are:

Don't bother eating the snacks, you get better use out of them by trading with the kids:
Note that children often trade items that infected people are after. So you can trade with kids, then trade with infected, and profit. When you trade with infected, trade antibiotics of the color you have the most of.

Not major spoilers ahead. Just some essential stuff.

1. Day 2: Don't speak with Yulia Lyuricheva located on the balcony of the Lump
- The lump is the big house where Big Vlad is, not a big spoiler as you find him in day 2.
- If you talk with her, this introduces her as a character which means now he has a risk of catching the plague.
- If she's not spoken to, she's not introduced until day 6, so one less character to worry about.

2. Day 2: Don't speak with Vlad the Younger about the Termitary. Instead, speak with Big Vlad, then with Clara who is in the lobby of his house, then with Big Vlad again.
- He will send people to retrive his son, keeping both of them alive.
- There is no penalty to this with the steppe people in the Termitary.

3. Day 3: Don't do the House of the Dead sidequest. -> Simply do not enter the House of the Dead
- Doing this one prevents an area with a single character from being infected.
- However, if you don't do it, Khan won't leave the Polyhedron so he can't be infected.
(Not major spoiler, you find out in Day 2: Khan is important because he's one of the 7 kids that your father took care of).

4. Day 4: Don't give a bottle of water to Lara -> Prevents the infection from reaching where she lives.

5. Day 5: Do speak with Sitcky (the kid) to find out about a chemist involving bodies. -> If you do it corretly you'll protect the west of the town from being infected the first time.

Early in the game, children will inform you about chests they hid through the town. Telling you that you have to take something from the chest, and put something back, that's how you play the game.

Actually, you don't have to put anything back. Here are the children chests locations:
The chests reset everyday. Just like the trash cans.

Not the trash cans, they reset everyday. Not the Warehouse where Bad Grief lives, there will a fight there one day that will reset the chests. But, most of drawers and chests in named NPC houses are persistent.

1. Lara's House, the cabinet next to her -> That's the only place in her house where you can store items indefinitely. In the room opposite from where Lara resides, there is a large cabinet that is not safe for the player's stored items, as it will occasionally be stocked with items from Lara.

2. Big Vlad's House, the dresser in the entrance -> Initially containing money, that is a place where items may be stored indefinitely, as well as a couch where you may sleep. Both Capella's Wing and Olgimsky's Seat have house clocks where the you may save your progress.

Afterwards, you will get the keys to your house and can safely deposit there, you'll have a lot more room than in Lara or Big Vlad's house. And afterwards, you'll get access to a deposit vor even more space.

Any tincture not used in diagnosis is one more tincture used in antibiotic or painkiller production.

The Plus Tinctures are twice as effective in revealing symptoms. It will reveal 2 symptoms where a normal Tincture can reveal 1.

If we use a normal Tincture to reveal the useless central symptom, the Plus Tincture can be used to reveal the resulting color.

The Plus Tincture will always reveal 2 symptoms if it can, so if it reveals only one, you know that it is the other color that is the correct one.

If you reverse the order and start with a Plus Tincture. A Plus Tincture has a 1/3 chance to reveal the right color straight away, with the second normal Tincture being necessary 2/3rd of times.

The second Tincture can be any color, even the same color as the Plus Tincture, just make sure pain is not 100% maxed so symptoms can still be revealed.

If pain starts at about 40% or higher, it guarantees needing a Morphine.

So, use 2 Tinctures of any color: one Plus, one normal, for any all all diganosis. Use a Plus Tincture first if the pain is low so you have a chance of 1 shot kill. And use a normal Tincture first if the pain is high.

This is where the herbs grow in Pathologic 2
As a rule of thumb, the herbs grow:
- 3 in the hill next to the graveyard.
- 3 in the village at the end of the map.
- A lot when the river ends on both sides, like a really really lot, just go here and forget the rest lot.
- 5 in the structures next to the train station.
And remember that they respawn at 7:30. So if you go there at 6 - 6:30 PM and wait an hour there. You can collect the double amounts of herbs for that day.

These are the herb combinations:
Here is a better table for herbs:
As a rule of thumb, make sure you have a balanced number of colors. The plus Trinket is better because it can reveal 2 symptoms but other than that, all Trinket are the same in terms of rarity, utility and effect. They have differents effects on yourself but most of the time you're not going to use them on yourself.

We took care of hunger and thirst, but what about exhaustion? It seems like a consntat right? That you have to sleep for 1 hour to recover 20% of your exhaustion meter.

Additionally, you can eat Lemon or Coffe to reduce your exhaustion. Sleeping is bad because generally you lose parts of the game when sleeping, the world around you still moves when you sleep.

But, there is one the exhaustion fears, in his tongoue he is the liver of dead bodies!

If you take the liver antibiotic before sleep, your exhaustion will recover quicker, by about 20%. So 3 hours of sleep will do the job of 4 hours. If you don't mind the loss of health. If you take your Morphine to maximize health, you could trade a couple of herbs, one bottle of water and Morphine, for an extra hour of hunting around and fixing your loot and the town.

But you know who beats the liver antibiotics? the liver painkillers. They do the same thing as the liver painkillers, but you know what the bomb is? they stack.

Take 2 liver painkillers and sleep for 2 hours, you will be almost fully recovered.

The liver antibiotic:
The liver painkiller, making it:
Get a few livers from the nearest corpse and you will never have to sleep again.

To make painkillers, combine a Tincture with a healthy organ or blood.
To make antibiotics, combine a Tincture with an infected organ or blood.

And an important bit about health:

Health is primarily lost during combat, however if the player's hunger or exhaustion are at their maximum limit, or the player has contracted Plague, their health will diminish incrementally.

If already infected, interacting with infected surfaces, people, clouds, or air will result in additional loss of health. Health can also by lost by consuming certain rations (such as Coffee) and drugs (namely antibiotics).

Health can be regained by using healing items such as Tourniquets and Bandages, or by sleeping (+25% HP/2 hrs). If the player consumes a Morphine or Painkiller prior to sleeping, the rate at which they recover health will increase. Damage received during combat can be mitigated by wearing clothing.

The plague kills you in about half a day, depending on you keeping your immunity up, that is not walking into infected districts, and depending on your health beforehand.

How effective are antibiotics at removing the infection and how dangerous? They cannot kill you. They always take a percentage of your remaining health. However, something else can kill you when you have low health due to antibiotics.

Not all antibiotics are equal however, depending on your choice of starting Tincture and organ you could be reducing the infection by as much as 80% or as low as 30%, and the health from as much as 50% to as little as 25%.

If you sleep with infection, you may lose health instead of gaining. Given that antibiotics cannot kill, do not use your health items unless after you've taken your antibiotics.

Also, the infection rate increases exponentially so there is never a wrong time to take antibiotics.

The infection growth rate is proportional with how much infection you already have. So there isn't really a bad time to take antibiotics, there's no benefit to waiting until the infection has grown to take an antibiotic.

Infection cured & health lost per antibiotic:
Antibiotics also provide minor benefits to immunity, hunger, thirst or exhaustion.

But preferably, you would want to cure the plague rather than keep being on top of it.

There are 4 ways to cure the infection and the 3rd one is a big story spoiler so I will only talk about the first 3 ways:
- Panacea, no penalties.
- Shmowders, more common than panacea, lose a lot of health, can usually be found at children.
- Fire, if your infection level is low and your health high enough to survive a burning, you always need to have low infection for this to work. Find a firestarter in the infected districts and attack him, take one molotov to the face, wait until you're cured, then run.

As time goes on, bins refill, shops change their stocks, herbs regrow, children play with chests and the outdoor furniture continues to be filled with stuff. But when do these happen?

There are 2 times when these inventories in the world reset, at: midnight 12:00 and at 7:30.

If you catch some of these inventories before and after those times you can double your profit. Especially if you catch the reset time for shopkeepers inventories.

Bins refill at 12:00. Shops refill also at 12:00.

Herbs regrow at 7:30. Children change chests at 7:30.

This is very useful for herb hunting. If you collect all herbs in an area just before 7:30, you will double your stock.

Also, the townfolks despawns at 12:00 to be replaced by thugs, and they return at 7:30.

1. Stamina -> You only gain thirst (the red part of stamina) when your stamina (the green part) is not at full. That means, you only gain thirst when you run.

When going to sleep, make sure your stamina (the green part) is 100% full, otherwise you will gain thirst while sleeping.

When walking your thrist bar won't increase, unless you eat food or get into a fight.

2. Days get Shorter -> As the in-game characters say, the days get shorter, but your in-game survival bars don't, so each day is going to be harder and harder to survive, and you will have less time.

You the player have less time each day to acquire food as each day the time of the day shrinks.

3. The greater your immunity, the lower your infection rate -> So always try to keep your immunity to max level.

4. The time stops when talking or trading -> So don't worry about that.

5. Shmowder locations -> Various side quests, children inventory, children chests, but they are quite rare. Shmowder usually costs 35 when found in children's inventory, as such you should always carry more nuts with you, buy them from any grochery you pass by.

6. Children's Hazlenuts -> Hazlenuts are the best for trading with children. They value their own nuts as 1 and your nuts as 2, so you can repeatedly trade with them to obtain all of their nuts all at once.

7. When fighting big guys -> Use a heavy punch to stun them first, followed by quick strikes to minimize your stamina drain. However, if you wear a weapon, even if a rusty one, you attack faster than if you were using your fists. So use a weapon, even if it is completely broken.

8. Menkhu's Finger -> Is the most powerful knife in the game and a good tool for getting organs. You can get one from Lara in Day 1 but it's badly damaged. However, it's cheaper to repair that one that buy a new one.

9. Infected districts are great for looting stuff -> Keep in mind, drawers that appear dirty will drain your immunity while searching them, but the ones that appear clean, won't drain your immunity while searching them.

10. This is a big one so you may want to do without it -> Do you want a full stack of healthy organs? For your antibiotics and other? Look no further than the Maw. Nobody cares about the Maw district. If you're hated in the Maw, nobody else cares. So if you're really desperate. Go on a killing and looting spree in the Maw to get as many organs and items as you can so you can save the rest of the town. This post was provided to you by the Maw-hating gang.

A minor 2022 update with other useful information.

1. Buy as much food as humanly possible in day 1 & day 2 and deposit them at Lara or Vlad. And get as much water as humanly possible in day 1 & day 2 to deposit them at Lara or Vlad.

Buy as much food as possible from shops, when you have money and nothing to do with them, but food from shops. Also in Day 1 and Day 2, a lot of people will give you food, because the town still has food at that point, don't use it, save it. May seem like a lot right now but you're going to need it later.

Get as many bottles from the trash and get as many water from the pumps as humanly possible in days 1 & day 2 and store them in the same place. Don't use them. It will help you a lot in days 9 - 12. Maybe days 7-8 too if you're feeling desperate.

So yeah, collect lots of food and water in day 1 and day 2.

Just like a huge amount of people did in 2020 in our timeline.

2. You can avoid negative effects of consumable by having your meters maxed out before taking them.

For example, at maximum exhaustion there are no side effect to drinking morphine or Medrel tincture. At maximum hunger you can consume coffee or Yas tinctures with no additional hunger. This may seem counter intuitive but at full health recommend taking coffee or rotten food before you sleep since you should be able recover from the negative effects of both by the time you wake up.

3. So much more safe deposit spaces.

So far I talked about 3 main safe deposit spaces:
- The Haruspex's workshop's absurdly large cupboard (obviously)
- Big Vlad's dresser by the exit to the lump.
- Lara's kitchen washstand, office cabinet, and upstairs cabinet. NOT the kitchen cabinet though as it resets with food on Day 4 when you take a quest.

But there are more safe storage places:
- Rubin's apartment has a lot of storage and it's one of the few storage locations you can access immediately since day 1 - a wardrobe and short dresser in the entrance room, a tall cupboard in the bedroom, a dresser a washstand and chest in the bathroom.
- NOTE: Rubin's place also has other apartments you can store stuff in, but you will get a reputation penalty for each item you take, even if you were the one to store it there.
- Katerina Saburov's morphine cabinet
- Anna Angel's place (in the room behind where she normally stands there are 3-4 different containers. And the chest on the floor)
- Yulia's dresser and wardrobe (on either side of the door as you enter)
- Peter Stamatin's twyrine cupboard (when going up the stairs, turn left instead, it is wedged behind the door) and chest (behind his bed)
- Var's dresser and chest right beside him, and washstand and chest on the shelf in the back room. But you have to talk to him before you can access his room.
- Isador's House after Day 4. Every container in Isadro's House is reset on day 4. After that point, it is safe. And also has some weird spawn effects first and second time you visit it, so just to be safe, only store after Day 4. So Lara's kitchen cabinet and Isador's whole house resets on day 4, the other containers are safe 100% of the time.

4. You can loot muggers twice if you take their things and then kill them anyway.

However, killing them makes you lose a minor amount of rep. So kill them at your own discression.

5. Lockpicks with low durability are an instakill when they break inside someone.

Really amazing that they added this small detail into the game.

6. Buy lockpicks from Bad Grief and trade them to Guards for toasts, inmunity boosters, morphine.

Practice capitalism. Win at capitalism.

7. Lemons are worth trading for. Sometimes even buying, as it literally buys you time.

They reduce exhaustion without having to spend time sleeping, time you could otherwise be spending completing critical quests or gathering herbs.

8. The Lantern doesn't just provide light, it banishes static plague clouds and halts the plague clouds that chase you.

Remember, the Plague fears and hates fire, use the lantern as your ward.

When it comes to looting infected houses. Keep the lantern out and lit, plague clouds will avoid it and dissapate in front of it. That said when looting with it out be as fast as possible because Artemy has to set the lantern down to loot and the plague clouds come back.

Use it in the hospital on the day you wait for an hour. Makes it super easy.

9. Collecting Shmowder, all non-random and random Shmowder locations.

In the early days of the game, say day 1 - day 3, but also practice it in day 4 - day 7. You should have 3 collecting priorities when you are not doing quests: food, water, shmowder.

Shmowder and Panacea are the only ones that can cure the plague. And you only get a limited & set amount of Panacea in your playrun (first 2 then later 5). But Shmowder are more random in this way, and they only provide -10% HP decrease so it's not like they are clearly inferior to Panacea.

Shmowder can help you cure the plague and cure the town instantly.

Guaranteed sources of Shmowder:
- The game of Hide-&-Seek with the children in Act 2. After you play the game and find them, one of the children will also have a Shmowder that they trade away for just 5, as opposed to the usual 35 price for Shmowder.
- Maera's trade in the Nutshell (children's house) in Act 3. Maera will want a leash and will give you a Shmowder in exchange.

Random chances of Shmowder:
- Teensys (girl with short black hair) have a 10% chance to carry Shmowder
- Rare children's caches (when you play that game with the map) have a 20% chance to carry Shmowder.
- The Fellow Traveller (guy at the Dead Man's shop who opens in the middle of the night) has a chance to carry Shmowders, but he values them at 40 where as the kids value them at 35.

So if you play your cards right. You should have 9 guarnateed cures and more depening on how many Teensys you spammed and your luck. Make sure you have stuff children love in your inventory to trade with Teensys: peanuts, walnuts, raisins, chestnuts, hazelnuts, bull bell, safety pin, spindle, button, beetle, chalk, marbles, rings. The small things, don't eat them. (Literally happened to me in my first playthrough, I found a Teensy with Shmowder, didn't have enough to pay for it, but the time I found enough, she despawned). And if you catch the plague yourself, go in an infected district and use fire to get rid of the plague, walk into fire while you have low plague/infection, make sure you have a lot of health, remember the plague hates fire.

10. Use a broken item rather than your fists when fighting.

A broken item, even if it deals no additional damage because it's broken, still attacks faster than your fists alone. So it's always better to use a broken item instead of your fists when fighting.

This is how my first playthrough went.


Day 1: I went through the town doing all kids of side quests and tried to stack up a lot of food and water. In the end, I didn't stack that much because I had no knowledge which food is good or where to get water from and I didn't had a good understanding of the town's layout. But I managed to get enough and it was really helpful in the last days of the game. I stashed the food in Lara's home and Big Vlad's home, those deposits I talked about in the guide.

Day 2: I don't remember much of what happened in Day 2 but I did the same thing I did in day 1. Lots of food and water stashed.

Day 3: First day of the outbreak if I remember correctly. I did the quest House of the Dead despite not telling you do it in the guide, but Khan lived to the end despite being infected and having to be saved 2 times so in the end it's all good.

Day 4: Anna Angel was infected as soon as the plague began. I thought she was gone, but surprisngly and very nicely she survived to the end. I managed to find 3 or 4 Shawders in my playthrough but had to use them on more important characters.

Day 5: Everything was getting harder and harder, the game already showed his teeths from Day 1, but in Day 5 I barely managed to get enough food and money. I think this is where I failed to do Rubin's quest to figure out what he was doing at night. It's a shame I lost it as it seemed very important, but at least I managed to do most of the other quests right.

Day 6: This is the day I finally managed to get a good grip of the game. I finally knew the town well enough to remember where the plants for potions are, where the shops are and what the most important items are. This is where I finally managed to understand the game so well that I didn't have struggles to make ends meet all the time, it didn't seem like a constant rush for food and the game didn't seem all that difficult anymore. So I let my guard down, and died 2 times. That's 3 deaths in total. But I did manage to store a lot of food this day, which is important because right after I learned the game, the inquistior came.

Day 7:I memorized how to do potions well, the 3 basic plants for a verity of each color and the rare plant with the weird sound for the plus yellow Trinket. The plus yellow Trinket is amazing because it also restores 10% of exhaustion. Meaning with this magic bomb I could sleep a lot less than I needed to. If only I would have known this from the beginning. If only I would have known what the most important food is, what are the most important times, where are the shops in town and so on on Day 1, maybe I would have finished the game with 0 deaths. I also upgraded my inventory and the brewery with every chance I got, I made it a priority and more than often it payed out. I finished the game with all inventory upgrades, at that point I had more space than I needed. But, just as I was about to get the hang of the game, inquistiorial coupons made me struggle with food again.

Day 8: Because of inquistiorial coupons I had to rely on trade for food now. I still used trade in the past and gradually learned it well. What items each type of character gives. Especially kids give good stuff, Schmower, and the Dead Man shop at night. Didn't trade with the infected that much but traded a lot with the locals. This time, I would rob a few houses but no luck in finding food. I traded with the locals a bit for food but only when I got lucky. Again, was having a hard time finding food, but I managed to survive and do all important quests.

Day 9: This is the day I learned a lot more about the economy of the game, and the daily founds also helped, and the miltary leaving bodies of bandits that I can loot for a lot of goodies also helped. This is the day I started to become essentially rich, I could have everything I wanted, except food because inquistiorial coupons. This is the day Muddy almost got herself killed so I became infected instead, and the day I was about to enter the Abbatoir to get more Panacea.

Day 10: I got all 5 bottles to fill with Living Blood to make Panacea from the Abatoire which helped me save 5/6 children with the plague came for them all. For the last kid, a note led me to a chest with Schmower, so luckly all kids survived. Also almost didn't made it to the inquistior so that she can deliver her letters. If I wouldn't have made it, I assumed I would have lost the game.

Day 11: I healed the infected but at this point it was useless and I decided to give the order to destroy the big building. I died when the army surrounded me, I knew they would shoot but didn't think it was instant kill, luckly nothing major happened like the last time when a rat came into the world. The magic and creatures of the step had to die but the town lived. I reached a good ending, but I'm curious what the alternative ending was and what would have happned if I told the inquistior to go get them themselves or if I picked Big Vlad instead of Young Vlad. Or if I had a different combo of death and infections, the game has a lot of replyability it seems.

Day 12: You reap what you saw, it was a time for reaping, and I liked the ending.

Here is my save file if you want to replay other parts of the game:
https://www.nexusmods.com/pathologic2/mods/16

That's it, consider your medical licence taken Doctor Artemy Haruspex.

Now go out there and save the town!

And try not to ever, ever, die, ever.

Btw, if you try to save scum, doesn't work, the game remembers how many times you died.

By the way, everyday, at midnight, at the theatre, a play predicts the future.