Just to give examples of how a-life in vanilla SoC works, some excerpts from my knife-start run:
At Garbage, don't trigger the shakedown scene - the trio of pseudo-bandits won't turn hostile. In fact, if Yurik is killed, the trio splits and they just wander around the map. I had one of these guys fighting actual bandits at car cemetery.
These bandits are coded as regular loners so if you don't trigger the shakedown script and Yurik gets killed, they will acts as regular loners too. Actually a coding oversight but still interesting
Dark Valley could be hard as it has no traders and plenty of bandits around. In my run A-life helped me and spawned two bandits and dogs right as I entered it - they killed the Dolg guy and wandered off, so I got myself a nice AN-94 to go. I cleaned the smaller factory first to stock on looted ammo and then went to the Borov HQ, you can also find another merc armor in the armory there.
The game rarely spawns any actors inside locations, it usually spawns them at level transitions and then they had to go to their destinations on foot. When you are not around, the game usually autoresolves most of emergent situations, like it allows bandits and stolkers to safely go through under the bridge with soldiers on Cordon. But if you around, all bets are off. If you stick around at Cordon and don't kill the soldiers under the bridge, it is most likely that they will get into firefight with some newcomers who try to get to their camps
Now, usually as you enter Dark Valley the game doesn't need to spawn anyone as all camps are fully crewed. But in my case, I guess some bandits were killed by some monsters in the background so reinforcement was needed
This time I turn right, the regular route. Game spawns two Dolg guys in exoskeletons, together, we kill two Monolith guys in the kindergarten. One Dolg guy decides to die in the anomaly - because why not? The other goes down to the parking and solo (!) cleans it from Monolith. Then goes up and dies from gauss sniper. The emergent situations in the game are still hilarious.
Pripyat is the most scripted location in the game, designed to be the kind of "cinematic" breakthrough scene, although only on the first visit. Usually, you go underground with stolker masters from initial firefight and fight monolith peps in there. In my case, stolkers were all dead and dolg guy went there because his route demanded it. As he is master in exoskeleton and monolith dudes there are bums with AKS-74s, he had no problems clearing them solo. Stolker masters - if alive - set up camp underground, Dolg guys have to go further per their route. Usually, they go after you, but as I wasn't in a hurry so this time I trailed behind one of them.
