Chernobylite — Companion recruitment and skills guide

In Chernobylite, you’ll gain experience points from various actions such as killing enemies, exploring the game world, encountering random events, crafting items/base-building, and completing missions. In turn, you’ll use the points you earn to obtain new perks, all of which come from your companions. Here’s our Chernobylite companion recruitment and skills guide to help you turn the main character, Igor, into everyone’s best friend who becomes an absolute beast thanks to his training.

Note: For more information, check out our Chernobylite guides and features hub. Likewise, please be reminded that this guide contains minor spoilers.

Chernobylite – Companion recruitment and skills training guide

Your companions in Chernobylite join at intervals as long as you met pre-requisites. You’ll meet them during the course of your journey and you’ll be presented with the option to recruit them. Once they’re in your base, you can talk to them to start your training. This will lead to a short activity or cutscene.

In some cases, you’ll simply listen to the character’s dialogue as they teach Igor. In others, you might be asked to shoot targets, run through an obstacle course, or sneak up on your own buddies. It’s also possible that some perks have upgraded versions that cost more points (i.e., Olga giving you +6 inventory slots, then another +6 slots after learning the previous perk).

You can refer to the pages below for the parts that you need help with:

Note 1: Due to the nature of Chernobylite‘s campaign, companion quest chains and narrative arcs tend to be non-linear. For instance, you could meet up with Sashko during a mission and, later, he’d call you on your HQ’s radio to give your next task. Alternatively, his arc might be interrupted by a mission from Olga, though you’ll still get Sashko’s next quest down the line.

Note 2: You do have the option to tell characters to leave your group for good, but this isn’t advisable. Moreover, Chernobylite provides many important decisions for you to make, some of which can cause companions to like or dislike your actions. If your relationship suffers past the “Terrible” stage, they could end up leaving your squad. If you don’t want this to happen, you can use the timeline reversal mechanic to change the outcome.