The first time the government came to be aware of the presence of stalkers after the second incident was in Aug, when a stalker camp was found by government explorers. It follows that former criminals can be found in all of the stalker factions except Duty, though most criminals not part of a bandit clan have long since started new lives. Some go for profit, some for adventure, some seek to get away from the world, to escape the law or personal problems. Stalkers come to the Zone for a number of reasons. Indeed, without stalkers, curiosities like artifacts would be a rarity outside the Zone and the experiments of the Ecologists would be stalled for a considerable amount of time as the military is hardly able to assist them because of their slipping control, low morale, and lack of sufficient manpower. Unofficially, they are the most reliable workhorses for any individual who wants something retrieved in the Zone as they are the most experienced people who can be enlisted. Officially, stalkers are trespassing in a restricted ecological disaster zone and will be shot on sight by the military due to armed encounters in the past.
And stalkers seem to have adopted this concept, since exploiting and robbing others do not fall within their usual agendas. The stalker's primary act of "stalking" or "looting", as the military characterizes it, is the smuggling of radioactive and unidentified objects from the zone that is highly dangerous for human health and life.
Bandits are borderline cases as they are not called "stalkers" by other stalkers, though the authorities label them as such, and they use the word for themselves. In the Zone's culture, being a stalker is more of a career than a title as traders like Sidorovich and Barkeep are not considered stalkers by other zone dwellers, even though they are illegally residing inside the zone.
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