THE CONFLICT TIMELINE

The Norvinsk region on the Russian border was set up as a special economic zone to attract international business, and it worked. The port city of Tarkov boomed as foreign companies moved in, none bigger than TerraGroup, a transnational holding with dozens of subsidiaries and offices in over a hundred countries.

One of those subsidiaries, TerraGroup Labs, set up shop in Tarkov under an innocent banner: biotechnology research for agriculture and farming. On paper, it was exactly the kind of investment the economic zone existed to attract. The company's motto was Vires in Scientia, strength in science.

The agribusiness front did not hold. TerraGroup Labs was running research far outside anything its paperwork described, much of it in a secret underground facility beneath the city itself, the place players now know as The Lab.

Evidence of illegal activity started to surface, and the Russian government took notice. What TerraGroup was actually building beneath Tarkov, and why it was worth destroying a city to protect, is the central mystery the game's story slowly unwinds.

TerraGroup did not rely on lawyers. United Security, USEC, a western private military company founded in 1999 from the merger of two firms, had effectively become TerraGroup's private army after the holding contracted it in 2004. USEC's job in Tarkov was blunt: destroy evidence of the company's activities and keep investigators away from its property.

The Russian response was BEAR, the Battle Encounter Assault Regiment, a PMC quietly established by government decree and staffed with ex-special forces from across the former Soviet states. BEAR was hired by Norvinsk officials to do the opposite job: get inside, find the evidence, and expose TerraGroup.

Two private armies with directly opposed contracts in the same city. The skirmishes between them came to be called the Contract Wars, and they did not stay skirmishes.

Open fighting broke out in the streets and the city came apart. The evacuation of civilians was chaotic and incomplete, and then the borders sealed: a blockade around the whole region cut Tarkov off from the outside world, with UN peacekeepers and Russian military on the perimeter.

Everyone still inside was on their own. USEC and BEAR operatives were stranded with no extraction and no functioning command. Civilians who stayed behind armed themselves and formed packs to survive, looting whatever the city left behind. Locals started calling them Scavs.

The strongest Scav groups organized under bosses who carved out territory: the Svetloozersk gang under Shturman in the Woods, Reshala's crew running Customs, and others across every corner of the region. And at night, hooded figures began appearing at ritual sites, a cult whose purpose nobody could explain.

This is where you come in. The 1.0 story opens during an assault on the TerraGroup office that goes wrong, leaving your PMC stranded in the city with no contact with command, forced to build relationships with the local traders to survive.

From there the story runs through nine chapters: a mysterious downed plane in the nature reserve, an armored case everyone wants, the cult, the lab beneath the city, and finally a choice between four different ways out of Tarkov. Every chapter is walked through step by step in our Story Guide.