S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl

• You have to actually be holding your artifact detector to know if anything is nearby, even though your unseen anomaly detector and Geiger counter obviously do not need to be held in your hand to work

• Different merchants will buy things for different prices. Honestly I have not even figured out fully what the optimal traders are, I just know that bartenders for some reason pay twice as much for artifacts as other vendors do

• Paying for things to be repaired will cost more than the price you can get when selling it, so only repair something you are actively using

• Related, nobody will buy equipment damaged beyond 50% or whatever the threshold for the broken red heart icon is so you might as well not even take that stuff unless it is a gun or a piece of armor you really want to try. (It turns out there is a vendor in
  Rostol
  that will buy anything as long as it's above 0%).

• The sum total of those two tips indicating that yes, particularly considering how tight money can be in the game, you are likely better off just dumping a gun that breaks and switching to a new one unless you find something unique (if the gun has a nickname, it is probably special)

• Take the game seriously when it tells you to find cover and go where it says--I assumed surely any sturdy-looking building counted as cover. This is untrue.

• Do not worry if you suddenly die in the tutorial and feel like you are doing something wrong. The developers just clearly wanted everyone to get the authentic S.T.A.L.K.E.R. experience right away.