Story Chapters and Endings: Tarkov's Main Questlines

The problem this guide solves

You finished the tutorial raid, your quest log exploded into dozens of trader tasks, and somewhere in the interface there is a separate tracker called story chapters that nobody explained.

Escape from Tarkov runs two quest systems side by side. The first is the familiar stream of side tasks from traders like Prapor and Therapist. The second is the chapter system: multi-stage mainlines that carry the actual narrative of the Norvinsk zone and, at the far end, decide which of the game's four endings your character walks into. Most wipe-veteran advice you find online still treats every quest as interchangeable grind, which is exactly how players end up fifty hours in with rich traders and zero story progress.

This guide untangles the two systems. You will learn what a chapter actually is, which chapters exist right now, which one silently gates half the maps in the game, and which one opened the door to the Icebreaker and the Paradigm storyline. You will also learn the one ending route that can currently be documented with confidence, and where the honest gaps are.

Everything here was checked against Patch 1.1.5.0, live since September 8, 2026, during Season 1 KORD BREACH. Story content is the fastest-moving part of the game since the 1.0 launch, so treat exact requirements as a snapshot: quest steps, karma thresholds, and map access rules drift between patches, and a future update can reshuffle any of them.

Where a detail could not be confirmed from the sources behind this site, the text says so plainly instead of guessing. Tarkov's story layer is young, and large parts of it are still being mapped by the community. Knowing what is verified and what is rumor is itself an advantage, because it stops you from chasing requirements that do not exist.

At a glance: every story chapter

Ten chapters are live in the current build. One of them, Tour, doubles as your progression skeleton key; another, Boreas, gates the newest map in the game.

The chapter list below is the verified roster. What each individual chapter demands stage by stage is only partially documented outside the game, so the table sticks to what is confirmed: the chapter exists, and where research has pinned down its role, that role is noted.

Three structural facts matter more than any single chapter. First, chapters are mainlines, not side jobs: they run in ordered stages and feed the ending structure. Second, Tour is the mandatory on-ramp that unlocks traders and maps in sequence. Third, exactly four endings exist, and the only route into one of them documented in our sources runs through Scav karma.

Two quest systems, one character

Since the 1.1.0.0 progression rework, the game formally splits tasks into two families. Story chapters are the multi-stage mainlines that build toward the endings. Side tasks, still labeled quests in most community writing, are the traditional trader errands, and they now unlock in batches tied to each trader's loyalty level rather than arriving in a fixed sequence.

The practical consequence is that your quest log no longer shows you the whole ladder at once. Side tasks appear as you prove yourself to each trader, while chapters sit on their own track and quietly set the long arc. Players who ignore the chapter track do not lose loot or experience directly, but they do stall map unlocks, because the single most important progression chain in the game lives inside a chapter.

A useful mental model: side tasks build your economy and trader standing, chapters build your access and your ending. You need both, but they fail differently. Neglect side tasks and you stay poor; neglect chapters and entire maps, mechanics, and the endgame simply never open for you.

Tour: the chapter that unlocks the game

Tour is assigned automatically and functions as the game's true tutorial. Every new player should treat it as the first priority, above money, above gear, above everything.

The chain starts with a guided extraction from Ground Zero and then walks you across the map pool one location at a time. Each stage asks you to visit a trader or survive a specific map, and each completion hands you the next trader and the next location. By the time Tour ends, you have met every core trader and unlocked every standard map including The Lab.

Two properties make Tour unforgiving if you improvise. Several hand-ins demand found-in-raid items: construction materials, weapons, and PMC dogtags must be looted by you or crafted, not bought off the flea market, because purchased goods lose the found-in-raid flag. And the Lighthouse stage costs 20,000 dollars outright, which you can buy from Peacekeeper with rubles once he is unlocked.

The Terminal stage deserves a warning of its own. It asks you to use the radio at the watchtower in the southeast corner of Shoreline, and the safe approach is to leave the guards alive and press the radio exactly once. Players who shoot the guards or hammer the interact key turn a scripted conversation into a firefight they did not need.

Finishing Tour's final stage, entering The Lab through a transit with a TerraGroup Labs keycard and sweeping the manager office, server room, and drainage escape, awards the Pathfinder achievement and completes your map access. Only then does the rest of the chapter system become fully reachable.

Why Tour outranks every other quest

Look at what Tour's middle stages actually pay out: Skier, Mechanic, Prapor, and Peacekeeper are not optional contacts, they are four of the eight classic traders, and you cannot even accept their side tasks before the corresponding Tour stage. Delaying Tour does not just delay the story; it freezes your loyalty progression with half the trader roster.

The map unlocks matter just as much. Customs, Factory, Woods, Shoreline, Reserve, and Lighthouse all sit behind Tour stages, and since the 1.0 launch the standard maps are reached through the transit system rather than a flat selection screen. Each Tour completion widens the network of locations you can chain together in a single session, which directly multiplies how many tasks you can complete per raid.

The efficient play pattern is to batch. When Tour sends you to Customs, stack every active side task that touches Customs and finish them in the same raids. The chapter sets your route; the side tasks ride along. Players who reverse that priority, grinding whatever task is on top of the list, routinely hit level gates with no maps to run them on.

The four endings and what is actually known

Tarkov's chapter system converges on four endings. That number, and the framing of chapters as roads toward an ending, is confirmed by the community wiki's story chapter documentation. What is not confirmed, anywhere in the sources behind this site, are the names, triggers, and content of three of those four endings.

The one ending route that can be documented is called Savior, and its gate is not a boss kill or a rare item but a reputation number: reaching Scav karma of +4 unlocks the quest Establish Contact, which opens the Savior route. The full stage-by-stage path from Establish Contact to the ending itself is not detailed in our research, so this guide will not pretend otherwise.

This gap is normal for where the game is in its life. The 1.0 release only arrived on November 15, 2025, the chapter system is being expanded patch by patch, and the community is still datamining and testing how the ending logic triggers. If a video or forum post claims exact steps for any other ending, treat it as unverified until the wiki's chapter pages catch up.

Scav karma: the currency of the Savior route

Fence's reputation and your Scav karma are the same number, and that number gates more of the story than most players realize.

Karma rises when you extract as a Scav, use vehicle extracts as a PMC, take co-op extracts with a friendly Scav, or kill PMCs and traitor Scavs who prey on Scavs. It falls when you kill AI Scavs, player Scavs, or bosses and their guards. Killing raiders, rogues, and cultists costs nothing. The swings are small per event, which means karma is a habit, not a project: every raid either nudges it up or drags it down.

The thresholds that matter for story progress form a ladder. At +1 the quest Is This a Reference? becomes available. At +2 you unlock Mechanic's Network Provider - Part 1, a gate on the path toward Lightkeeper. At +4 Establish Contact and the Savior ending route open. At +6 Fence adds a 30 percent discount page and AI Scavs will fight alongside you.

The floor matters too. Drop to -5 and AI Scavs attack you on sight while the BTR driver refuses your business, which makes the co-op extracts and Scav runs that feed karma recovery far harder. Falling into the hole is easy; climbing out is a grind of Scav extracts at +0.01 each. Protect the number before you need it.

If you build the hideout's Intelligence Center, Fence starts issuing daily tasks to your Scav character worth +0.01 to +0.05 karma each, with an option to reroll for euros or a karma cost. That turns karma farming from pure scavenger rng into a scheduled daily income, and it is the single most reliable engine for pushing from neutral to +4.

Boreas and the stranded Paradigm ship

Boreas arrived with Patch 1.0.5.0 on May 25, 2026, alongside the Icebreaker map, and it is the clearest example of how chapters now deliver new content. The chapter investigates a nuclear-powered icebreaker owned by the Paradigm Shipping group, sitting locked in the Gulf of Finland: why it ran aground, what happened to the crew, and who ordered the lockdown. The ship itself, also named Boreas, is the map.

Progressing the Boreas chapter is what unlocks travel to the Icebreaker. Once unlocked, you reach the ship by transiting from the docks on Lighthouse or Shoreline, and each trip consumes a Sudak-Tudak marine repair kit. Completing the Stick to It questline later removes the friction and lets you select the map directly. Patch 1.1.5.0 added the Lighthouse to Icebreaker transit point, tying the ship into the main transit network.

On the question of whether Icebreaker is a PvE-only map, the careful reading is the one from 4Gamer's coverage: it is a PvE-oriented location for one to three players, and while you can technically enter from PvP mode, you are not matchmade with other players, so your opposition is AI either way. Some media outlets simplified this into PvE-only; plan around the co-op-versus-AI reality rather than the slogan.

Two warnings before you sail. Insurance does not return items lost on the Icebreaker, so do not bring a kit you cannot afford to write off. And enemy presence scales with your party size, so a trio does not get an easier raid than a solo player, just a different one.

Raiding the Icebreaker: what waits on board

The ship is compact, vertical, and built around locked compartments. Know the boss spawns and the extract before your first crossing.

The headline threat is The Wedge, a boss who holds the gym on deck three with three to six heavily armored guards. Below, on deck zero, Knight of the Goons appears with two rogue escorts, and the rest of the hull is patrolled by rogues and Black Division troops. This density of elite AI in tight corridors rewards slow pie-ing of corners and punishes sprinting between decks.

The loot structure runs on keycards and tools: the Boreas crew quarters keycard and engine room keycard open the high-value rooms, Compartment C-1 and C-3 keycards open their respective sections, and items like the BBQ-S43 gas torch and SZ-1 explosive charge feed the map's deeper interactions. If you are running Boreas chapter stages, expect your objectives to pull you toward exactly these locked spaces.

Extraction is a helicopter, and it is neither free nor instant: you fire a green flare inside the flare zone and pay 2,400 euros per person, then wait for the aircraft to arrive. That delay is the most dangerous window of the raid, because every AI patrol on the ship converges on the noise. Clear the approach before you pop the flare, not after.

The Labyrinth and Terminal: chapters at the edge of the map

Two chapters share their names with the game's most hostile endgame locations, and both maps are one-way terminal points: nothing transits onward from them, and insurance does not come back from the Labyrinth. Whether you chase these chapters for story or for loot, you enter through the same doors.

The Labyrinth is a Greek-themed fortified bunker built by Knossos LLC beneath Shoreline, reachable only by transiting from the resort's west wing basement with both a Labrys access keycard and a Knossos LLC facility key. Inside, five spawn chambers each hide a mechanism you must solve, and the halls are wired with tripwires, spike pits, and poisoned barbed wire that drains 140 health per minute. Shadow of Tagilla roams the entire bunker, and killing him summons Vengeful Killa. Exits are Ariadne's Path, which needs the Ariadne symbol key, and The Way Up, which only opens fifteen minutes into the raid.

Terminal is the opposite kind of hostile: a fortified southern port held by Russian forces, reachable only from Shoreline between 21:00 and 06:00 by presenting an access item over the garrison radio. One raid boss, drawn at random from Glukhar, Killa, Reshala, Sanitar, or Tagilla, holds the container ship berth. Uniquely, your character's state is restored after you extract or die there, with only the access item consumed, which makes Terminal the one endgame map where failure costs almost nothing but time.

The escape from Terminal is the Zubr boat, with seats scaled to your party size, and any player carrying the Secure container Alpha-1 must have it on their person to board. Friendly Russian troops and civilians share the dock, so target discipline matters more here than anywhere else in the game.

How chapters, karma, and the endgame interlock

The deeper you read the requirements, the more the systems braid together. Lightkeeper, the in-raid trader who anchors the late-game storyline, currently requires Lighthouse access from Tour, loyalty level 3 with every trader except Fence and Ref, Fence reputation of at least 2.0, which is exactly Scav karma +2, and a conversation with Mechanic. Every one of those prerequisites traces back to either a chapter stage or the karma system.

The Collector quest, which awards the Kappa secure container, demands Scav karma of at least +3 and loyalty level 4 with seven traders on top of a mountain of found-in-raid collectibles. Even the pure loot endgame, in other words, checks the same reputation number that gates the Savior ending. A player who farmed karma from level one arrives at these gates already holding the key.

The strategic conclusion is simple: karma is not a scav-mode mini-game, it is a story stat. Keep it positive as a background habit, push it to +2 early for the Lightkeeper track, +4 for the Savior route, and let the +6 Fence discount arrive as a side effect rather than a goal.

What we could not verify

Honesty about gaps is part of this site's method. The following items are unverified as of Patch 1.1.5.0, and this guide deliberately does not state them as fact.

The wiki's chapter documentation confirms the roster and the four-ending structure, but most chapters do not yet have complete public walkthroughs, and the Lightkeeper access chain rebuilt in the September 8 patch, named To the Light, had no stage-by-stage page at research time. When those pages fill in, this guide will be revised to match.

Planning your chapter progression

Sequence your first fifty hours around three rules. Rule one: Tour is the spine, so whenever a Tour stage is available, it takes precedence over every side task. Rule two: karma is a daily habit, so end sessions with a Scav run, prefer co-op and vehicle extracts, and never shoot a Scav who has not betrayed you. Rule three: found-in-raid hand-ins are bottlenecks, so hoard construction materials, spare weapons, dogtags, and dollars before the relevant Tour stage rather than after it stalls you.

Mid-game, start steering toward the two expensive doors. Boreas asks for a marine repair kit per crossing and punishes under-geared crews, so bankroll the Icebreaker trips instead of financing them one death at a time. The Labyrinth and Terminal keys are rare enough that you should treat every Shoreline raid as a scouting run for them once Tour has opened the map.

Finally, track your own progress in writing. The in-game task search added in Patch 1.0.6.0 helps you find a quest, but it does not show you the cross-system dependencies this guide describes: which karma threshold gates which quest, which chapter gates which map. A simple note with your karma, your Tour stage, and your next three target unlocks will save you more time than any single gear upgrade.

Expected outcome and where to go next

If you follow this plan, Tour will be finished before your trader loyalty stalls, your Scav karma will cross +2 and then +4 without a dedicated grind, and the Icebreaker, Labyrinth, and Terminal will open as deliberate expeditions instead of accidental suicides. You will also know which ending route is real and documented, and which claims to distrust until the sources catch up.

For the stage-by-stage Tour execution, read the Tour Walkthrough at /guides/tour-quest-walkthrough. For the karma thresholds and every gain and loss event, see /guides/scav-karma-guide, and for the trader loyalty levels that both Lightkeeper and the Collector demand, use /guides/trader-loyalty-guide together with the tool at /tools/trader-loyalty.

When you are ready for the doors this guide only described, the map pages carry the extraction tables and key lists: /maps/shoreline for the Labyrinth and Terminal transits, /maps/lighthouse for the Icebreaker crossing, and /maps/icebreaker itself for the ship. The endgame unlock guide at /guides/endgame-maps-unlock, the Lightkeeper breakdown at /guides/lightkeeper-guide, and the Kappa walkthrough at /guides/kappa-container-guide pick up exactly where the chapters leave off.