Quest progression
Objectives live in conversations and places, and the marker is only a pointer.
If the marker vanishes after the opening quest, save and relaunch — the player who reported it advanced only after a restart, and the studio replied in the same thread that reloading clears that class of bug.
The Hollow does not run a quest log with a list you can scroll. Objectives arrive in conversation, live in places, and are supposed to be carried by a marker on screen. When that marker fails, the game becomes a walk in the fog with no direction — and that is the single most reported problem on the Steam discussion board.
The reported blocker, in full
The thread is titled, plainly enough, "No mission marker or where to go after finishing first quest". The sequence as the player describes it:
- Finish the first quest with the scout at the Petryvki hanging rock anomaly.
- He tells you to take TNT somewhere to stop an approaching group, and to tell the officer about a mole.
- No mission marker appears. The player walks the map.
- He returns to the village; the officer is no longer at his post.
His own follow-up is the answer: after restarting the game, the pointers came back and he advanced. The studio account replied in the same thread that during this kind of bug the game can simply be reloaded.
The troubleshooting order that works
| Step | What to do | Why |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Save, quit to desktop, relaunch | The reported fix; the studio's own advice in the thread |
| 2 | Return to the quest giver's location | Objectives are location-bound; the marker is a pointer, not the task |
| 3 | Search the buildings, not the road | The officer was reported missing from his post while the task stayed live |
| 4 | Re-read what the NPC actually said | The chain is verbal: TNT delivery plus a report to the officer |
| 5 | Check the weapon wheel with Q | If it is dead too, you are in the known input bug and a reload fixes both |
How objectives are structured
Named locations carry the progression. Official material gives us Vanavara, Sverdlovo, Nahirna Zachepilivka and Vanavara-Zachepilivka, and the five achievements are essentially five milestones tied to them:
- Bring peace to Nahirna Zachepilivka (SUPRESSOR, 13.5% of players)
- Liberate Vanavara-Zachepilivka from the invaders (THE CEASEFIRE IS OVER!, 10.9%)
- Help Kondratyuk obtain the results of your father's work (SCIENCIST, 10.0%)
- Destroy the forest spirits and bring peace to the indigenous people (THE KING OF THE FOREST, 8.5%)
- Break down the prison of nations (LIBERATOR, 8.3%)
Because those five describe the shape of the campaign, they are also the best progress tracker the game has: if you want to know roughly how far along you are, look at what you have unlocked on the achievements page.
When it is not a bug
Some silences are design. The map is semi-open, and a task that says "go somewhere with the TNT" is not going to hand you a waypoint across three kilometres of taiga. If the marker is present but far, you are expected to travel — on foot, through weather, with a fire stop at night. That is the loop described on the how to play page.
If the marker is genuinely absent, the routine above is the whole fix. And if you are meeting an NPC who should be somewhere and is not, check the update history — the studio has shipped fixes for NPC pathing at Vanavara and for a door at Sverdlovo, and those are exactly the kind of blockers that read like quest bugs.
