For those that don't know, there is a bug that occurs during the Bandits chapter that prevents the player from performing takedowns on human NPCs for the remainder of the game. There is a lot of speculation online as to the cause of and solution to this, but nothing concrete. As a result, the solutions are as follows:

1. Keep reloading the game from the Revolution chapter and hope it works

2. Restart your progress and pray

3. Use someone else's save file

For sanity's sake and to save time for folks in the future, I'm uploading a save file from about five hours of trial and error before finally being able to perform takedowns again. This is a Ranger Hardcore save file on Survival with most of the morality points up to this chapter received (minus most in Revolution and Regina). For anyone wanting to know how I got around the bug, it's entirely speculative but here are the steps I took to get a working save:

I went through Revolution as fast as possible, killing the first three guards you see and only knocking out one NPC near the end (the closest guy who talks about the ladder stash) and ignoring most pickups and morality points. For Regina, I ignored all of the morality points and side rooms and just beelined for the finish. I did this in addition to deleting 2034_auto_save, 2034_l07_tunnel, and 2034_l07_tunnel_2 from my save game folder and quitting to the main menu and starting
both Regina and Bandits over from the chapter select screen. Once I got to Bandits, I was able to knockout NPCs again. It's frustrating to miss out on the loot and morality points, but Last Light, even on Survival mode, is very generous with equipment and money.

INSTALLATION

To install the mod, locate your save game folder (i.e. Documents/4A Games/Metro Last Light), and delete whatever is inside. Then, extract the downloaded archive into the folder. For added insurance, disable Steam Cloud save games for Metro Last Light by right clicking on the game in Steam, selecting properties, and disabling "Keep Game Saves in the Steam Cloud". You should be good to go!



For anyone interested, here is what I've gathered from my dozen or so attempts at resolving this issue:

Many of the solutions people posted online don't seem directly tied to the problem, or are inconsistent at best. Some of these solutions include:

Not knocking out the final guard of Revolution
Avoiding all of the side tunnels in Regina
Avoiding the spiderbug QTE in Regina
Avoiding killing Spiderbugs with your flashlight in Regina
Starting from the chapter select before each mission

I've tried all of these and none of them are guaranteed to do anything. I was, however, able to replicate this fix by tracing my exact steps listed above, and only these exact steps. If I do anything different in Regina but not Revolution, it doesn't work, and vice versa. This is an incredibly elusive bug and it may just be luck whether it affects you or not.