You’re not stuck with the skills and perks you purchase in The Outer Worlds. Right from the start of the game, you can start spending your precious bits to respect and start from scratch.
There’s a lot of useful skills in this game, and min-maxing is pretty encouraged. It’s better to focus and upgrade a few skills while leaving others completely behind — and if you’re looking to fully explore the game, I highly recommend grabbing Stealth and Speech skills, no matter what your combat preferences are.
But we’re not here to talk about the best skills to grab right at the start of the game. This is all about resetting your perks and skills. You can actually do it right in the Unreliable, your trusty ship stolen from a failed smuggler’s quest to get your recently unfrozen colonist somewhere safe.
I’ll explain everything you need to know about ‘respec’ below. It’s super simple.
More The Outer Worlds guides:
- The Outer Worlds: 20 Tips, Tricks & Secrets I Wish I Knew | Beginner’s Guide
- The Outer Worlds: How To Fix Constant Crashes, Low FPS & Tweak .ini Files | PC Fixes Guide
How To Respec | Skills & Perks Reset Guide
To ‘respec‘ — reset all your skills and perks so you can reallocate your points however you like, all you need to do is reach the Unreliable, your ship and intergalactic partner.
The respect station is located in the hangar of the Unreliable, on the second floor catwalk. Climb the ladder and circle around to a dead-end corner you won’t normally have any reason to visit. There’s where the respect machine is — using it costs bits, and the machine gets more expensive each time you use it.
Respecs cost 500 bits the first time, but get progressively more expensive. Don’t waste you bits until you really want a total respect. Activating the respect machine returns all perk and skill points to you, so you can reallocate them however you like.
Personally, I think one of the most useful perks is the Pack Mule perk, which lets your character carry +50 kg weight. That’s a lot more stuff you can lug around, and lugging around loads of items to sell is one of the most important tasks you can do in an open-world RPG. It’s all up to you!
As for skills, I highly recommend allocating lots of points to Stealth — that makes sneaking around and scoring high-powered headshots a lot easier. You can even wipe out an entire bandit camp with a properly powerful Hunting Rifle. Just get headshots, kill in a single shot, and you won’t alert the entire camp. You can make all the noise in the world. The trick is just not making too much noise.
Hilariously, you can actually leave your Intelligence / Speech skills extremely low, unlocking unique low-intelligence speech options when talking to people. Now isn’t that fun? It’s also super old-school.
Have fun creating wacky builds — the game doesn’t just encourage it, you’ll find plenty of rewards for maximizing just a few skills and forgetting the rest.
