This 'can't shoot' Starfield bug may be a holdover from Fallout 4, and it's curable by re-visiting the character creation menu.
It’s every astronaut’s nightmare: you’re in deep space facing down a pack of serpent-worshipping fanatics, but when you pull out your favorite gun and squeeze the trigger, nothing happens. You’ve got plenty of ammo, the gun is loaded, and you’re not in scanning mode. But for some reason, you just can’t shoot.
Like a few other bugs we’ve seen, the Starfield ‘can’t shoot’ bug may be a holdover from Fallout 4. Strangely enough, the best way to get your guns spitting lead and lasers again is to visit… a plastic surgeon.
As former PC Gamer contributor Emanuel Maiberg reported for 404 media, there have been multiple posts on Reddit from players saying they suddenly found themselves unable to fire their weapons (though typically they could still perform melee attacks). Even trying to use the mining laser resulted in a big fat nothing. Early solutions involved using Starfield console commands to change the sex of their characters—this was also a solution to a similar bug in Fallout 4—though it sounds like a cheat-free fix is to simply visit a store called Enhance.
In Starfield, Enhance is a clinic where you can make changes to your character’s body, face, name, tattoos, walk animations, and so on. Basically, it’s the character creation menu all over again, though it costs 500 credits to use at Enhance. And to fix the ‘can’t shoot’ bug you may not even need to do anything drastic: for most players, it was enough to simply enter the character creation menu at Enhance and then leave without making any changes. (Though since you’re there, you might as well freshen up your hairstyle or get some new piercings, right?)
You can also enter the character creator with a console command: showlooksmenu player 2.
It’s not a bad idea to keep this fix in mind for other problems. I recently had a different type of bug: after creating a character, I noticed that whenever I ran somewhere in third-person mode, my dude’s head would always be looking as far to the left as possible. It wasn’t game-breaking like the ‘can’t shoot’ bug, but it was annoying, and someone suggested visiting Enhance and switching my walking style from Walk 1 to Walk 2. Sure enough, that did the trick, and I even switched back to Walk 1 later and the bug didn’t return.
Sounds like a lot of quirky character behavior may be solved by visiting an Enhance store and re-entering character creation, even if you don’t make any changes. If you haven’t been there yet, you can find all the Starfield Enhance locations in major settlements.
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