How to Melee in Starfield

Bethesda Game Studios’ ambitious sci-fi RPG features plenty of dust-ups with monstrous extraterrestrial beasties, interstellar pirates and corrupt space corporations. But what if you want to save your ammo and take them on au naturel? If so, you’re probably wondering how to melee in Starfield. Well, you’re in the right place, folks. Here’s what you need to do.

How to Melee Attack

With Your Gun Equipped

Simply put, to melee in Starfield, all you need to do is press the R3 button. You can do so by clicking in the right stick on your Xbox controller. Meanwhile, over on PC, pressing the Alt key unleashes a melee attack.

You can deliver a melee attack even when you have a gun equipped; your character will bash your opponent with the butt of their armament. This does dole out some nominal damage and can be enough to finish off an adversary who’s very low in health.

With Melee Weapons

However, using specific melee weapons — like knives, cutlass’ or wrenches — will deal greater damage when compared to the butt of your gun. For these specific melee weapons, you can simply use the RT to deliver a melee attack once they’ve been equipped.

Best Melee Weapons Skill

The corresponding Skill to upgrade to enhance your melee attacks in Starfield is the Dueling Skill, which is part of the Combat tree. Dueling increases melee weapon damage, but also can be upgraded to increase your speed, protection, and ultimately, heal you with every melee strike.

• Dueling Rank 1 – Melee weapons do 25% more damage. Take 10% less damage while wielding a melee weapon.
• Dueling Rank 2 – Melee kills make you run 20% faster for 10 seconds.
• Dueling Rank 3 – Melee weapons do 50% more damage. Take 15% less damage while wielding a melee weapon.
• Dueling Rank 4 – Melee kills heal you for 10% of your health.

Unarmed With Your Bare Fists

If you want to shake things up and go for more of a bare-knuckle boxing approach, you can always switch to bare fists. To do so, go into your inventory and deselect the weapon you’re holding. This will change your current weapon to your fists. With your bare fists, you can block with LT and punch with RT.

Best Unarmed Skill

If you fancy upgrading your Unarmed abilities, the corresponding Skill to upgrade is Boxing, which can be found in the Physical tree. Initially, the early ranks gift players more damage and less O2, though culminates with rank 4 enhancing your unarmed attacks by 100%.

• Boxing Rank 1 – Unarmed attacks do 25% more damage. 25% less O2 used when using a power attack.
• Boxing Rank 2 – Unarmed attacks do 50% more damage. 50% less O2 used when using a power attack.
• Boxing Rank 3 – Unarmed attacks do 75% more damage. While in a fight and unarmed, running consumes 30% less O2.
• Boxing Rank 4 – Unarmed attacks do 100% more damage and have a chance to knock down opponents.

Why Use Melee Attacks in Starfield?

Melee attacks are super useful as they’re a good method for conserving your ammo. Like we mentioned above, we got into a rhythm of shooting enemies until they had a smidgen of health left, and then whacking them with a melee strike to finish them off. Sure, it may not save you tons of ammo in the moment, but over time, this will undoubtedly stack up.

And, what do you know. That concludes our guide on how to melee in Starfield. For more, make sure to check out our related coverage below. And as always, for more tips, tricks, reviews, and guides, you’re in the right place at Twinfinite.