One of the most jarring aspects of Starfield for me very early on was the inability to slide. When I first got into the open world, I tried to press the crouch button while sprinting so I could slide behind some cover during a combat sequence. However, all that happened was my character stopped running, crouched down, and that was it. From that point on, I thought it wasn’t possible to slide in Starfield.
Fortunately, I was wrong about that, but I didn’t realize it until several hours later when I was perusing the different skill trees. The ability to slide is, in fact, in Starfield, but it will take some time and effort before you are able to take advantage of it.
How to combat slide in Starfield
To slide in Starfield, you need to unlock the “Gymnastics” ability, which is located in the Physical skill tree. You won’t be able to unlock this ability with your first skill points of the game, though. The ability is located in the second row of the Physical skill tree, which means you need to spend three other skill points in the first row to unlock the second row.
Once you do that, you can unlock the Gymnastics skill and gain the combat slide ability. This ability also comes with a 15% reduction to your fall damage. After unlocking the combat slide ability, all you have to do is press your crouch button while sprinting to go into a slide.
From what I can tell, there are no additional ranks to the Gymnastics ability that will improve your sliding mechanics. The rest of the ranks will give you better overall movement, though, so it might be worth going through the ranks of Gymnastics anyway.
And there you have it, sliding in Starfield just comes down to unlocking an ability in the skill tree.
Published: Sep 15, 2023 10:51 am