Playing Cyberpunk 2077’s Update 2.0 is like playing a brand-new game. The patch reworks combat, equipment, and skills to the point where they are almost unrecognizable. On one hand, these changes give the game a brand new lease on life. On the other hand, it means all your previous stat and perk builds are absolutely useless. While you can restart your Night City adventure from scratch, it’s much easier to just respec.
Technically, Cyberpunk 2077 has two kinds of character respecs: a Perk respec and an attribute respec. The former lets you refund Perk points and use them to acquire other abilities, while the latter resets your stats to the baseline and lets you redistribute them as you see fit.
To respec Perks in Cyberpunk 2077 2.0, simply bring up the game’s menu screen, navigate to the “Character” tab, and select an attribute. Next, hover the cursor over the perk you want to refund and hit the button on the tooltip next to the word “Refund” (e.g., “Y” on the Xbox Series X’s controller and the middle mouse button on PC).
Nine times out of ten, that’s all you need to do, but if you invested some points into side Perks, you can’t refund the main perk until you’ve deselected the side Perk. For instance, if you have Data Recycler and Hack Queue unlocked, you can’t refund Hack Queue until you get rid of Data Recycler. Moreover, if any perks unlock a Cyberware slot or a specific type of Cyberware, you can’t refund the perk until you unequip its linked item.
While you can refund Perks at any time, if you log into an old save after installing Update 2.0, the game will automatically reimburse all of your perk points. If you want to try a new build, you will have to refund every Perk individually. While this process is time-consuming, it is much easier than Cyberpunk 2077’s previous Perk respec system, which required players to purchase the Tabula e-Rasa shard for a not-insignificant 25,000 Eddies.
Resetting attribute points is easier than respeccing Perks, but it is also much more limited since you can only perform the action once per game. To do this, revisit the “Character” tab, and select the “Reset Attributes” button on the bottom-left corner of the screen. A tab will pop up telling you that you can only do this once. If you accept, you will continue with the respec. Otherwise, the game will save your one free attribute do-over for a later time. Unlike the perk refund system, the “Reset Attributes” function reimburses all of your points in one fell swoop, which lets you redistribute them.
After respeccing, take care where you decide where to put all of your stats, as the perk system circa Update 2.0 ties abilities to attributes. The more points you put in a stat, the stronger Perks you can acquire, with the strongest abilities being locked behind maxed-out stats (i.e., 20 points in one attribute).
As of Update 2.0, that’s all you need to know about respeccing in Cyberpunk 2077.