Dead Space Remake: How to Get the One Gun Trophy / Achievement

Your trusty Plasma Cutter is really all you need. One Gun is a trophy / achievement in the Dead Space remake that challenges you to complete all 12 chapters of the game without ever using a gun besides your trusty, jury-rigged starter: the Plasma Cutter.

Here’s the upside of limiting your arsenal by only using One Gun.

Cut Off Their Limbs: Why and How to Get the One Gun Trophy/Achievement

One Gun is one of the returning challenges from the original 2008 version of Dead Space. As noted above, it requires you to go all the way through the game on any difficulty without firing a shot from any gun besides your default Plasma Cutter.

At a glance, you might expect this to be a significant drawback, along the lines of a pistol/knife-only clear of a Resident Evil game, but going for One Gun is actually a strong strategy for your initial run through either version of Dead Space.

Screenshot by GameSkinny

Rather than being a weak starter option, the Plasma Cutter is a strong all-rounder that can accomplish most of what you need a weapon to do.

The Plasma Cutter inflicts decent damage per shot right from the start and its ammunition, Plasma Energy, stacks higher per inventory slot than any other type. Additionally, it’s decently quick to reload and fire even before upgrades, and its projectiles have instant travel time, which is great against bosses.

While the Cutter doesn’t have an alternate fire mode, you can instead rotate its firing pattern on the fly to make it easier to target necromorphs’ limbs.

Screenshot by GameSkinny

Furthermore, only having one weapon in your inventory means that all the randomized ammunition drops in the game will be for that weapon. You’ll still find an occasional fixed pickup — for example, every new gun usually has a couple of packs of its ammo type in the same room with it — but you should end up with stacks on stacks of Plasma Energy.

Finally, sticking to one weapon means you’ve only got two pieces of equipment that you need to upgrade: the Plasma Cutter and your Suit. In the remake, both of their upgrade grids are partially locked behind upgrades, so you can only fill out so many of them at a time.

Screenshot by GameSkinny

The one drawback is that the Cutter’s not great against “horde”-style necromorphs such as Swarmers and Dividers. You’re going to need to use stasis and/or explosives on them.

Where to Get the Plasma Cutter Upgrades

The Cutter’s three major upgrades can be found in the following locations:

• Chapter 2: Cartridge Rack. Once you’ve blown up the barricade on the Medical Deck, go through into the Ishimura Clinic to find this upgrade on a bench. It increases the Cutter’s ammo capacity by 7.

• Chapter 3: Heat Accumulator. This can be purchased from the Store for 11,000 credits once you reach this point in the game. When installed, this upgrade adds a small damage-over-time effect to the Cutter’s blasts. It’s not much, but it’s still bonus damage.

• Chapter 8: Weighted Blades. Check the Maintenance Locker Room in the Communications Hub in Chapter 8. This adds a heavy knockdown effect to the Plasma Cutter’s melee attack. While this doesn’t appear to translate to significant damage, it does stun most standard necromorphs for a couple of crucial seconds.

Another tip: You can get some “free” ammo by waiting to install Capacity upgrades on the Cutter until it’s close to empty, as upgrading any weapon’s max ammo has the side effect of refilling its magazine.

On a clean-start One Gun run of Dead Space, you’ll accumulate Power Nodes faster than you can install them in either the Suit or the Cutter. Since there’s no reason to spend Nodes anywhere else, this gives you a solid, consistent power curve as you make your way through the game. It’s pretty easy to have a fully-upgraded Cutter by the end of Chapter 8.

Screenshot by GameSkinny

It also has the useful side effect of avoiding one of the big Dead Space newbie traps, where you spread your Nodes across too many pieces of equipment at once, so none of them are ever particularly good at any one time. Having one particularly powerful weapon in Dead Space is better than having four mediocre guns, particularly with options like the Force Gun that take a while to realize their potential.

You can still get One Gun if you pick up other weapons, as long as you never shoot them, and you can still freely use stasis and kinesis.

Screenshot by GameSkinny

Just throw every other gun you get into the Storage tab at the Store the first chance you get, then store or sell their ammunition. You can even redeem upgrades for other weapons at the Bench, which is worth doing if only for the free Power Node, without endangering One Gun.

If you complete One Gun’s criteria, it will unlock right when you complete Chapter 12 (below).

Screenshot by GameSkinny

And with that, you should have completed the One Gun achievement. For more tips on the Dead Space remake, feel free to visit our guides page.

Featured image by GameSkinny.