Starfield NPCs have the fear of space god put into them by player picking up a mop

pcgamer.com:

Starfield has now been in the wild for a month and, yep, turns out it's a Bethesda game. I don't know why anyone's surprised really, and surely that's what we were all secretly hoping for: where's the joy in a vast, polished galaxy where everything works as intended? Far better to have a cosmos where something like a mop can accidentally trigger a mini-genocide.

This is what player lkl34 discovered when tootling around in Neon and deciding, flagrantly, to pick up a cleaning mop. The reaction of NPCs immediately around them is to shout «thief!» and start running like headless chickens, which is amusing enough, but in that way of bad logic piling upon bad logic, things begin to escalate… and soon enough we've got a bunch of NPCs in their underwear, seemingly non-aggroed, just desperate to be involved?

This is the jank we pay the ticket price for. As any Starfield player knows, this ain't unusual. Bethesda's space sandbox has the same tagging issues as any of its previous games, meaning you risk a gunfight with security any time you accidentally knock a ball or pick up an incidental prop. It is undoubtedly amusing watching the player pick up the mop again and the instantaneous «oh no!» reactions of the NPCs. 

My most well-worn Bethesda story is about how a dragon once attacked me in Skyrim near a small village's outskirts and, because it knocked over a fence while attacking, the entire village swivelled on the spot (blaming me for the fence) and joined its assault: then the game immediately quicksaved. Mopgate certainly has similar vibes, even if lkl34 can't quite resist the temptation to chuck a grenade into the hapless NPCs halfway through.

Starfield does have the option to pay a fine, which is how you traditionally