How To Unlock Every Character In Risk of Rain 2: The Fastest Ways

Risk of Rain 2 hands you two survivors and makes you work for the rest. Some of that work is a single errand you can finish on your first afternoon, some of it is a challenge you cannot even attempt until you have beaten the game, and one of them is not a challenge at all but a set of items you assemble mid run. Here is the whole roster with what each one asks for and the quickest honest way to do it.

Every Survivor Unlock

The Ones You Can Do This Week

MUL-T is the gentlest, because Verified counts first teleporter events across separate runs. Five short Drizzle runs that you quit after the first boss will do it, and you get a 200 health survivor with two equipment slots out of it. Bandit's Warrior is the same errand with teeth: reach the third teleporter event and finish it without dying once. Drizzle again, and treat stages one and two as travel rather than farming.

Engineer takes the longest of the easy ones and the least attention. Engineering Perfection wants 30 stages cleared in total, and our Engineer guide makes the same recommendation we would: run Drizzle and stay in the small early stages, because a cleared stage counts the same whether it was your first or your tenth, and the counter survives across runs.

Artificer is the one people miss because it is not a fight. Pause. asks you to free the survivor suspended in time inside the Bazaar Between Time, and the crystal holding her costs 10 Lunar Coins. Coins carry over between runs, so this is a saving job rather than a skill one, and our lunar items guide covers where coins actually come from and the blue portal that gets you into the Bazaar.

The Ones That Need A Plan

Loader is the best survivor on our character tier list and her unlock is a hidden boss. Guidance Offline wants the unique guardian of Siren's Call, the fourth stage in that environment slot, and that guardian, the Alloy Worship Unit, has to be summoned. Six Alloy Vulture Nests are dotted around that map and all six must come down; a distant whirring after the fifth tells you the count is right, and the sixth brings it in. It drops a legendary item for every player as well, so the trip pays twice. The full kit is on our Loader guide.

Acrid needs the Void Fields, which are behind the Null Portal in a hidden cave down the shaft below the Bazaar's blue portal, and you may only enter once per run. The Fields run to nine cells, each one a minute spent inside a 20 metre radius while Void Fog eats anything standing outside it, so take this on a run that is already going well rather than as a dedicated attempt. REX wants the Escape Pod's Fuel Array, taken from a hatch on the back of the pod you land in on stage one and carried down to the broken robot in Abyssal Depths. Two warnings: it fills your equipment slot for the whole trip, and it detonates for 300 percent of your maximum health whenever you drop below half, so the run that fetches it is a run spent avoiding damage.

Mercenary's True Respite is the loop ending. Survive long enough for the game to send you round to stage one again, and a white Celestial Portal opens there; step into it and let the Obelisk obliterate you. Our Mercenary guide describes the same route. Captain's Washed Away has no shortcut at all, because it asks you to beat the game, which means Commencement and Mithrix.

The Expansion Survivors

Three of the newer characters need nothing but the expansion switched on: Railgunner with Survivors of the Void, Seeker with Seekers of the Storm, and Operator with the Alloyed Collective. The other three are challenges attached to the content they arrived with. Void Fiend wants you out of the Planetarium or through wave 50 of the Simulacrum, False Son wants the Heart of the False Son purified with the Halcyon Seed, and CHEF wants the Wok's recipe completed in the Reformed Altar. Drifter is freed from a vault in Solutional Haunt, and our Drifter guide covers what you get for the trouble.

The Heretic Is Not Unlocked, She Is Assembled

The nineteenth character never appears on the select screen. Picking up Visions, Hooks, Strides and Essence of Heresy at the same time replaces whoever you were with the Heretic for the rest of that run. She brings 440 health and 18 damage at base, the largest of either on the roster, and a bar that empties itself whether or not anything is hitting you. There is no permanent unlock to earn and no way to start a run as her, so every Heretic run begins as somebody else and ends when the items are lost.

Unlock Questions

What is the fastest survivor to unlock?

MUL-T. Five first teleporter events on Drizzle, and they do not have to be in the same run. The Engineer's counter accumulates the same way, but it wants 30 stages rather than five short trips.

Does the Artifact of Command help with unlocks?

A great deal. Nearly every requirement on this page is a single event you have to arrange, not a marathon, and being able to hand yourself the item that arranges it takes the luck out. Unlocking it first is the argument our artifacts guide makes.

Do unlocks carry across runs and difficulties?

Yes. Challenges completed on Drizzle count exactly as much as challenges completed on Monsoon, and progress counters such as the Engineer's 30 stages accumulate across every run on the profile. Which one to earn first is answered two ways: by loadout on our survivor builds guide, and by what each stage of a run demands on the Risk of Rain 2 hub.