You’ve probably been there. You are forty minutes into a Monsoon run on Petrichor V, your Commando is sweating bullets, and suddenly a Wandering Vagrant decides your run is over. It’s frustrating. But then you see a clip of someone playing as Goku, fighting five Mithrixes at once, while a UI mod tells them exactly what every item on the ground does. That’s the magic of Risk of Rain 2 modding. It isn't just about making the game easier or weirder; it’s about fixing the tiny annoyances that Hopoo Games left behind and expanding a universe that already feels infinite.
Honestly, the community is the only reason this game still pulls thousands of players daily years after its release.
Getting Started Without Breaking Everything
If you try to manually drag and drop files into your Steam folder like it’s 2004, you’re going to have a bad time. Don't do that. The backbone of the entire scene is r2modman. It’s a clean, simple mod manager that handles the heavy lifting of dependencies. See, most mods don't just work on their own. They rely on BepInExPack, which is the framework that lets the code actually inject itself into the game. If BepInEx is the engine, r2modman is the garage where everything gets tuned.
The best part? It creates a separate profile. You can have a "Vanilla+" profile for playing with your purist friends and a "Total Chaos" profile for when you want to turn the game into a third-person hero shooter with 50 new survivors. It keeps your base game files clean. No re-installing Steam because you accidentally deleted a .dll file.
💡 You might also like: Lego Marvel Superheroes Characters: Why This 2013 Roster Still Slaps
The Essential "Quality of Life" Tier
Some people think modding is cheating. Those people are wrong. There are mods that basically should have been in the base game from day one. Take ProperSave, for example. Risk of Rain 2 doesn't let you save mid-run. If your power flickers or your cat steps on the power strip at stage 9, that's two hours of your life gone. ProperSave just tucks a save file away at the start of every stage. Simple. Necessary.
Then there is ItemStatsMod. In the base game, an item might say it "increases attack speed." Okay, by how much? Does it stack linearly or exponentially? This mod adds a detailed tooltip that breaks down the math. It tells you exactly what that 5th Soldier's Syringe is doing for your DPS. Knowledge is power, especially when you're trying to decide whether to hit a 3-cost mountain shrine.
Why Risk of Rain 2 Modding Changes the Meta
Once you move past the "fix-it" mods, you hit the content. This is where things get wild. The Starstorm2 mod is basically an unofficial expansion pack. It adds new survivors like the Executioner, new events, and "Storms" that change the difficulty dynamically. It feels like a sequel. The developers of these mods often spend hundreds of hours balancing these characters so they don't feel like broken fan-fiction.
Speaking of survivors, the custom character scene is massive. You can play as the Paladin, a heavy-hitting melee class with a fully realized skill tree and unique animations that look better than some AAA releases. Or you can go the "Enforcer" route, bringing back a classic shield-bearing class from the first game that never made the jump to 3D officially.
The Multiplayer Headache (and Solution)
Playing modded multiplayer used to be a nightmare of version mismatches. Now? It’s mostly seamless. If you’re the host, your friends just need the same mod list. You can even export a "Profile Code" from r2modman. It’s a string of gibberish you send to your buddies; they paste it in, and boom—their game mirrors yours exactly.
The Technical Side: BepInEx and Hooking
For the nerds out there, the reason Risk of Rain 2 modding is so robust is because the game is built on Unity. Unity uses C#, which is relatively easy to decompile and "hook" into. Modders use tools to find specific methods in the game's code—like how damage is calculated or how enemies spawn—and they tell the game to run their code instead of the original code.
It’s a constant cat-and-mouse game. Every time the game gets an official update (like the Seekers of the Storm DLC), the internal "hooks" break. The community has to scramble to update the core libraries. It’s a labor of love that usually happens within 48 hours because the Discord community is incredibly caffeinated.
📖 Related: Wolfenstein The Old Blood Walkthrough: How to Survive Castle Wolfenstein and Beyond
Common Misconceptions About Modding Your Run
- "It will get me banned." No. There is no anti-cheat in Risk of Rain 2. It’s a PVE (Player vs. Environment) game. Hopoo Games and Gearbox have been historically supportive of the modding scene. Just don't try to use mods to grief people in public lobbies; that’s just being a jerk.
- "It ruins the difficulty." Only if you want it to. You can install mods that make the game significantly harder, adding new elite types (like the Aetherium mod) that will absolutely wreck a seasoned player.
- "My PC can't handle it." Actually, some mods improve performance. RuntimeGC helps manage memory leaks during long, three-hour "god runs" where the floor is covered in thousands of items.
How to Build Your First Modpack
If you're ready to dive in, don't just download the "Most Popular" list and hope for the best. Start small.
First, get r2modman from GitHub or Thunderstore. Create a new profile. Search for BepInEx—it’ll usually auto-install when you grab other mods, but it’s good to check. Grab LookingGlass or BetterUI to clean up the screen. These give you much better information about your buffs and cooldowns.
Then, pick one big content mod. Starstorm2 or Aetherium are the gold standards. Adding five huge content mods at once is a recipe for a crash at the teleporter event. Test your stability. If the game loads to the main menu, you’re usually golden. If it hangs on a black screen, check your console log. It usually highlights the offending mod in red text. It's almost always a version conflict.
The Future of Petrichor V
With the transition of the IP to Gearbox, there was a lot of anxiety about whether the modding scene would be shut down. So far, the opposite has happened. The community remains the heartbeat of the game. We are seeing more "Vanilla Redux" mods that focus on rebalancing the original items that everyone hates (looking at you, Roll of Pennies) to make every item pick-up feel rewarding.
Modding is the ultimate expression of the "roguelike" spirit. It’s about taking a set of rules and breaking them until something new and beautiful emerges.
🔗 Read more: Jurassic Park LEGO Walkthrough: How to Actually Get 100% Without Losing Your Mind
Your Next Steps
- Download r2modman. Do not use the Overwolf version if you value your RAM; stick to the clean, standalone version from Thunderstore.
- Search for "ProperSave" and "ItemStatsMod" first. These are the non-negotiables that make the game objectively better without changing the gameplay loop.
- Join the Risk of Rain 2 Modding Discord. If a mod breaks, the developers are usually there and are surprisingly helpful if you provide a log file.
- Try a custom survivor. The "Paladin" or "Miner" are great entry points that feel like they belong in the game's universe.
- Share your profile code. Don't make your friends hunt for mods manually. Use the export tool to keep everyone in sync.
The game is deep, but the mods make it bottomless. Go see how far the rabbit hole goes.