Bernie

Bernie

He came. He sat. He is once again asking.

A new survivor for Risk of Rain 2, inspired by the famous 2021 inauguration "mittens" photo. Bundled up in his parka, legs crossed, arms crossed (permanently), on a folding chair welded to a decommissioned MUL-T tread chassis. He does not stand up. He does not need to.

Kit

| | Skill | What it does |

|---|---|---|

| Passive | Bundled Up | Can't be frozen or slowed, +20 armor. The chair has bottom thrusters: jump again in mid-air to rocket upward in a full backflip (3 s cooldown). |

| M1 | Mitten Volley | Lob a hand-knit mitten that bursts for 240% damage. |

| M2 | Tax the Rich | Hold to drain the richest (highest-health) target in front of you for 300% damage per second. 1.6x damage to elites, 1.3x to bosses. 30% of the damage is redistributed as healing to you and nearby allies. |

| Shift | Feel the Bern | Fire the chair rockets and ram forward. Enemies in the way are smashed aside for 500% (stun + ignite), you leave a burning trail, and skid to a fiery stop for 300%. |

| R | I Am Once Again Asking | A robot arm raises a giant mitten. Nearby enemies are stunned, take 400% damage, and each one donates gold. Allies in range gain Solidarity (+30% attack speed, +30 armor for 8 s). |

He also has an original voice: an elderly, grumbly, Brooklyn-ish grandpa with things to say about your fair share.

Install

Use r2modman or the Mod Manager: click Install, and the dependencies (BepInEx, R2API modules, HookGenPatcher) come with it. Pick Bernie on the character select screen.

Manual install: put the plugins folder contents in BepInEx/plugins/Bernie/ (keep AssetBundles and Sounds next to BernieMod.dll), and install the dependencies listed on this page.

Config

BepInEx/config/com.antrim.BernieMod.cfg

• Voice volume, SFX volume: multiplied by the game's own master/SFX sliders.
• Enable dev hotkeys: off by default. For testing only (needs DebugToolkit).

Notes and known issues

• Multiplayer: built with multiplayer-safe networking (skills use the game's projectile/blast/bullet systems), but it has only been tested in single player so far. Everyone in a lobby needs the mod. Reports welcome.
• Sounds are played by the mod itself (Risk of Rain 2 routes all its audio through Wwise and has Unity audio switched off), so Bernie's voice and effects follow the game's master and SFX volume sliders.
• The backflip is a cosmetic animation for the player who jumps; other players see the thruster jump without the flip.
• Item displays are not set up yet, so items don't appear on his model.

Credits and disclosure

• An affectionate parody of a public figure's famous meme moment. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Senator Sanders or anyone else. The voice is an original AI-designed voice, not a clone of any real person's voice.
• Built by antrim and Claude Code (Anthropic, Claude Opus 5.5) using the universal-modder plugin. The code, model processing, testing and video were done by the AI agent working with the author.
• Art and audio generated with fal (fal.ai): concept art and icons with Nano Banana 2, 3D models with Trellis 2, knit texture with Z-Image Turbo (tiling), voice with MiniMax Voice Design + MiniMax Speech 2.8 HD, sound effects with ElevenLabs Sound Effects v2. Models were cleaned up and split in Blender.
• Character code started from rob's HenryTutorial survivor template (ArcPh1r3/HenryTutorial).
• Thanks to the BepInEx, R2API and RoR2 modding community.

Code: MIT License.