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 Thunderstore 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.