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Rogue Genesiahas a curated selection of characters you can unlock. Some are simple stat redistributions to enable new builds, while others completely change the core gameplay mechanics. Each of them is locked behind its own achievement, and some of them are hidden from the player until discovered.
While most of these avatars can be unlocked by playing the game normally, a few require you to take actions that are unintuitive or even break the game. Here’s how to unlock all eight of the base characters in the game, plus the two secret characters the achievement list doesn’t tell you about.
How To Unlock All Standard Characters
The first five characters of the game all fit into the normal gameplay formula. They use the same weapons, level up from the same cards, and by the time you’re killing the Void Primordial they’re difficult to tell apart under all the flashing lights.
Knight
Playable by default
Knight rog hastwo alternate skinsunlocked by completing F-rank and E-rank challenges.
The Knight’s playstyle is balanced but with a special focus on survivability. You’ll start with some extra beginning defence that can make good use of moon cards or the Lunar Inferno talent.
Duelist
Die once
A helpful speedrunning technique for this unlock is toset the starting corruption to 300.
The Duelist is damage-focused but has a special passive thatsaves them from dyingas long as they don’t get hit again within three seconds of fatal damage.
Rogue
Reach 999 percent attack speed
A specialised build is needed to hit this, best doneusing lots of wind cards.
This character is able to break the normal cap on attack speed and hasincreased drop rate on cards that boost attack speed.
Lagrog
Drop your FPS below three
The intended way of unlocking this character is tocollect lots of weapons with complex particle effects and fire speeduntil your computer cries blood. You can do it more quickly and easily by setting the game’s graphics to their highest and running two tabs of chrome in the background.
Lagrog has fewer weapon slots and lower stat limits but spawns fewer enemies. This can behelpful for some challenges such as Pacifist runs.
RogNGesus
Lose three times in a row at the gambling event.
The gambling den can appear on event nodes, witheach gamble being roughly a coin toss. There’s no special trick to this but you’ll get it eventually if you accept every gamble you’re offered.
RNG gives you random modifiers and drop rates, enabling some unexpected gameplay outcomes but alsoa random chance of instant death.
How To Unlock All Special Characters
Three of the unlockable avatars come with alternative playstyles that overhaul either how you progress through the game or the entire upgrade system used by other characters.
Gunslinger
Hold eight weapons at once
Avoid weapon fusions that remove weapons from your slots, and you should be able to achieve this in a long enough run.
The gunslinger has a personal suite of weapons and talents.All their weapons require manual aimingand must be reloaded between shots.
Kill the necromancer boss.
The necromancer appears at the end of C-rank worlds.
The summoner has their own collection of talents and weapons but cannot deal direct damage. Theirstat scaling is shared with summoned minions.
Shopkeeper
Invest 50,000 gold to the shopkeeper
The opportunity to invest occurs at random event nodes rather than shops.The amount you invest is maintained across runs, so as long as you hand over what money you have each time you’ll get there.
Instead of gaining cards on level-up, the shopkeeper is given access to their own shop. You’ll want toenable manual level-ups when playing asthem.
The shopkeeper is one of thestrongest characters for playing Survivors mode, as the only character able to restock on banishes and rerolls. In a long enough game they’re able to banish all cards that don’t fit into their build and continue to purchase artifacts after elites after chests no longer appear.
How To Unlock Dog Rog
Two of the avatars have their unlock conditions obscured andwon’t appear in the character select menu until you discover them.The first of these is Dog Rog, who is simple to unlock but well hidden. To unlock Dog Rog you’ll want tostart a game in Survivors mode on an E-rank worldand then navigate to a specific spot in the desert. You can stumble onto it randomly but here’s a consistent method:
The exact time intervals willdepend on your movespeed upgradesand whether you stop to collect loot along the way.
Dog Rog’s is another stat variant on the standard character, with afocus on movespeed and max healthat the cost of lower damage across the board.
Dog Rog’snegative defence means they can make Faith buildsmore easily than other avatars.
How To Unlock The Corrupted Avatar
The rarest character in the game is unlocked by continuing through Survivors mode until the secret ending activates. This takes about nine in-game days.
For the first fifteen minutes to an hour (depending on difficulty) time flows at a normal rate. After all bosses for the world are defeated, the counter advances much more rapidly. You can also findsoul shop upgrades that increase time scaling in Survivors mode.
Under ideal conditions,reaching the ninth day takes under three hours.You’ll want a build that hits all the following:
The shopkeeper is the character that is able to achieve reliability, while the duelist is able to make a solid attempt.
The first challenge is to obtain a weapon that kills enemies regardless of health and armour. The Death Scythe is evolved from the cleaver, swordarang, and Divine Smite and has a chance to instantly kill enemies. You’ll need to level up the two weapons and gather critical boosting cards before the synergy and evolution appear.
With maximum crit rate,the Death Scythe has a ten percent chance of instantly killing enemies, and two percent for elites. Modifying it with projectile count, size, duration, and attack speed, you should be able to kill most enemies before they appear on-screen to hurt you.
Elite enemies will sometimes survive long enough to brush against us.The next tool we need is a way to survive foreverdespite having minimised the game to write the guide you’re currently reading. This is done bymanipulating the game’s various forms of one-shot protection.
We need to combine one or more of these forms of protection with a mechanic that gives us time to heal between each attack. Thebest choice is the artifact Luna’s Cross, and its worth using as many refreshes as are needed to find it. There are also a few potential alternatives.
As long as we’re able tofully heal in the 0.25 seconds provided by Luna’s Cross, one-shot protection will activate again on the next attack and we’ve become functionally immortal. To do this we want to lower our max HP as much as possible, while increasing our regeneration. Thankfully, there are plenty of cards and artifacts that trade max hp for increased healing and damage.
Oneshot protectiononly activates if your max HP is at least ten.If you trade away all of your HP to cards and artifacts the build will stop working.
The last part of the build isavoiding anything that risks crashing the game.
