Welcome to GamesBeat’s Borderlands 2 game guide, where we’ll show you how to exploit Gearbox Software’s latest and greatest to your heart’s content. You can use this game’s design and loopholes in a lot of ways to trick out your characters and make Borderlands 2 your B, so let’s get to it!

All about the Golden Key and chest

Before you start, you should know how the Golden Key and Golden Chest work. If you pre-ordered the game or signed up for the Gearbox Shift club, you likely have at least one of these keys (they do not drop in-game). Each key can be used to open the Golden Chest in Sanctuary, Borderlands 2’s city hub. You’ll reach this area within 3-5 hours after starting the game, and can then access it anytime.

The Golden Key can only be used once, on one character, and then it’s gone forever. Furthermore, the weapon inside the chest scales to your level, so you need to decide if you want a decent weapon now or a super-badass weapon later. Lots of people seem to want to wait until level 50 to open the chest for the best possible results, but the majority of comments I’ve seen are from people who accidentally opened the chest and wasted their key without knowing it. To make sure you don’t do that, here’s what the chest looks like:

Because Eridium is better than money, these slot machines generally give better stuff. If you get 3 Psycho Heads, Flesh-Stick shocks you (instead of grenades), 3 purple vault symbols give you a pearlescent weapon, 3 Rainbows give you varying amounts of cash (Usually a decent amount) dependent upon your level, 3 teapots give you a blue weapon. Here it is the long awaited vid sorry that it took so long to put up as you will see at the end i gad to re-shoot it like 3-4 times because my boi who i do t.

Quick and easy Badass tokens

As with the first Borderlands, the sequel has tons of in-game challenges that you can now complete for Badass Rank. Earn enough Badass Rank and you’ll get a token that allows you to permanently increase a bonus stat across all of your characters.

Some of these challenges can take multiple playthroughs to finish across dozens of hours, while some of the specific challenges can be pretty difficult for a number of reasons.

Most challenges have five levels, with a higher goal at each level (10 sniper kills, 100, 500, and so on). The higher the challenge level you complete, the more Badass Rank you gain and the more points you unlock for a total of 166 points per challenge:

Borderlands 2 Eridium Slot Machine Hack Cheat Engine

Challenge Level 1: 1 Badass Rank
Challenge Level 2: 5 Badass Rank
Challenge Level 3: 10 Badass Rank
Challenge Level 4: 50 Badass Rank
Challenge Level 5: 100 Badass Rank

However, you can knock out a few challenges early on with a little game exploitation and get a lot of tokens well before the game’s designers intended for you to have just one.

First up is trading. You must complete 50 trades with another player to finish level five of the “Psst, Hey Buddy…” challenge. You can do this at the very beginning of the game and receive sizable permanent stat boost thanks to the 15-plus tokens you’ll receive, all in a matter of minutes.

To initiate a trade, hold B for a second while facing a nearby player. That player holds B to accept the trade and then you’ll both enter the trade interface. To expedite the process, both players select “Trade” and you’re done. You don’t even have to trade anything.

Trade 49 more times and you’re done. The beauty of this is that both players complete the challenges at the same time, unlike the Duel challenge (see below).

BONUS: Badass tokens and the permanent stat increases you get for them are saved across all your characters, but challenges are not. That means, if you were so inclined, you could keep creating new characters, max the trading challenge (among others) out in a couple of minutes, and repeat for tons of Badass Rank and tokens.

Grinding duels

To complete all the levels for the Duel challenge, you need to win 50 duels. However, like with trading, you can do this quickly at the beginning of the game. First, both players should remove their shield (if they have one). Now whenever you lose a duel, you’ll only have a sliver of health remaining. Then initiate a duel with a second player by using melee attacks against each other.

Once the duel begins, melee the other player and you’ll defeat them in a single swipe. Repeat until you’ve hit 50 wins. If you want to be nice, you can then take 50 losses so your friend can get their wins, too.

Note that winning a duel doesn’t technically count as a “kill,” so you can’t grind any of the kill challenges this way, and shooting the other player is just a waste of ammo. It’s best to get these done as fast as possible and move on.

Grinding revives

Whenever a fellow player is downed, you may hold X to revive him if you’re feeling generous. Of course, the game has a challenge for this (“This Is No Time for Lazy!”), but it would take forever through normal play (especially if your team doesn’t suck).

Since you can’t take damage from falling, you can’t repeatedly jump to your doom and have your friends waiting for you at the bottom. Instead, you can only down yourself with grenades (slow and costly) or Tediore weapons, which are chucked instead of being reloaded and explode on impact.

As soon as you get a Tediore weapon, remove your shield and stand in a corner with your friend next to you (Borderlands 2 has no friendly fire, so he won’t receive damage). Now shoot once and then hit reload to throw the gun and down yourself from the explosion. Your friend will revive you, and you can repeat the process for both players until everyone has the challenge maxed.

Borderlands 2 Eridium Slot Machine Hack

Free legit rare items (no exploit)

There is a non-player character in Sanctuary named Michael Mamaril. He is named after a Borderlands fan who passed away, and he even has his own achievement. Every time you find and speak with him, he’ll hand you a rare item (blue or better). That’s it, no strings attached. You can return to Sanctuary as many times as you want for a sizable number of free weapons, but Michael will move around constantly within the city. Once you learn all of his go-to spots, you can quickly hunt him down. Don’t forget to check in Moxxi’s bar by the jukebox and in Roland’s hideout near the stairs.

Update: This special NPC only appears frequently during Act 1, before a special event affects Sanctuary. So if you want to pump him for infinite rare loot, do it before progressing the story beyond that point.

Duping items

The dupe trick is back. I’m pretty surprised this was left over from the first Borderlands, as it gives players the capability to quickly and massively derail the design of the game, but here it is.

To create an identical copy of any gun or item, simply drop it. Have the other player pick it up (to be safe) and then you dashboard out (press the Xbox button on your controller and then Y). This will send you back to the dashboard without saving your game.

Now re-enter the game and both you and the other player will have a copy of the gun you dropped. Make sure you don’t accidentally trigger an auto-save before dashboarding (it’s best to just stand still during the process and make sure no other players are running around killing stuff or doing quests).

This can be good for getting that one superawesome shotgun or relic your friend ninja-looted from you, or for repeatedly selling expensive items for lots of cash.

Level up from 1 to 15 in about 20 minutes

Already beat the game (twice) and want to expedite the process of starting a new character? Hopefully you took along a friend for the ride, because he can now help you rapidly level up a brand-new character.

Simply join his game on True Vault Hunter Mode (aka Playthrough 2). Your newborn character will be completely worthless, but anytime your friend completes a mission, the XP reward will rocket you up several levels at a time. If your friend just started True Vault Hunter Mode, you’ll reach level 5 just for grabbing the gun out of the container after Claptrap loses his eye.

Easy and early Eridium (max out your backpack ASAP!)

Bl2 Eridium Slot Machine Jackpot

Once you reach Sanctuary (shortly after completing the Prologue), you can gamble on two slot machines at Mad Moxxi’s bar.

The further you