Level

Level is a statistic that all characters have in Risk of Rain 2. The higher a character's level, the higher their stats.

As in most games, all characters in Risk of Rain 2 begin at level 1 and steadily level up, becoming progressively stronger over time.

Player Level
Players level up by gathering experience. The biggest source of experience is from defeating monsters, which drop whitish-blue experience orbs when killed that are automatically collected by the player that kills them. The amount of experience depends on the current difficulty, the type of monster, and whether the monster is an Elite. Notably, if a non-player entity (such as a drone) kills a monster, that experience is lost.

Aside from killing monsters, players can acquire small amounts of experience by opening barrels. Additionally, when proceeding to the next stage via Teleporter or portal, all of the player's leftover gold is converted into half that much experience.

A player's current level can be found using the formula $$level = log_{1.55}(1+0.0275*totalexp)+1$$, with a minimum of 1. The amount of experience required to reach a certain level can be found with $$exp = -4/0.11*(1-1.55^{level-1})$$.

Since each subsequent level requires 1.55 times as much experience as the previous one, leveling up outside of early stages becomes nearly impossible. Ultimately, players require items to survive and fight on.

Ambient Level
Non-player characters use a completely different leveling system than players, instead scaling their level with the ambient difficulty. This is found with the formula $enemyLevel = 1 + (coeff - playerFactor) / 0.33$, where coeff is the difficulty coefficient and playerFactor is a constant that scales with the player count of the game (see the math behind scaling difficulty). This level is displayed in the top-right corner of the screen, alongside the current scaling difficulty.

A monster's level also determines how much experience it will drop for a player that kills it; the experience reward is found with $reward = coeff \times monsterValue \times rewardMultiplier$. The experience yield of a monster is exactly half the amount of gold it drops.

Although this level system is used primarily for monsters, nearly all non-player characters use the ambient level. There are two exceptions:  and  use his level instead; and Umbrae spawned from the  are always level 1 (this is likely a bug).