The Thing About Borderlands 2 Mods
Most people don't realize how much the modding scene around Borderlands 2 has shifted since 2012. Gearbox stopped supporting it officially years ago. The community filled that gap, and most of what's available now came together through people working off each other's tools. That's how Borderlands 2 Won T Get Fooled Again started too. It's not a one-person project anymore. It's more like a maintained fork of older tools that people keep patching when new updates break things. The basic idea is straightforward: it gives you control over loot tables, weapon scaling, and some of the grinding mechanics that the game makes painfully slow. Without it, running a second or third playthrough feels like filling out paperwork. With it, you can set specific drop rates or skip directly to what you want.
Borderlands 2 Won T Get Fooled Again
I should clarify what this actually is before talking about how to use it. It's a combination of a save editor and an in-game modifier tool. You run it alongside the game, it hooks into the memory space, and it lets you tweak various parameters while playing. The name comes from an inside joke in the community about how many times people tried to update these tools and broke them in the process. Someone decided to just keep it as-is instead of rebranding every time. What it covers: Loot table editing, red vault keys, skill point allocation, XP multiplier control, and a few weapon stat modifiers. The skill point thing is the one most people actually use regularly. Redoing a character build normally means starting over or accepting a mediocre hybrid. This tool lets you reallocate without restarting.
Setting It Up
The installation isn't complicated, but it's also not something you can just double-click and walk away from. You need to pull the latest release from the official thread on the Borderlands modding forums. There are mirror sites, but I wouldn't touch them. I ran into a copy once that had bundled something unwanted in the folder. It was obvious from the file sizes — the legitimate release is usually under 5MB. Anything significantly larger is probably modified. After downloading, you extract it somewhere outside your Program Files directory. The tool writes logs and configuration files, and Windows will block it from doing that if it's sitting in a protected folder. A simple path like C:\Tools\BL2Mod\ works fine. Then you launch Borderlands 2 through Steam in windowed mode. The tool detects the process automatically. If it doesn't, you just drag the Borderlands 2 executable onto the tool's window to register it manually. There's a dependency issue some people hit. The tool relies on an older version of the Visual C++ redistributable. If you get an error about missing DLLs on startup, install the 2010 x86 package. Not the 2015 or 2019 version. The 2010 one. I wasted about twenty minutes on this the first time I set it up because I installed the wrong one and assumed the tool itself was broken.
Get the Full Details
Using the Main Features
Once the tool is running and connected to the game, the interface is basic. A lot of dropdowns, a few input fields, and tabs for each category. The skill reallocator is the most complex part because it requires a proper save state. Here's the workflow: pause the game, open the skill tab, select your character, and hit the reallocate button. The tool will ask you to confirm. It then writes the changes to the save file. You have to reload the save for the changes to apply. This isn't optional. For loot manipulation, you can set global drop rates or target specific items. The targeted item approach is more useful. You pick a weapon or artifact, set the drop source, and adjust the probability. Setting it to 100% on a specific drop node will reliably give you that item the next time that node triggers. I used this to finish collecting all the unique weapons for a completionist run. Took me about three hours total, which would have been weeks otherwise. The XP multiplier is straightforward. You enter a number, and it applies for the current session. Going above 10x causes some visual glitching in the level-up animation, but functionality stays normal. I never found a reason to go much past 5x though. Character progression gets boring fast when there's no challenge involved.
Problems and Workarounds
The biggest issue I've encountered is with the Vault Hunter Online mode. The tool conflicts with certain online sessions when multiple players are modifying their saves simultaneously. I once caused a desync that corrupted a shared vault key. It took about fifteen minutes of reloading and re-downloading the session to fix. The workaround is simple enough: only run the tool when you're in single-player or co-op with people who aren't using modifiers themselves. There's no clean way to run it alongside other people's mod tools. Another edge case involves the true vault hunter mode. The tool recognizes it and adjusts its behavior accordingly, but the skill tree in that mode has some quirks that the reallocator doesn't always handle correctly. I found that some skill points got assigned to nodes that didn't visually appear in the tree. The workaround is to apply changes in small batches rather than dumping everything at once. Two or three skill points per reload cycle seems to be the sweet spot. There's also the matter of GameBunny and Gearbox Cloud saves. If you have cloud sync enabled, the tool can write to your local save but the cloud version won't reflect those changes until you manually upload. I learned this the hard way when I spent an hour trying to figure out why my progress wasn't showing up across machines. Disable cloud sync or accept that you'll need to manage saves manually after using the tool.
Download and What to Watch For
The official release is posted in the Borderlands modding forums under the Tools section. Look for the thread with the most recent date stamp. The current version supports all patches up to about 2020. If you're running a version newer than that, the tool may not detect your game executable properly. There's a manual executable registration step I mentioned earlier that usually gets around this. I want to be clear about what this doesn't do. It won't give you items from multiplayer bosses that you haven't personally defeated. It won't bypass any of the game's achievement tracking. It also won't work on the GOTY edition's later updates if those changes modified the core game structures. The tool is tied to specific game versions, and the developers stop updating it once a major patch breaks compatibility. If you're just looking to speed up the grinding without touching save files, you might find the in-game console commands sufficient for your needs. The developer tool here is overkill for that. But if you're doing a completion run, managing multiple characters, or just tired of accidentally deleting builds you spent time on, this is about as good as it gets. The game is old enough that most of the community tools are stable, and this one has been around long enough to have most of the bugs worked out.
