Besides the class abilities of the 15 unique characters, artifacts are a great way to gain an advantage in Risk of Rain Returns. Being a Common rarity artifact, Bitter Root can increase your health by 8% per use and has a supply of 38 charges that will allow you to increase your health by three times. This item can help in the high-difficulty levels, giving you more room for combos without fearing for your health. Moreover, Bitter Root is an essential item to unlock Chef, so we are here to help you and tell you how to get it in Risk of Rain Returns.
Risk of Rain Returns: Unlocking the Bitter Root

To unlock the Bitter Root artifact in Risk of Rain Returns, you only need to increase your character’s health to 650. At the same time, the difficulty level of the playthrough, the chosen character, and the way you use to increase your health do not matter. Accumulating 650 HP is relatively easy, but we have tips that can help you.
Tips To Get Bitter Root Faster
- The most obvious advice we can give is to level up your character. With each new level, your health increases, but the HP increase varies from character to character. Therefore, we recommend unlocking and using HAN-D, which has the highest health gain. Probably 13-14 levels will be enough to reach the desired level. But as an alternative, you can use the Loader character.
- The second thing you can use is Infusion. As an Uncommon rarity artifact, this item increases your health by 1 for each enemy killed. Of course, you cannot guarantee that you will find this in the first stage, but if you are lucky, you can unlock Bitter Root by the end of the second stage.
- In addition to the previous tips, do not forget that the difficulty level does not matter. So, if you only want to unlock Bitter Root as soon as possible, play Drizzle Difficulty and increase your HP without much resistance from enemies.
Once you reach 650 HP, you will receive the In Good Health achievement and unlock the Bitter Root artifact, which you can find starting from your next playthrough. This also means that you are at the finish line to get Chef. After all, you need to find four ingredients, of which three are available initially, and you have just unlocked Bitter Root.
To summarize, here is how you can unlock Bitter Root in Risk of Rain Returns:
- Increase your HP to 650.
- Play on the lowest difficulty.
- Use the Infusion artifact.
- Play as HAN-D or Loader.
Risk of Rain Returns is now available for PC and Nintendo Switch.