Borderlands 3: Mayhem Modes (What They Are & How to Unlock Them)

Borderlands 3 is the culmination of all it’s predecessors and many changes unique to the game itself. Mayhem Mode is an entirely brand new aspect and changes how players get to experience the replayability that Borderlands has to offer. Mayhem Mode is an end game activity that cranks up the difficulty, chaos, and loot.

Mayhem mode in a way replaced Ultimate Vault Hunter Mode Entirely. UVHM was the third and final playthrough for all previous Borderlands titles and drastically amped up the enemies for the entirety of the Campaign. Playing the entire story mode a third time might have felt like a bit much, especially when it’s the third time on a second, third, or fourth character. So instead, players have the option to run around the Galaxy with the option to control how much more difficult they want the enemies to be.

How to Unlock Mayhem in Borderlands 3

Since Mayhem is an end game feature, the only way to unlock it is to defeat the final boss of the campaign, Tyreen. Gearbox played one of their practical jokes and made it appear as if the fight against Troy would be the final battle but there was still one more place to go, Nekrotafeyo. After players align all the vaults and finally put Tyreen to rest, the final Vault of the campaign will open up giving players an Eridian artifact that Tannis later describes to be an Eridian “training simulator”. This device created or placed the user in alternate realities where everything was much more powerful and difficult to deal with. Once players unlock this artifact in the first playthrough, Gearbox made an update to the game that allows players to access it and amp up the difficultly when immediately beginning True Vault Hunter Mode.

Mayhem Mode has gone through a series of updates and is now in the current state of Mayhem 2.o. Originally, there were only 3 Mayhem levels with a 4th added much later. Unfortunately, there was a lot of balancing issues and many players petitioned to Gearbox that the experience wasn’t exactly fair and entirely too difficult. Mayhem 2.0 has not only balanced weapons and abilities but has also added an entirely new array of buffs and debuffs to make the game more interesting and entertaining. From “big head” mode that makes everyone’s head huge, to “freeze tag” where flying orbs of ice consistently release Novas. There is a wide variety of Modifiers making every opportunity to load in the game quite different than the last. Modifiers can be re-rolled at any point in time but if players are not in Sanctuary, the game will have to reload the instance. There are 10 levels of Mayhem and the difficultly tends to scale drastically every 2 levels. Weapons will also drop with higher stat bonuses in each Mayhem level but not every weapon will receive the buff. Weapons that have increased Stats will be labeled “Mayhem Level (?)” to indicate the corresponding Mayhem Level the stats were rolled for. The higher the level, the more modifiers the game will implement and the more difficult they will be to deal with.

Borderlands 3 is available on Xbox, Ps4, and PC.