Which Brotato character to start with, going by what their kits actually say

The five characters you have from the start, what each one gives and takes away, and a sensible order to try them in. Plus the easy unlocks that come next.

By MaxPublished 29 Oct 20263 min read

Character text is from the Brotato Wiki as of 28 Oct 2026. This is my reading of the kits, not a tier list. I don't have win-rate data and haven't tested these in-game.

Nobody can tell you the best Brotato character, and I'm not going to pretend to. What I can do is read the kit text for the five you start with and tell you what each one is asking of you. That's enough to pick a sensible first run.

First, one bit of jargon

You'll see "modifications" in a lot of these kits, like "Ranged Damage modifications are increased by 50%". My reading of the wiki wording is that it means the stat changes you pick up from level-ups and items, so +10 Ranged Damage counts as +15 on the Ranger and as +0 on the Mage. If that's wrong, the comparisons below still hold in direction, just not in size.

The five you start with

What I'd do, and why

Start with Well Rounded. It's the only one of the five with no penalties listed at all. Because nothing is held back, you can buy whatever the shop shows you and learn what each stat does, which is more useful on a first run than picking the character with the best theoretical ceiling. The +8 Harvesting also gives a small economy bump from wave one. The Harvesting guide shows how that grows.

Then Ranger or Brawler to see what a focused build feels like. Ranger is the cleaner lesson: it can only use ranged weapons, and every Ranged Damage point you gain is worth half again as much, so your decisions narrow to one stat. The price is lower Max HP growth and no melee as a backup. Brawler is the same idea in melee, with the Fist and dodge to lean on, but it carries a -50 Range penalty and -50 Ranged Damage, which is a lot to give up if the shop doesn't offer you Unarmed weapons.

Crazy is fast and swingy: +25% Attack Speed sounds great, and it is, but -30% dodge makes it fragile. I'd leave it until you're comfortable with survival stats. The dodge guide explains why that penalty hurts more than it looks.

Mage is the one I'd leave for last of the five. Melee and Ranged Damage gains do nothing for it (-100%), so you're locked into Elemental, and Engineering is halved. A few weapon classes use elemental scaling, but if the shop doesn't offer you any, you're stuck. That's a fun puzzle once you know the shop, and a bad time before then.

The easy unlocks that come next

You get more characters by doing things, and the first ones don't take long:

Dying unlocks a character, so a bad first run isn't wasted. Chunky is also a good example of a trade-off kit: Max HP gains are +25% and every 3 Max HP gives +1% damage, but Speed gains are reduced by 100% and life steal by 100%.

The DLC characters

If you own the Abyssal Terrors DLC, five more are available from the start: Sailor, Curious, Builder, Captain and Creature. I wouldn't start with any of them. Sailor can't dodge past 20%. Captain needs 200% more XP to level. Builder can't have structures. They're all interesting, but every one of them breaks a rule the base game teaches you, so they make more sense once you know the rules.