Gibbed on the PS Vita, Honestly

Borderlands 2 did get a Vita port (2014), so the question comes up a lot — and I want to be straight with you, because the Vita is the one platform where stock Gibbed genuinely doesn't have you covered. There's a clean way around it if you own a PS3, and a much harder homebrew-only way if you don't. Let me split it cleanly so you don't waste an evening.

First, the honest summary

The official Gibbed BL2 save editor was written for PC, Xbox 360 and PS3. Vita support was requested on the repo years ago but never built in. So you can't just open a Vita save in the normal editor and pick "Vita" — that option doesn't exist. Everything below is about getting around that, and the right path depends entirely on whether you also own a PS3.

The easy route: cross-save through a PS3

This is the one I'd point most people at. Borderlands 2 has an official cross-save feature between PS3 and Vita — a single cloud slot you upload a character to on one console and download on the other (it needs PSN). That turns a Vita-editing problem into a PS3-editing problem, and PS3 is one of thefriendliest platforms for Gibbed.

1. Upload the character from your Vita

   In-game, use the Cross-Save menu to upload your Vita character to the cloud.

2. Download it on the PS3 and edit it there

   Pull the character down on PS3, then edit that PS3 save with Gibbed the normal way — decrypt with Bruteforce Save Data, edit, re-encrypt. The full flow is on the PS3 page.

3. Cross-save it back to the Vita

   Upload the edited character from PS3 and download it again on the Vita. Done — no homebrew needed.

The Vita-only route (needs homebrew)

No PS3? Then you're into homebrew territory, and I'll be honest that this one is for people who already tinker with their Vita. Vita saves are encrypted, so you need a console running HENkaku (the Vita jailbreak, via h-encore/HENlo on supported firmware) to get at them.

• You decrypt and pull the save off the console with VitaShell (its "Open Decrypted" option), then copy the files to a PC.
• There's a community Gibbed fork for Vita (beefcat666/gibbed-borderlands2-vita , originally BabyPuncher) that can load a decrypted Vita save and convert it to other platforms — but its own README says saving Vita saves is not supported.
• That last point is the catch: reading and converting is solved; writing a fully valid edited save back onto the Vita cleanly is the part that isn't officially documented end-to-end. Treat it as advanced and back up first.

A stock, un-hacked Vita?

Mostly a dead end for editing. There's a PC-side trick to decrypt a stock Content Manager backup (Yifan Lu's psvimgtools with the account key service), but those tools are decrypt/backup-only — they don't re-encrypt a modified save to put it back. So without either a PS3 for cross-save or a homebrew Vita, there isn't a clean way to round-trip an edit. I won't pretend otherwise.

Bans & online

On the single-player side, Borderlands 2 has no anti-cheat, so editing your own save isn't a cheat-detection problem. The homebrew side is its own question: historically people haven't reported PSN bans for HENkaku, but that's a community observation, not a guarantee from Sony — the usual advice is to be careful with PSN while homebrew is running. And BL2 on Vita does have 2-player online co-op, so don't drag obviously modded gear into someone else's game. The wider safety picture is in is it safe.

Quick answers