Mod Mania | Balatro's Multiplayer Mod is wild; Future teasers and how to install
This is the first magazine article of Mod Mania; a magazine strip that showcases fantastic mods that augment their original game in a cool or unique way. For this first article, we're showcasing a recent up-and-coming multiplayer mod for Balatro, created by the mod makers Virtualized and TGMM.
BalatroMultiplayer is a unique mod that puts players head to head against one another, turning the single player experience into that of a head-to-head multiplayer showdown. At current, the mod has two modes out and 4 planned for the full 1.0 release. There's already a good amount to play around with, and much more planned in future updates. I learned much from the brief interview with Virtualized I had, from the jokers, to the consumables, to some rulesets planned for lobbies. We'll be covering all of it here in this article, and at the end, for those of you who want to download it, there will be instruction at the very bottom of this article.
How the mod currently looks
At current, the mod has just 5 jokers, and 1 asteroid card, along with all the multiplayer bells and whistles. There are two modes, attrition and showdown, each where after a set amount of time, each player faces off in PvP blinds where whoever scores the highest amount wins. Each has a set amount of lives (usually 4) and once one runs out they lose. Attrition has players facing at each boss blind, making each ante a face off to be the one with the better hands. Showdown gives each player 3 normal antes to prepare, before throwing them in an endless ante where each blind players face each other until one has no more lives.
Currently, the beta is more feature rich, with lobby options that give customization to any given game. Hosts of the room can toggle comeback money, blind rewards on round loss, whether you lose a life on non-PvP losses, as well as the amount of lives, too. Hosts can also control if players always have the same seed or deck, and enable or disable the multiplayer cards currently included in the mod.
The future plans
Warning: All of this according to Virtualized own words is subject to change. Potential details are being ironed out about added content such as jokers and consumables.
I had a brief talk with Virtualized about their future plans as well as how they got to this point. When asked about how things got so popular, Virtualized had this to say: I've been developing this mod since Balatro came out. Our Discord was at 2,000 before a video was put out by
Bean
. It went under the radar for a while before the YouTube algorithm picked it up and our Discord exploded early January to around 10,000 people, and now were sitting at around 20,000 or more.
From there, we had a back and forth on his future plans, and he gave me tons of exciting details, firstly, the modes are going to have a rework. The first rework? Each mode can be between up to eight players. From there on, the modes are as follows:
Attrition: Just like how it is now, its a focus on 1v1, where each boss blind will have you facing a player, and if you score lower, you lose.
Battle Royale: Each boss blind is a battle between all players, and the bottom 25% scoring will lose a life.
Precision: This one was very interesting to me, instead of high scoring, your focus is to get as close to the target score as possible, whoever's closest (higher or lower) wins.
And finally, Speedrun: No PvP, First person to finish ante 8 wins, with a blind loss having you restarted on a new seed.
Along with modes, he also shared with me several rulesets:
Vanilla: Where those who just want to enjoy base Balatro with no changes.
Competitive: All multiplayer, changes to the games balance (i.e. Photochad, Justice Tarot, reworking Hanging Chad).
Tournament: For tournament play, prevents lobby settings being tampered with.
Weekly: An arcade like experience where certain sets of jokers and cards are banned, to change every week or two for a fresh experience.
In terms of new content, Virtualized shared that there were around 20 jokers planned, potentially more or less, planned for the update, with these confirmed jokers:
Conjoined Joker: While in a PvP blind, X1 Mult for every Hand your Nemesis has left.
Jack-in-a-Box: If first hand of round is a single Jack, destroy it and create 2 Trap cards.
Handshake: If multiple players have this joker at the beginning of the PvP blind, destroy this joker and gain $20
Mastermind: 1 in 2 chance to create a spectral card when you activate a trap.
While there are no confirmed effects for the cards below, I was also sent these very cool art assets to be used in game for the 1.0 release.
The only other confirmed content as of this moment is a unique gimmick called Trap cards (mentioned in the Mastermind Joker effect), which will be a consumable that is held in a separate consumable area. These will be sent from your opponent, having various effects, with 17 planned in total. The art competition for this wrapped up recently, and you can see the planned effects as well as the assets below:
In all honesty, all of this sounds really cool, and theres a lot of potential to be had here. Reminder to readers that all of this is subject to change. As a final tidbit, Virtualized shared one more potential card type they had planned called Sabotage. This consumable type would appear when the player loses a PvP blind. They could potentially choose an effect to help them, including that of making the next round have a boss blind effect that effects all players.
How to install
For those excited by the prospects of future release, you can join their Discord here for future releases and to find people to play this amazing mod with.
To install, you'll need to make sure you set up both LovelyInjector and Steammodded, as well as downloading the Multiplayer mod. Follow the read me for each link, and you should be good to go.
A friendly word of advice, make sure there's no -main at the end of any mod folders, it can mess up the functionality of them sometimes. If you have any trouble, the Balatro Multiplayer server is very helpful.
Source(s)
Github, Virtualized, Balatro
