Per-instance sticker cautions, unlike the per-joker CAUTIONS table: the
same joker is a fine buy without the sticker. Perishable debuffs a joker
for good after 5 rounds (Card:calculate_perishable, card.lua:2652), so a
perishable Ride the Bus or Hologram is investment about to be wiped --
the new SCALERS set in synergies.lua lists the jokers whose stored gains
die that way, excluding computed (Bull) and round-scoped (Hit the Road)
values and Egg, whose sell value survives a debuff. Rental charges
every round (card.lua:2647), which can eat a money joker's whole payout.
The scaler-key integrity test caught j_canio for j_caino on the first
run -- the misspelled vanilla keys strike again.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Card Sharp's x3 needs the same hand twice in ONE round -- it checks
played_this_round > 1 (card.lua:4465) and that counter resets each
round (state_events.lua:252). Burglar's +3 hands makes the replay
routine, so it gets the famous pair plus a hands_up want, same shape
as Burglar + Acrobat. The old verdict rejecting the Obelisk clash
stands; the audit entry now records both decisions.
Troubadour and Merry Andy join the cautions: their buried costs (one
fewer hand every round, one hand size) are the same shape as
Stuntman's existing warning.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Cross-checked all 150 jokers' tags against JOKER_EFFECTS.md and the dump:
- Drop the Vampire + Marble clash: Vampire gains xMult from any non-base
scoring card (card.lua:3907), Stones included, so Marble feeds it --
the same shape as the Midas Mask pair. The data even scored the duo
as a combo while warning against it. Stone-build harm stays covered
by the Vampire + Stone Joker line.
- Delayed Gratification wants discards_up: it pays per unused discard,
same shape as Banner.
- The Idol wants suit_flex: it checks is_suit (card.lua:3530), so
Smeared doubles its eligible cards, like Ancient Joker.
- 8 Ball wants retrig_scoring: the 1-in-4 rolls per scored 8 in the
individual pass (card.lua:3507), so retriggers re-roll it.
- Reword the suit give phrasings: nothing vanilla turns cards into a
suit, so 'turns cards into Spades' was a lie whenever Blackboard sat
across from a one-sided giver like Wrathful or Arrowhead.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
DNA only fires on the round's first hand and only for a single played
card (dump/card.lua:3956) - sacrificing a full hand to enable the
easiest hand in the game is not a synergy. Its trips/quads enabling
stays; that is what the one-copy-per-round loop actually builds toward.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Business Card claimed a synergy with Hack, but Hack only retriggers
2s-5s and Business Card only pays on faces. The single retrig_scoring
tag lumped every retriggerer with every retrigger payoff.
retrig_scoring now means rank-agnostic (Dusk, Seltzer, Hanging Chad,
Splash). Hack gives retrig_low; Sock and Buskin gives retrig_faces.
Payoffs want only the scopes their ranks can reach: low-rank payoffs
(Even Steven, Odd Todd, Walkie Talkie, Fibonacci, Wee) add retrig_low,
face payoffs (Scary Face, Business, Photograph, Triboulet) add
retrig_faces, rank-agnostic ones (Hiker, the suit gems, The Idol) add
both. Scholar keeps only retrig_scoring - no retriggerer targets Aces.
This also kills Hack+Scholar, Hack+Scary Face, Hack+Photograph,
Hack+Triboulet, and Sock and Buskin vs every low-rank payoff.
Both new tags are full themes (catalog page, label, teaching line) so
Hack and Sock and Buskin stay visible in the Engine tab.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Every lead in AUDIT.md, traced to the running source and then settled.
Ceremonial Dagger DESTROYS the joker to its right at blind select
(card.lua:2945) and skips Eternals. The card says so; what it cannot say
is WHICH of your jokers is about to die. JCA.dagger_victim names it in
the tooltip -- "WILL DESTROY Baron at the next blind" -- while there is
still time to reorder, and stays quiet when the neighbour is Eternal.
Four jokers that scored 0 against all 150 now have partners, all verified
in card.lua rather than recalled:
* Burglar + Ramen: Ramen decays per discarded card and is DESTROYED at x1
(SMODS.destroy_cards). Burglar zeroes discards, so it never decays and
never dies. Same for Burglar + Green Joker, which is only punished by
discarding.
* Trading Card + Erosion: Erosion pays per card MISSING from the deck,
and Trading Card permanently destroys the card it discards.
* Chaos the Clown + Flash Card: a free reroll every shop, and a joker
that grows per reroll. Both were inert.
Erosion is the mirror of card_gen, so it now clashes with every joker
that permanently adds a card: DNA, Marble, Certificate.
Rejected, with the reasoning recorded so nobody "fixes" it later:
Card Sharp and Supernova reward replaying a hand and Obelisk punishes it,
but neither destroys the other's precondition -- the player's hand choice
does. That is an opposed incentive, not an opposed effect. The clash list
only earns trust while every entry is mechanical.
The audit's own silent-check was wrong: it flagged Square Joker, which
has been paired with Four Fingers all along, and I duplicated that pair
before the suite caught it. Silence now means no tags AND no famous pair.
711 pass locally, 10 in-game.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
* The tooltip mis-taught every pure enabler. JCA.explain used a cluster
tag's `both` text whenever EITHER side was a full member, so Four
Fingers next to Runner claimed "both reward Straights" -- Four Fingers
does not reward Straights, it makes them reachable. `both` now requires
both sides, and every cluster tag carries give/want phrasings.
* Blue Joker and Abstract Joker scored 0 against all 150 jokers. Blue
Joker scales on #G.deck.cards, so it wants card_gen (DNA, Marble,
Certificate); Abstract scales on #G.jokers.cards, so it wants joker_gen
(Riff-Raff is +6 Mult on its own). Both verified in card.lua. Steel and
Glass Joker look like the same fix but are NOT: they need Steel/Glass
specifically, and the only enhance_gen givers make Gold and Stone, so
tagging them would invent a synergy that does not exist.
* Copy jokers are positional and the board order was there all along.
JCA.copy_source reports what an owned Blueprint/Brainstorm is actually
copying, including when the target is one of the 29 centers vanilla
refuses to copy (blueprint_compat = false), or when it is copying
nothing at all.
* The sell advisor now counts clashes when ranking what to cut. JCA.score
stays pure -- a trap must never make a card look like a combo -- but a
joker eating another one's payoff is exactly the one to sell.
The suite caught a real bug while writing this: `(mode == 'right') and
cards[idx+1] or cards[1]` falls through to the LEFTMOST joker when the
right-hand slot is nil, so a rightmost Blueprint would have named the
wrong card. 673 pass here, 9 in-game via the smoke harness.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Every entry here was checked against the running Steamodded source in
Mods/lovely/dump, not from memory.
The headline is a correction: the shipped CLASHES table warned that
Smeared Joker + Flower Pot "cannot make all four" suits. It is backwards.
Flower Pot fills its four suit slots with a greedy if/elseif chain
(card.lua:4256) and SMODS.smeared_check makes Hearts answer for Diamonds
and Spades for Clubs, so the second Heart falls through into the Diamond
slot: any two red + two black cards fill the pot. It is one of the
strongest combos in the game and the mod was steering players away from
it -- while simultaneously scoring the pair +2 via suit_flex, which
should have been the tell. It is now a famous pair.
New clashes (4 -> 22), all traced to the mechanism:
* Burglar zeroes discards_left on blind select (card.lua:2905), which
switches off every discard-gated joker for the rest of the run: Banner,
Delayed Gratification, Castle, Yorick, Hit the Road, Burnt, Mail-In
Rebate, Faceless, Trading Card, and it wipes the discards Drunkard and
Merry Andy hand you. Delayed Gratification is the cruellest -- "no
discards used" reads like a synergy, but the code also requires
discards_left > 0, so it pays exactly $0.
* Vampire strips enhancements in the `before` pass, ahead of the
per-card `individual` pass where enhancement payoffs are read, so it
eats what Golden Ticket, Glass, Stone Joker, Marble and Driver's
License are counting.
* Joker Stencil scales on EMPTY slots, so Riff-Raff and Abstract Joker
fight it.
* Splash makes every played card score, so a face card that used to be a
harmless kicker now resets Ride the Bus.
New cautions (3 -> 15): the positional traps (Blueprint dead in the
rightmost slot, Brainstorm in the leftmost), Mime doing nothing without a
held-card payoff, and the decay timers, whose numbers are exact from
game.lua (Ice Cream 100/5 = 20 hands, Popcorn 20/4 = 5 rounds).
Also corrects the stale game path in CLAUDE.md.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
There was no test file -- CLAUDE.md described the harness in prose and
referred to an "orphan-tag check" that did not exist. test.lua now stubs
the game globals and exercises the real engine, database and catalog tab
builders. It found three bugs on its first run:
* four_kind was the only theme in the catalog that could never be
discovered. Theme discovery needs a giver and a wanter on two DIFFERENT
fielded jokers, and The Family was its sole member -- so the Hands bar
and the overall Progress bar could never reach 100%. DNA is the real
enabler (copying a card is how you stack duplicate ranks, the only
vanilla route to a reliable Four of a Kind), so it now gives the
matching-hand tags as a pure enabler.
* hand_level was given by Space Joker and Burnt Joker and wanted by
nobody, so it could never contribute to a score and its "want" tooltip
text was unreachable. Nothing in vanilla rewards hand levels; the tag
is dropped rather than faked.
* Invisible Joker had no tags at all, so it scored 0 against the entire
game. Selling it duplicates one of your Jokers -- the same "stronger
target, better payoff" logic Blueprint and Brainstorm already model --
so it now wants copy_target.
The suite guards both directions of the tag contract (no orphan wants, no
dead gives), theme reachability, blurb widths, the inert-joker list, and
the card materialize fix from the previous commit.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Blueprint+Brainstorm, Mime+Raised Fist, Mime+Shoot the Moon,
Hack+Fibonacci, Photograph+Sock and Buskin, Smiley+Sock and Buskin,
Four Fingers+Shortcut, Four Fingers+Smeared, Smeared+Bloodstone,
Bull+To the Moon, Marble+Hologram, Egg+Campfire. All blurbs within the
34-char tooltip budget; discovery and the Combos tab pick them up
automatically.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Warning-only data in synergies.lua — never touches the synergy score.
Tooltips gain a red 'Clashes - <owned joker>: <why>' line when a hovered
joker fights one you own (Ride the Bus + Pareidolia, Vampire vs Steel
Joker/Lucky Cat, Smeared vs Flower Pot), and a 'Caution:' line in the
buy area for jokers that harm a board you keep (Ceremonial Dagger,
Madness, Stencil). Learning mode keeps warnings — they teach.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Any xMult joker used to pulse 'recommended' on a board of four unrelated
+Mult/+Chips jokers: the generic engine-complement +1 in JCA.score
accumulated once per owned joker in partners_for, reaching the threshold
of 4 with zero listable partners (pairwise scores never hit 2), so the
card pulsed while its own tooltip said 'No synergy with your jokers.'
- partners_for now counts the generic +1 once per candidate. Tag/pair
scores are even, so the generic bonus can no longer flip a
recommendation at all; a pulsing card always has a nameable partner.
- Joker Stencil is the one xMult joker the generic rule actively
misreads (its multiplier grows with EMPTY slots), so entries support
{no_generic = true} which suppresses the rule in score() and the
generic fallback lines in explain(). Stencil also gains copy_target:
its real famous synergy is being copied by Blueprint/Brainstorm.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Steamodded mod that teaches Balatro joker synergies: hover tooltips
explain why jokers combo (famous-pair blurbs + tag-based reasons),
combo discovery tracking with catalog grey-out and run recap, an
in-game synergy catalog with real card sprites, learning mode, and
a HUD shortcut.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
funman300