JokerComboAdvisor/CLAUDE.md

CLAUDE.md

This file provides guidance to Claude Code (claude.ai/code) when working with code in this repository.

Project

"Joker Combo Advisor" — a Steamodded (SMODS) mod for Balatro that scores shop/pack jokers against the player's current jokers, shows a "Combo Advisor" tooltip on hover, and pulses strongly recommended cards. Pure Lua, no build step.

Commands

Syntax check, then run the test suite — always both, after every edit:

luac -p main.lua synergies.lua config.lua integrations.lua test.lua
lua test.lua

test.lua stubs the handful of game globals main.lua touches (the game cannot be launched headlessly here) and then exercises the real engine, the real database and the real catalog tab builders. It is the only safety net; there is no other harness. It enforces, among other things:

• Score tiers: famous explicit pair + tags = 6, hand-type/suit cluster = 4, single tag match = 2, generic mult+xmult complement = +1 on top, unrelated = 0.
• No orphan wants — a wants tag nothing gives is a payoff with no enabler.
• No dead gives — a non-engine tag given but never wanted can never change a score, so it is invisible dead weight. (This caught hand_level, given by Space and Burnt Joker and wanted by nobody.)
• Every theme is discoverable — theme discovery needs a giver and a wanter on two different fielded jokers, so a theme with fewer than two members is an achievement no player can ever earn and pins the Progress tab under 100% forever. (This caught four_kind, whose only member was The Family.)
• theme_info and THEME_TABS cover exactly the same tag set.
• Pair/clash/caution keys all exist; every blurb fits its ~34-char row.
• Every card the catalog pages emplace is materialized (see the UI notes below).
• Jokers with no tags at all are listed in EXPECTED_INERT on purpose — a joker landing there by accident scores 0 against the entire game and says nothing.

To poke at the engine by hand, copy the stub block from the top of test.lua.

Then the audit, after any synergies.lua change:

lua audit.lua --write     # refreshes AUDIT.md; exits 1 on an unreviewed joker

test.lua is the gate — it fails on what is broken. audit.lua is the map — it reports what is merely suspicious, chiefly the ~32 jokers the advisor is silent about (they give nothing but Mult/Chips/xMult and want nothing, so they can only ever earn the generic +1). Silence is the right answer for many of them, but it must be a decision rather than an accident, so audit.lua carries a VERDICTS table recording what we concluded about each one and why — including the traps. Read AUDIT.md before re-deriving any of this. A newly-silent joker lands in "never looked at" and fails the audit until it gets a verdict.

The verdicts also hold the leads not yet chased (Ceremonial Dagger's positional destroy, Erosion vs the card-adders, Burglar + Ramen/Green Joker, Chaos + Flash Card). They are marked candidate because they are unverified — check the dump before acting on one.

In-game verification (this machine)

• The mod is symlinked into the live Mods folder: ~/.local/share/Balatro/Mods/JokerComboAdvisor -> ~/Documents/JokerComboAdvisor (this repo). Edits here go live on next game launch — do not copy files anywhere. Lovely reads that folder as C:\users\steamuser\AppData\Roaming\Balatro\Mods. The link used to point at the repo's pre-rename home (~/Documents/Balatro Mod); when that path died the loader silently skipped the mod — if the game boots with no JCA in the log at all, check this symlink first. A disabled-in-BMM mod looks the same way (SMODS drops a .lovelyignore file into the mod folder to disable it — never create one at the repo root).
• Game: Steam/Proton, installed in the /mnt/games/Steam library (not the default one — its save prefix is /mnt/games/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/2379780/pfx/.../Roaming/Balatro). Lovely injector + Steamodded 1.0.0-beta are already installed; mods are managed via Balatro Mod Manager.
• Crash/load logs: ~/.local/share/Balatro/Mods/lovely/log/ (newest file).
• Remote: https://git.aleshym.co/funman300/JokerComboAdvisor (private, user's Gitea). git push just works: it authenticates through the global libsecret credential helper (credential.helper=/usr/lib/git-core/git-credential-libsecret). Never copy a token into the repo or the remote URL. Commit per feature.
• The tea CLI is installed and logged in as funman300, but its stored login has auth_method: oauth and no token, so tea cannot create repos or call the API — it is not the thing that authenticates pushes, despite what this file used to say. Creating a new remote repo needs the web UI (or a token added to tea).

Architecture

Three-layer split; JCA is the single global namespace:

• synergies.lua — data only. Returns { jokers = {...}, pairs = {...} }. Each of the 150 vanilla jokers gets gives (capabilities it adds) and wants (capabilities that strengthen it) tag lists, converted to sets at the bottom of the file. PAIRS lists famous explicit combos worth a flat +4.
• main.lua — engine + game integration:
  • Scoring: JCA.score(a, b) = explicit pair bonus (+4) + 2 per give→want tag match in each direction + 1 for the generic "+Mult/+Chips source with an ×Mult joker" complement (second return value flags when that +1 applied). JCA.partners_for(card) aggregates over G.jokers.cards; total ≥ JCA.config.threshold ⇒ recommended. The generic +1 counts toward the total once per candidate, not per owned joker — since tag/pair scores are even and the threshold is 4, the generic bonus alone can never trigger a recommendation, so a pulsing card always has a nameable partner. Jokers whose multiplier the generic rule misreads opt out with {no_generic = true} in synergies.lua (Joker Stencil: its ×Mult grows with empty slots, so "+Mult jokers feed it" is backwards).
  • UI hooks: wraps Card:generate_UIBox_ability_table to append a tooltip entry to aut.info (format: array of rows-of-UIT-nodes plus a .name string — must match what vanilla info_tip_from_rows expects), and wraps Card:update for the ~2.5s pulse on recommended shop cards and the partner highlight (hovering a joker juices its owned partners ~0.9s; partner set cached on the card as jca_hl, dropped when hover ends). All hook bodies are pcall-wrapped so a scoring bug can never crash a run — keep it that way.
  • Sell advisor: JCA.weakest_link() (full board + ≥3 jokers + a strict minimum required, else nil) flags the lowest-scoring owned joker with a red verdict row; suppressed by learning mode, toggled by config.sell_advisor. Its ranking subtracts CLASH_PENALTY (odd, so it always breaks a tie) per clash with an owned joker — the joker eating another one's payoff is the one you want to cut. This is the only place a clash changes a number; JCA.score stays pure, because a trap must never make a card look like a combo.
  • Copy advisor: JCA.copy_source(card) → target, status, chain. Reports what an owned Blueprint/Brainstorm is actually copying, from the live board order (Blueprint takes the joker to its right, Brainstorm the leftmost). Copiers chain — SMODS.blueprint_effect recurses (utils.lua:2269) and Blueprint's own blueprint_compat is true, so Blueprint→Blueprint→Baron really gives two Barons; the chain is walked to the joker actually copied, capped at the board size like vanilla, and a copier ring yields nothing. status is ok/none/incompatible/debuffed. Test blueprint_compat for truth, not ~= false — vanilla does (utils.lua:2254), so a modded joker that omits the flag is not copyable. A debuffed target copies as nothing. Do not rebuild the neighbour lookup with the a and b or c idiom: for a rightmost Blueprint the right-hand slot is nil and the idiom falls through to the leftmost joker, confidently reporting the wrong card. Shop copiers get the same treatment before purchase via JCA.copy_source_if_bought(key): a purchase always lands in the rightmost slot (buy_from_shop → G.jokers:emplace, button_callbacks.lua:2279; emplace appends, cardarea.lua:53), so a bought Blueprint starts dead (buy-area tooltip names the joker to slot it against) while a bought Brainstorm copies the leftmost joker immediately (tooltip says which, chaining through a leftmost copier like copy_source).
  • JCA.is_eternal(card) reads card.ability.eternal — the flag vanilla itself uses for the badge (card.lua:1141). Never call SMODS.is_eternal() from an advisor path: it runs a full SMODS.calculate_context per call (utils.lua:3079), far too heavy for a hover, and outside a live run it reported every joker as Eternal, silently disabling the sell advisor. Eternal jokers cannot be sold at all (Card:can_sell_card, card.lua:1993), so weakest_link never names one — advice you are not allowed to take is worse than none — though they still count toward the best score.
  • Public API for other mods: JCA.register(key, gives, wants, opts), JCA.register_pair(a, b, blurb) (sets JCA._pairs_dirty so the Combos tab re-sorts), JCA.register_clash(a, b, warning). Unknown tags are dropped with a log line, never an error.
  • Config tab: registered on SMODS.current_mod.config_tab, guarded by if SMODS.current_mod so standalone tests don't need full stubs.
  • Synergy catalog: SMODS.current_mod.extra_tabs adds Combos/Engine/ Economy/Hands/Traps tabs (plus a text-only Progress tab with discovery completion bars) that render real Card objects in CardAreas (collection-style, so hover shows each joker's own tooltip). One theme per page; pagers swap the tab_contents UIBox from an option-cycle callback — the same pattern as SMODS's achievements tab. Because pages contain live Card/CardArea objects, tab definitions must be rebuilt on every call — never cache the node trees. Cards must be start_materialized as they are emplaced (card_row_node), exactly as every vanilla collection page does — that call is the appear animation, and without it cards pop in with no animation on tab open and page switch. Only the first card of a page build plays the sound (vanilla's i>1 or j>1 silence flag); tab defs call begin_page() so the counter spans the page, not one row. The same tabs open in-run via a "Combos" HUD button (wrapped create_UIBox_HUD, injected into the button_area node under Run Info/Options); the pagers work there because vanilla create_tabs also names its body tab_contents.
  • Discovery: CardArea:emplace hook calls JCA.check_discoveries when a joker lands in G.jokers; famous pairs fielded together persist in config.discovered (saved immediately via SMODS.save_mod_config) and per-run in G.GAME.jca_run_combos. Undiscovered pairs render face-down with a ??? caption in the Combos tab; blurb replaces it once fielded. Themes (every theme_info tag) persist in config.themes_found once two DIFFERENT jokers connect the tag (giver + wanter; a joker carrying both sides needs a second joker). One toast per emplacement, famous pair outranking theme. Badge/progress render in theme_tab_def; toast names come from JCA.theme_names (filled after THEME_TABS, used only at gameplay time). The Traps tab (clash duos, then caution jokers; one pager spans both page kinds) is deliberately an open book: no discovery gating and no Progress entry, because a warning locked behind fielding the bad pair would reward exactly what it warns against. register_clash keeps JCA.clash_list in sync (and sets JCA._traps_dirty) so third-party clashes appear on the tab; blurbs are read back through clash_blurb at build time so updates always win.
  • Post-run recap: wraps create_UIBox_game_over/create_UIBox_win and inserts a "Combos fielded this run" row (from G.GAME.jca_run_combos) relative to vanilla button ids (from_game_over; from_game_won or win_cta) via a parent-trail walk — anchor depths differ per screen.
  • Learning mode (config.learning_mode): suppresses the pulse and the "Strong pick!" line but never the explanations. No-synergy buy-area tooltips show "Looking for:"/"Offers:" hints from TAG_LABEL. synergies.lua also exports theme_info (one teaching sentence per catalog tag — keep ≤ ~90 chars and cover every THEME_TABS tag).
  • The real (Lovely-patched) game source is readable at ~/.local/share/Balatro/Mods/lovely/dump/ — check it before assuming what a vanilla function returns or expects.
• config.lua — default settings (pulse, owned_tooltip, threshold). Steamodded loads and persists this table itself; read it only via SMODS.current_mod.config (exposed as JCA.config).
• integrations.lua — cross-mod integrations, loaded at the very end of main.lua (pcall-wrapped; counts land in JCA.integrations). Every integration gates on its target's global — a missing mod is silence — and every target loads before us (JokerDisplay priority -1e9, Fusion Jokers -10000, TMJ -1000, ours 0):
  • JokerDisplay: appends a (2 combos) counter element to each known joker's reminder_text (created when absent) and wraps the definition's calc_function to fill card.joker_display_values.jca_combos from partners_for. The wrapper pcalls the original calc and blanks the text when config.jd_combos is off, so the toggle works mid-run both ways. Definitions are marked jca_combo_counter against double patching.
  • Too Many Jokers: registers a TMJ.SEARCH_FIELD_FUNCS entry (its api.md's documented hook) returning the joker's TAG_LABELs on both sides, so the collection search finds jokers by 'money', 'Hearts', 'held-card retriggers'... Unknown centers return nil, never an error.
  • Fusion Jokers: installs JCA.fusion_plans(card), which reports every fusion a joker is a component of — result, discounted cost, what is still missing, and what fusing would cost you in combos. That last part is the reason the integration exists: fuse_card calls ingredient:remove() on the components, so their partnerships with the rest of the board die, and nothing but this advisor knows what those were. Rendered in tooltip_rows (max 2 plans), ready fusions sorted first. Read the recipe table (FusionJokers.fusions, an array with the ingredience[component][result] reverse index hung off the same table) — never call Card:get_card_fusion(): it drives its price flicker with math.randomseed(love.timer.getTime() * 8), so an advisor calling it would reseed Lua's RNG on every hover. Cost mirrors their arithmetic (flat then percentage discount, per-result and universal, floored, min $1) and affordability is only judged on plain numbers, because Talisman turns G.GAME.dollars into a big-number object. Components are counted by quantity, not presence — their own debug recipe needs 3× Joker. The smoke scenario asserts the JokerDisplay patch against the real mod.

Conventions and gotchas

• Cluster tags (hand types pair/straight/flush/…, suits, planet, spectral_gen): put the same tag in both gives and wants of every member so members mutually reinforce (2+2 = 4). Pure enablers (e.g. Four Fingers, Smeared, Pareidolia, DNA) only give; pure payoffs only want. A cluster tag needs all three TAG_TEXT phrasings, not just both: both is only true when both jokers sit on both sides of the tag, and JCA.explain requires that before using it. Four Fingers does not "reward Straights" — it makes them reachable. The suite enforces the three phrasings.
• A tag needs both sides to exist, on at least two different jokers: something must give it, something must want it, or it is dead data that can never change a score — and if it is also a theme, an achievement nobody can earn. lua test.lua enforces both directions; run it after every synergies.lua edit.
• Tooltips teach: JCA.explain(hovered, partner) picks one reason per partner — famous-pair blurb (third element of each PAIRS entry), else the first TAG_ORDER match phrased from TAG_TEXT (give/want/both variants), else the generic mult×xmult line. Every non-engine tag (anything besides mult/chips/xmult) MUST have a TAG_TEXT entry; new PAIRS entries need a blurb under ~34 chars so name + blurb fits one tooltip row.
• Vanilla center keys contain intentional misspellings/abbreviations — do not "fix" them: j_gluttenous_joker, j_selzer, j_ticket (Golden Ticket), j_trousers (Spare Trousers), j_ring_master (Showman), j_caino (Canio), j_delayed_grat, j_todo_list.
• Unknown joker keys (from other mods) must keep scoring 0 — never index JCA.db[key] without a nil guard.
• Display names go through localize{type='name_text', set='Joker', ...} with a pcall + center.name fallback.
• Anti-synergies never affect scores. Known traps are warning-only data: CLASHES (pairwise, red "Clashes -" tooltip line vs owned jokers) and CAUTIONS (per-joker, buy-area "Caution:" line) in synergies.lua, same ~34-char blurb budget as PAIRS. Learning mode keeps warnings visible. Verify every new trap against the dump before adding it — a warning that is merely plausible is worse than none. The mod once shipped a j_smeared + j_flower_pot clash that was exactly backwards: Flower Pot fills its four suit slots with a greedy if/elseif chain (card.lua:4256) and Smeared makes Hearts answer for Diamonds, so any two red + two black cards fill the pot. It is one of the best combos in the game, and the mod was warning players off it. Most traps hinge on the scoring-pipeline order in functions/state_events.lua (before → per-card individual → joker_main): Vampire strips enhancements in before, so every enhancement payoff that reads them in individual — Golden Ticket, Glass, Stone, Driver's License — is looking at cards it has already eaten.
• The UI hooks used to be the untested surface. They are now covered in the real game by the smoke harness (see below). If a tooltip regression is reported, run it, then suspect the aut.info entry format and check the lovely log.

In-game smoke tests

lua test.lua stubs the game, so it cannot tell you that vanilla accepted the tooltip format or that a card is actually animating. The smoke harness runs the real engine — real Card objects, the real Card:generate_UIBox_ability_table pipeline, a real overlay UIBox — with no clicking:

~/Documents/BalatroSmoke/run.sh JokerComboAdvisor

It boots the game, runs scenarios/JokerComboAdvisor.lua, quits, and prints a pass/fail report (non-zero exit on failure). Close Balatro first; it needs a clean boot. Scenarios live in the harness repo, not here. If ~/Documents/BalatroSmoke is missing, clone it: git clone https://git.aleshym.co/funman300/BalatroSmoke.git ~/Documents/BalatroSmoke and symlink it into the Mods folder like any mod.

It covers the surfaces this repo's tests cannot reach: the hover tooltip naming a partner, the clash and caution lines, discovery on emplace, and — the reason it exists — that catalog cards really do start_materialize on tab build and on page switch (asserted via card.dissolve > 0 in the live UIBox).

It is also the only place the cross-mod integrations meet the real thing: the JokerDisplay counter against vanilla definitions, and the Fusion Jokers advice against the real recipe table (test.lua can only drive JCA.fusion_plans against a stub). Both scenarios no-op with a pass when their mod is absent, so the harness stays green on a clean install. Note a fake run starts at $0 — a fusion affordability assertion has to set G.GAME.dollars itself.

The harness suppresses every save path and verifies from outside that no discovery state leaked, so running it can never spoil the catalog. Do not "fix" that by reversing writes after the fact — a crashed scenario would skip the reversal.