Balatro's first big balance patch fiddles with Fibonacci and makes a mod to Odd Todd

pcgamer.com:

The first big balance patch for Balatro is now fully live on Steam, bringing with it performance improvements, numerous gameplay adjustments, bug fixes, and a reduction in the cost of Fibonacci, «because Fibonacci.»

I have no idea what Fibonacci did to deserve such flippancy, but so far the response to the change—Fibonacci «costs $8 instead of $7, because Fibonacci»—seems quite positive. At least one redditor took issue with a similar tweak to Odd Todd, though, writing, «When Odd Todd triggers on an odd card, you get an EVEN amount of chips total. Score an Ace with Odd Todd, get 11 + 31 chips. That's 42. Busted game. Should be reverted immediately or I'll be protesting.»

I'm not sure how serious that threat is (not very, I'm guessing) but it does illustrate how Balatro patch notes are so utterly impenetrable for anyone who doesn't play the game. Some patch notes, like the recent Stardew Valley fix for Mr. Raccoon, don't make sense out of context but at least they're sort of relatable: Hey, Mr. Raccoon is better now, good for him. He's a cute guy.

Balatro, on the other hand? «Fixed bug where Buffoon Pack could show up in Jokerless challenge.» Reading these patch notes as a non-player myself, I'm starting to get an inkling of how Violent J feels about magnets.

Of course, it's not all quite so incomprehensible. Along with numerous gameplay tweaks, the patch makes «general performance improvements,» adds an option for «reduced motion» that removes the swirly background, gyrating card motion, and «much of the 'juice' in the game,» and fixes a bug that was causing performance problems for some players on Steam Deck. That last one is particularly important because Balatro is hugely popular on Steam—in fact it was the third-most-played game on the Deck in April, behind only Stardew Valley and the resurgent Fallout 4.

Updates to Balatro have been flowing since the game released in February, but they've been limited to an experimental branch of the game on Steam. This patch