For the Set Seed category, I've come up with seed conditions that I think should produce the best possible time, given perfect inputs. If I remember correctly, a foil edition adds $4 to the joker price, holographic adds $7, and polychrome adds $10. This is important in calculating affordability.

• Ideally, as few hands played as possible, the less cards the better. After careful consideration, it doesn't matter too much what deck you use, since the bonuses of each have almost no weight.

Ante 1: Skip Rounds 1 and 2, giving two Investment tags. After playing a straight flush and defeating The Head in one hand, you should have $42 ($4 base + 15*2 + $5 victory + $3 in hands). The shop ideally has a polychrome Ice Cream and holographic Half Joker, which I think is $27. Ante 2: Skip Rounds 4 and 5, one with an Investment Tag and another with a Reroll Tag. The Reroll Tag makes sure that the Half Joker can be used, otherwise The Psychic would disable it. Now, a high card can be played to guarantee a win with 1 card, granting $26 ($15 tag, $5 win, $3 hands, $3 interest). Now, a polychrome Blueprint and polychrome Joker Stencil (used in that order) will be enough to carry through Ante 5. Ante 6) Before fighting Verdant Leaf, the shop should have a negative Blackboard in order to allow a one-card win. It is important to not sell any jokers here, otherwise one card would not be enough.

This hypothetical seed, in my opinion, should be able to produce times we couldn't even imagine. Given that one round (play and shop) takes around 10 seconds in my playthroughs, a sub-50 could realistically happen. Remember in the beginning that the fastest possible time uses perfect inputs.

Besides speedrunning Balatro, I’m also working on a seed searcher. A seed with these exact conditions probably can’t be found, but I can find some pretty speedy seeds for a run where something like high card isn’t used and the other restrictions are more lenient.

A seed with these exact conditions can't be found, but I can find some pretty speedy seeds for a run where something like high card isn't used and the other restrictions are more lenient.

a) If you're willing to share a working copy, I'd like to see how the seed finder works! b) It makes sense for this many conditions to exist in few to no seeds considering the probability of things like both jokers having editions (let alone the ones we want here) or even getting a straight flush in the first hand. Considering that Balatro has only 36^8 seeds (8 characters, alphanumeric) coming out to a total of ~2.82 billion, compare it to something like Minecraft - with several glitches found in maybe a few dozen out of 18 quintillion seeds, rarities like that cannot exist here with those probabilities.

It's always fun to explore things like this though, post here (and a run, ofc) when you find something noteworthy!

a) Unfortunately as of now I can’t share a working copy. The seed finder is currently in a phase where changing the search criteria requires changing lines of code, and for the demo version it won’t be open-source. There is a UI in progress, and when that is finished I can send you a copy of the program.

b) Agreed, although the number of seeds is actually 2.25-4.34 trillion (the characters allowed in seeds are a bit complicated, as the number 0 is converted to the letter O and a few symbols (.^$ if I recall) are allowed in the seed input, sometimes only by pasting, leading to between 35^8 and 38^8 depending on what you want to use). For comparison, the number of seeds the searcher can search in a reasonable timeframe is in the range of billions, and with a few weeks of time it could likely search the full range of seeds.

I’ll be sure to upload any findings that can improve the WR. As a fun fact, the current WR seed was found with an older version of the seed finder (which explains why it has periods in it).

A few updates on this:

• the use of symbols was unintended and got patched, lowering the number of possible seeds back to 35^8

• The seed searcher is much faster; on my RTX 3080 it can search most things in about a day, which some searches being faster depending on the speed of certain calculations

• For those not in the Discord, I ran a seed search today for SS skips. I’d recommend checking out the world record to see the new seed I found.