Install Steamodded and every achievement in Balatro goes dark — not because you did anything wrong, but because the mod loader flips a global flag the instant it loads. Most “best mods” roundups skip straight to the fun stuff and never mention it. That single fact splits the entire Balatro modding scene into two camps: mods that touch your unlocks and mods that don’t, and which camp a mod falls into matters more than whether it adds 5 Jokers or 300.
This guide sorts the mods actually worth installing in 2026 by that line, plus the usual questions — what to install first, what to skip, and which ones carry real safety baggage beyond just achievements. Verified against the live 1.0.x build; LocalThunk’s 1.1 content update was still unreleased as of this writing, so nothing here depends on features that might get rebalanced out from under you[1].
The Two Loaders Every Balatro Mod Needs
Every mod on this list sits on top of one of two foundations, and knowing which is the first filter for whether it’s safe.
Lovely is a runtime Lua injector built for LÖVE-engine games — it works by patching Balatro’s code in memory as the game runs, rather than modifying the executable itself[2]. On Windows you drop a single version.dll file next to Balatro.exe. Nothing about Lovely on its own touches achievements or save data — it’s just the plumbing.
Steamodded is built on top of Lovely and is what actually turns Balatro into a moddable game: it adds a Mods menu, a shared API for Joker/deck/voucher creation, and the framework nearly every content mod depends on[3]. It’s also the thing that disables achievements — more on that below. Installing both is straightforward, but there’s one recurring gotcha worth naming: unzip either tool and you’ll often get a folder suffixed -main (e.g. Steamodded-main). Leave that suffix in place and the loader won’t find it — rename the folder before dropping it in your Mods directory[4]. It’s a five-second fix that accounts for a disproportionate share of “my mods aren’t showing up” posts.
Neither tool is endorsed by developer LocalThunk — the community wiki is upfront that mods are “not endorsed by Balatro’s developer” and are used at your own risk[5]. That’s not a red flag specific to Balatro — it’s the standard disclaimer for a single-player game with no anti-cheat to worry about — but it does mean nobody is testing mod compatibility against patches for you. Our own Balatro complete guide covers the base-game systems these mods build on top of, if you want the unmodded fundamentals first.
Why Content Mods Turn Off Your Achievements
Steamodded sets a single internal flag — G.F_NO_ACHIEVEMENTS — to true as soon as it loads, and that one boolean is the entire mechanism[6]. You can confirm it yourself: the fix that re-enables achievements, a community mod called AchievementsEnabler, is a single line of Lua — G.F_NO_ACHIEVEMENTS = false — distributed independently by at least two modders with identical code[7]. It’s not a bug or a Steamworks limitation; it’s a deliberate anti-trivialization switch, since a mod that hands you a broken deck or infinite rerolls would otherwise let you farm the game’s harder unlocks for free.
Drop AchievementsEnabler into your Mods folder alongside Steamodded and you get both — content mods and legitimate unlocks. The catch: because it works by poking a game-internal flag rather than through any supported API, it’s fragile. One Steamodded GitHub issue documents exactly this failure mode — a player’s achievement-enabling setup stopped triggering unlocks entirely after a Balatro update changed how the game tracked them, with no warning and no error message, just silently dead achievements[8]. If you’re chasing achievements with mods installed, don’t assume they’re firing — clear a challenge you know should pop one and check your Steam overlay before trusting a long run to it.
Quality-of-Life Mods That Never Touch Your Achievements
There’s a second, smaller category of mods that skip Steamodded entirely and run on Lovely alone — which means they never touch G.F_NO_ACHIEVEMENTS in the first place. These are the safest mods on this list for anyone who wants convenience without an achievements trade-off.
Saturn requires only Lovely and is built specifically for grinding out endless-mode runs: it raises game speed up to 16x with animations stripped out, merges duplicate consumable cards so your Tarot/Planet stack doesn’t clutter the screen, and lets you hide cards you’ve already played from the deck viewer[9]. HandyBalatro goes further on pure control — full keybind remapping, hover-to-select for hands, one-button quick buy/sell/use, up to 512x speed, and full gamepad support, with roughly 100 individually toggleable settings[10]. Its own documentation states plainly that it does not disable achievements and is safe alongside vanilla play, multiplayer, and other mods — the only mod on this list that makes that claim explicitly rather than leaving you to infer it.
The takeaway: if your only goal is a faster, less fiddly version of vanilla Balatro, Saturn or HandyBalatro alone — no Steamodded required — gets you there without opening the achievements question at all.
Content Mods Worth Installing
Once you accept the achievements trade-off (or install AchievementsEnabler alongside them), these are the content mods actually worth your Mods folder space, ranked by what kind of run you’re trying to have.
| Mod | What it adds | Best for | Avoid if |
|---|---|---|---|
| All in Jest | 300+ new Jokers/consumables, 3 decks, matches base art style closely | Wanting a fresh run without it looking like a reskin | You want short, curated additions rather than a second game’s worth of content |
| Holy Fools | 30 literature-inspired Jokers | Casual players who want new synergies without overhauling the whole game | You’re chasing 100% completion — every new Joker is another unlock to track |
| Cryptid | 100+ Jokers, 20 decks, 20 vouchers, three difficulty gamesets | Hardcore players who’ve cleared vanilla’s ceiling and want a genuinely harder, expansion-scale game | You want balanced difficulty — reviewers flag it as deliberately unbalanced |
| Pokermon | 200+ Pokémon-themed Jokers, optional replacement of originals | Novelty runs and streamers — high visual variety | You want the base game’s own card art and synergy names intact |
| Stickers Always Shown | Keeps every earned sticker visible on a Joker permanently | Completionists tracking Completionist++ progress across long play sessions | You don’t care about sticker/challenge tracking at a glance |
| Rebalanced Stakes | Smooths the difficulty spike on Blue, Orange, and Gold stakes | Players stuck on a specific stake wall who want the curve, not the whole game, adjusted | You’re going for a legitimate stake-climb achievement — this changes the exact mechanics those unlocks test |
The one-line summary: All in Jest and Holy Fools add breadth without breaking your sense of what “Balatro” plays like; Cryptid is for players who’ve out-leveled the base game entirely; Pokermon is a reskin/novelty pick; and Stickers Always Shown and Rebalanced Stakes are single-purpose tools, not content packs. All six require Steamodded, so all six cost you achievements unless AchievementsEnabler is riding alongside.
A newer option worth flagging separately: BalatroMultiplayer turns the single-player game into head-to-head play, currently offering an Attrition mode (1v1 at every boss blind) and Showdown (three normal antes, then endless PvP), plus five custom Jokers[4]. It needs Lovely, Steamodded, and the mod itself all correctly installed on both ends of the match, and it’s still adding features toward a planned 1.0 release — worth trying with a friend, not yet something to build your whole modded setup around.
Which Mods Fit Your Playstyle
Not every mod belongs in every Mods folder. What you should install depends heavily on what you’re actually trying to get out of Balatro right now.
| Player type | Install | Skip |
|---|---|---|
| New player | Nothing yet — learn vanilla mechanics and stake progression first | Everything on this list; content mods will teach you the wrong baseline |
| Casual player | HandyBalatro for speed/comfort, one content pack (Holy Fools is the gentlest on) install | Cryptid — its difficulty curve isn’t built for a casual pace |
| Hardcore optimizer | Cryptid for a harder ceiling, plus a seed-search tool like Immolate or Ouija from the wider ecosystem[11] for run planning | Rebalanced Stakes — it removes the exact difficulty you’re optimizing against |
| Completionist | Stickers Always Shown plus AchievementsEnabler, so nothing you unlock goes untracked | Any content mod without AchievementsEnabler installed alongside it |
If you only take one combination away from this article: Lovely + Steamodded + AchievementsEnabler + one content mod matched to your play style above is the starter setup that gets you new content without silently voiding your Steam profile.
Mods to Install With Caution — or Skip Entirely
Two categories deserve a harder warning than “requires Steamodded.”
Preorder Cards and its lighter sibling First Round Joker let you hand-pick which cards show up in upcoming shop rotations. One reviewer called Preorder Cards a “straight-up cheat mod” outright, and that’s a fair label — it removes the randomness that Balatro’s entire economy and risk curve is built around[12]. Fine for messing around or testing a specific build idea; skip it if you want runs that still feel like Balatro. If you’re weighing a rebuilt economy against a smoothed-out one, our Jokers guide is a better starting point than either mod for actually learning what makes a build work.
Second, a general safety note that has nothing to do with achievements: Lovely’s version.dll has been flagged by some antivirus software as a false positive purely because it’s an unsigned DLL being injected at runtime — a legitimate pattern that also happens to be how real malware behaves — and at least one third-party Balatro Mod Manager executable has shown up in public malware sandboxes with suspicious (though not conclusively malicious) behavior. Neither Lovely nor Steamodded’s own GitHub releases have any confirmed malware reports. Stick to the official Steamodded and Lovely GitHub repositories, or Nexus Mods pages with an established download history, and be more skeptical of one-off “all-in-one installer” executables from smaller sites than of the actual mod files themselves.
FAQ
Do I lose my save file if a mod breaks?
Not directly — Balatro’s save data and mod files live in separate folders, so a crashing or broken mod won’t corrupt an in-progress run’s save. What you can lose is that specific run, since a mod-caused crash mid-game usually forces a restart from your last completed round. Back up your save folder before testing anything experimental if a long run matters to you.
Can I turn achievements back on after using content mods without reinstalling everything?
Yes — installing AchievementsEnabler alongside Steamodded is enough; you don’t need to remove any other mods first. The trade-off is durability, not compatibility: since it works by flipping an internal flag rather than through a supported API, a future Balatro update can silently break it, as already happened once[8]. Verify with a known-easy achievement after any Balatro patch, don’t assume it still works.
Is Cryptid worth it if Balatro already feels hard enough?
Only if “hard enough” means you’re winning consistently and want a new ceiling, not if you’re still losing runs on vanilla’s higher stakes. Cryptid’s 100+ Jokers and three difficulty gamesets are explicitly built as an unbalanced, expansion-scale step up — installing it before you’ve mastered vanilla’s stake progression just adds more variables to a game you haven’t solved yet.
Sources
- PC Gamer. Balatro’s big 1.1 update is delayed to 2026, for a very good reason: ‘I’m slow’.
- ethangreen-dev. lovely-injector: A runtime lua injector for games built with LÖVE. GitHub.
- Steamodded. smods: A Balatro Modding Framework. GitHub.
- NotebookCheck. Balatro’s Multiplayer Mod is wild: Future teasers and how to install.
- Balatro Wiki. Mods.
- Steam Community. Mods & achievements question (Balatro).
- box304. AchievementsEnabler.lua. Balatro_mods, GitHub.
- Steamodded/smods GitHub. Issue #116: Achievements Mod doesn’t seem to work anymore on latest version.
- OceanRamen. Saturn: Quality of life mod for Balatro. GitHub.
- SleepyG11. HandyBalatro: Quality of Life controls and keybinds for Balatro. GitHub.
- jie65535. awesome-balatro: A list of Balatro Mods and Tools. GitHub.
- GameRant. Best Mods For Balatro.
- PCGamesN. The best Balatro mods 2026.
I've been playing video games for over 20 years, spanning everything from early PC titles to modern open-world games. I started Switchblade Gaming to publish the kind of accurate, well-researched guides I always wanted to find — built on primary sources, tested in-game, and kept up to date after patches. I currently focus on Minecraft and Pokémon GO.