Final Boss

Bosses talk back. Every boss blind gets a short line of dialogue when it starts, reacts to your big hands, close calls and last hand, and gloats if you lose to it. Showdown bosses go further: a roaming boss avatar with an HP bar, a cinematic intro, their own music, screen effects and a slow-motion explosive finale. You also decide when showdowns appear, so you can have a final boss every 8 antes like vanilla or much sooner. Every boss also performs a visible move when its effect hits, final bosses transform at 50% and 25% HP and die their own way, and bosses remember you across runs: rematch lines, a nemesis and ten achievements.

Requirements

• Balatro 1.0.1
• Lovely 0.9.0 or newer
• Steamodded 26.829.0 or newer

Install

With a mod manager: install Final Boss from Thunderstore (r2modman or the Thunderstore app). Steamodded and Lovely come with it.

By hand:

1. Download FinalBoss-v1.1.0.zip from the releases page.
2. Extract it into %AppData%\Balatro\Mods\ so the files end up in %AppData%\Balatro\Mods\FinalBoss\.
3. Start Balatro. The mod appears in the Mods menu as "Final Boss" with its own config tabs.

Features

Encounter tiers

Every boss blind gets a tier. The tier decides how much of the show it gets.

Reaction triggers:

• Big hand: a single hand scores at least 30% of the blind requirement.
• Close: your running total is at least 75% of the requirement but you have not won yet.
• Last hand: you have no hands left and have not reached the requirement.
• Disabled: the boss was disabled (for example by Chicot). A disabled final boss says it again when it gets angry at 50% and 25% health (see "Final bosses: deaths and phases").
• Defeat: the hand that reaches the requirement.

If several reactions would fire on the same hand, only one plays (last hand, then close, then big hand). Click the blind chip or press any key during an intro to advance to the next line; press twice quickly to skip the rest of the intro.

Interrupting the boss. Play a hand while the boss's intro is still running (the showdown title card or any intro line) and the speech stops at once: the boss snaps (a sharp shake and a red flash on the avatar, or on the HUD chip for regular bosses) and says its interrupted line instead. That line replaces the reaction line for that hand; the hit itself still lands. It happens once per blind. Skipping lines with a key or a click, or discarding, is not an interruption.

Game over. When a boss beats you, Jimbo mocks you on the game-over screen with that boss's catchphrase.

Regular bosses are light tier from the ante set in min_ante onward. Showdown bosses are always full tier. Mods can override the tier per boss (see below). An explicit 'light' or 'full' tier ignores min_ante and whether the boss is a showdown.

Showdown stage

Showdowns (full tier) get a stage of their own. None of it appears for regular bosses.

• Roaming boss avatar. A large chip with the boss's own art sits on the table. It bobs and lives right of the play area, above the deck; while you choose cards it glides between a few open spots where its HP bar stays clear of your cards, and it stops while it talks. When you play a hand it returns to the right of the play area until the hand resolves. Its speech bubbles are drawn above your cards. The boss reacts when your score lands: each hand makes it flash and flinch, a hand under 10% of the boss's health makes it shrug off the hit and laugh (a distinct "ha-ha-ha": it hops and tilts, and its line waits until the laugh ends), and it gets wounded: below 50% it cracks and bobs faster, below 25% it cracks more and trembles. While the boss is on the table, its HUD chip steps out of the HUD and returns when it leaves. Click it to skip an intro line.
• HP bar and damage numbers. Under the avatar: the boss name, a vanilla-style pixel bar (the same rounded, stepped bars as the game's own progress bars) in the boss's colour and remaining / max. The bar is drawn under your cards, so a card that overlaps it stays on top; damage numbers and speech bubbles still draw above. Each hand drops the bar at once and leaves a white trail that drains, and a damage number pops up above the avatar (big hands bigger, tiny hands small and grey). The bar flashes at 50% and 25%.
• Cinematic intro. Black bars slide in, a dark band with the "SHOWDOWN" title and the boss name slams in across the screen (above the boss-effect text) and holds for a moment, and the avatar falls onto the table before it speaks. Press any key to jump straight to the avatar and its dialogue (a click works once the avatar has landed). Press again to advance a line; press twice quickly to skip the rest. The title card draws above your cards. Continue never replays the intro.
• Slow-motion explosive finale. When the winning score lands, the game slows for under a second while the avatar cracks and shows its defeat line, then it explodes into shards with a flash in the boss's colour (the flash needs fx); the five vanilla final bosses die their own way instead (see "Final bosses: deaths and phases"). Playing a hand during the title card cuts the intro: the avatar lands at once, snaps at you and says its interrupted line (no intro dialogue).
• Game-over gloat. Lose a showdown and the HP bar goes away (the fight is over) while the avatar glides beside the game-over panel, above the dark overlay. When Jimbo says the boss's catchphrase, the boss laughs once, then bobs smugly until you start a new run or go to the main menu.
• Living arena. The background swirl takes the boss's colours, pulses on each hand, and darkens and spins faster as the boss gets wounded (below 50%, then below 25%). In the final stretch (below 25%) the music pitches up slightly; the pitch-up needs both fx and music. Everything returns to normal when the blind ends.

Turn off the avatar side with cinematic (avatar, HP bar, damage numbers, intro and finale). The arena follows fx, and the music pitch-up in the final stretch needs both fx and music. If you quit or Continue mid-showdown the stage is rebuilt from the saved score, with no fall-in.

Reduced motion. With Balatro's reduced motion setting on, the stage keeps colours, flashes, the dissolve and the explosion, but drops the movement: no roaming, bob, tilt, tremble, knockback, slide/fall animations, slow motion, arena spin or arena pulses (an interrupted boss only flashes red, and the game-over avatar does not bob). The avatar and bars just appear, the avatar stays right of the play area, and screen shake is off (only the explosion keeps a small jiggle).

Boss moves

Every vanilla boss performs a visible move at the moment its effect applies, with a short sound at its own voice pitch. In a showdown the avatar performs it; otherwise the boss chip in the HUD does (it juices and flashes in the boss's colour first). All 28 vanilla bosses have one.

• When you play a hand: The Hook whips a chain at the two cards it discards, which jolt toward it; The Tooth bites your played cards and drains a coin per card.
• When it hits your hand: The Flint sparks and cracks the Chips and Mult panels; The Psychic, The Eye and The Mouth send rings onto your played cards (The Eye adds a beam); The Arm drops the Raised Fist onto your hand level and slams it as the level falls; The Ox drains your money.
• When cards are dealt: The Club, Goad, Window and Head put a frame in the suit's colour and a suit badge on each cursed card; The Plant and Verdant Leaf grow vines over theirs; The Pillar cracks the cards played this ante. These marks are part of the card, drawn like a seal, and stay for as long as the curse holds. The Wheel spins its face-down card, The Mark puts an X on face cards it flips, The Fish sweeps a splash over the hand, The House sweeps the hand while it is dealt and flashes each face-down card as it lands, The Serpent's snake crawls from the deck to the hand and arrives with the 3-card refill, Cerulean Bell rings and circles the forced card, Crimson Heart fires a beam at the joker it disables.
• The moment the blind is set (The Wall, The Water, The Needle, The Manacle, Violet Vessel, Amber Acorn): the move plays at once and shows your value before and after. The Wall's and the Vessel's target counts up from the normal boss target (a bar slams it and cracks it, or purple rises over it); The Water washes your discards down to 0; The Manacle chains your hand and its card count drops by one; The Needle stabs the hands counter, which shakes and drops one hand at a time down to 1; Amber Acorn sweeps your jokers.
• When you sell a joker to Verdant Leaf, it bursts into leaves.

Moves never change what the boss does; they only show it. A repeated move (a stamp on every draw) plays at most once per batch, and curse marks are always placed even then. A disabled boss stops performing, except Verdant Leaf disabled by your sale. Bosses from other mods burst when they act. Turn moves off with Boss moves (moves); they also need Screen effects (fx). Reduced motion keeps the flashes, marks and particles but nothing flies, slides, falls or spins.

Final bosses: deaths and phases

• Deaths. The finale's explosion is replaced by each final boss's own death: Crimson Heart shatters into hearts, Verdant Leaf is blown away in a gust of leaves, Amber Acorn cracks open (crack lines and shell shards), Violet Vessel spills purple liquid over the play area, Cerulean Bell rings once more and breaks. Bosses from other mods keep the explosion unless they register a death. Deaths need fx.
• Phases. At 50% and 25% health a final boss transforms: time slows for a moment, the screen flashes in its colour and the showdown music dips, the avatar swells and shakes, its own move erupts big and it says a phase line. Afterwards its HP bar shows II or III, and it roams faster with an aura that gets stronger in phase III. One huge hand that goes from above 50% to below 25% goes straight to phase III. The winning hand and your last hand never transform the boss, and a boss that has been disabled (for example by Chicot) has no phases and no twists: at 50% and 25% it gets angry instead, flashing red with a short shake (the flash only with reduced motion) and saying its disabled line again, with no transformation, marker or stance. A Verdant Leaf disabled by your own joker sale still gets its phases and its regrowth twist. Phases need Showdown cinematics (cinematic).
• Rule twists (Boss phases change the rules, phase_twists, off by default, read when the blind starts): in phases II and III each final boss twists its own mechanic. Amber Acorn hides and reshuffles your jokers again; once you have sold a joker, Verdant Leaf withers 1 random card (phase II) or 2 (phase III) in each new hand, with vines on them; Violet Vessel heals 10% of its original requirement each time it changes phase (skipping to phase III heals twice) and the bar visibly refills; Crimson Heart disables 2 jokers per hand instead of 1; Cerulean Bell forces 2 cards instead of 1. With twists off, phases are only a show.

Continue mid-showdown restores the phase, stance, marker and twists without replaying the transformation.

Memory, nemesis and achievements

• Memory. Bosses remember your results across runs, per Balatro profile (fights, wins and losses per boss). Seeded and challenge runs count too. A final boss you have met before opens with a rematch line instead of the shared opener (sore if you won last time, smug if you lost); a regular boss says its rematch line instead of its threat about half the time. After a rematch or nemesis opener the next line is the generic "I am ...!" line.

• Nemesis. The boss that has beaten you most, at least 3 times, becomes your nemesis (a tie goes to the more recent loss). A nemesis always greets you with a nemesis line. In a showdown the title card reads NEMESIS instead of SHOWDOWN and the avatar glows crimson; a regular nemesis gets a red NEMESIS tag over its chip and a faint crimson aura. When you beat it, it says its own defeat line while a gold "NEMESIS DEFEATED" banner, a gong and a gold burst play. A defeated nemesis loses the title until it beats you again.

• Achievements. Ten Steamodded achievements (Mods menu, Final Boss, Achievements tab):

  • Showdown Survivor: defeat a final boss
  • Clean Sweep: defeat all 5 vanilla final bosses
  • Rude!: interrupt a boss while it is talking
  • No Manners: interrupt 10 different bosses
  • Last Laugh: defeat a boss with the hand right after it laughed at you
  • Overkill: defeat a final boss in one hand from full HP
  • Phase Skipper: take a final boss from phase I to phase III in one hand
  • Comeback: defeat a final boss on your last hand
  • Nemesis Slayer: defeat your nemesis
  • Twisted: defeat all 5 vanilla final bosses with phase twists on (a win over a boss disabled by Chicot or Luchador does not count)

  They follow Steamodded's achievement settings: with an Unlock All profile, or in seeded and challenge runs, Steamodded decides whether they unlock (its "Bypass Restrictions" setting).

Boss memory (memory) off hides the rematch lines and the whole nemesis presentation, and records keep counting, so turning it back on picks up where you were.

Showdown schedule

By default, showdowns appear exactly like vanilla (ante 8, 16, ...). Turn on the schedule in the Showdowns tab and pick a first ante and an interval to get extra showdowns, for example start 4 and every 4 gives antes 4, 8, 12 and so on. The win-ante boss is always a showdown. The tab shows a live ante track (antes 1 to 16, showdown antes lit in crimson with a final-boss chip) and warns ("Hard!") when the first showdown is before ante 4. Changes apply from the next ante's boss roll.

Configuration

Set in the Mods menu (Final Boss). The Config tab groups the boss dialogue settings (with Boss memory) and the showdown stage toggles (with Boss moves and Boss phases change the rules, which grey out while Screen effects or Showdown cinematics are off), with the developer keys at the bottom; the Showdowns tab holds the schedule; the Credits tab has the links (GitHub, the showdown music, Ko-fi); Steamodded adds an Achievements tab listing the ten achievements. Steamodded saves your choices; config.lua only holds the defaults.

The dialogue, music, FX and cinematic toggles are independent. Any combination works, for example music and effects with no dialogue.

For mod authors

Bosses added by other mods work with zero effort: a boss with no entry and no lines gets the generic lines automatically, with the boss name filled in. To give your boss its own voice, register an encounter and add localization lines.

if FinalBoss and FinalBoss.register_encounter then
  FinalBoss.register_encounter{blind = 'bl_mymod_boss', tier = 'full', voice = {pitch = 0.8}}
end
-- localization: misc.quips.fb_bl_mymod_boss_intro_1 = {"My line", "here"}

Load order. FinalBoss loads at priority -10, and Steamodded orders mods by priority and then id (dependencies do not change the load order). Keep your mod's priority above -10 (the default 0 is fine) so that FinalBoss exists when your main file runs, or register at runtime (for example from your own calculate or setting_blind) after checking that FinalBoss exists.

Always check that FinalBoss exists first so your mod still works without it. Registering the same blind again overwrites the earlier entry (and logs it).

FinalBoss.register_encounter{...}

Boss moves for your boss

moves maps a trigger kind to a recipe: a list of effect steps plus an optional sound. FinalBoss runs the recipe from the performer (the showdown avatar, or the HUD chip) the moment the trigger happens. It never changes what your boss does; it only shows it. Your own effect code stays yours: FinalBoss only observes the vanilla Blind callbacks.

FinalBoss.register_encounter{blind = 'bl_mymod_boss', tier = 'full', moves = {
  hand_debuff = {{effect = 'glare', target = 'cards', line = true}, {effect = 'crack', target = 'hud_chips'},
    sound = {'magic_crumple', 1.2, 0.4}},
  card_debuff = {{effect = 'curse', target = 'cards', style = 'suit', colour = 'suit'}},
  start = {{effect = 'chain', target = 'hand'}, sound = {'cardSlide2', 0.6, 0.6}},
  signature = {{effect = 'burst', target = 'source', scale = 1.5}}, -- played big when the boss changes phase
}, death = {{effect = 'burst'}, {effect = 'ring', count = 3}, {effect = 'sweep'}}}

Two moves of the same kind are at least 0.6 s apart, and moves wait while a phase transformation plays (at most the last two are kept). Everything needs fx and moves, and nothing plays for a disabled blind (except joker_sold) or after FinalBoss has stopped for the run.

Effects (effect = ...):

Targets (target = ...): source (the boss, the default), cards, played, hand, jokers, and the HUD elements hud_chips, hud_mult, hud_hand_name, hud_hand_level, hud_hands, hud_discards, hud_target (the blind's score), hud_dollars and hand_limit (the "0/8" card count under the hand). A step whose target does not exist is skipped. Numeric options (scale, count, time, hold, a numeric amount) given as strings are converted; any other value is ignored with a warning in the log.

Colours: leave colour out for the boss colour, or use 'suit' (the suit your blind debuffs) or a lower-case G.C name such as 'gold' or 'blue'. sound = {key, pitch, volume} names a vanilla sound on a recipe (played with the move) or on a step (played when that step runs); the pitch is multiplied by the boss's voice.pitch.

death is a built-in name or a recipe of burst, ring, crack and sweep steps (other effects need targets a death does not have). It replaces the explosion at the end of the finale and needs fx.

Custom music

FinalBoss only bids for its own tracks, so a custom track must be your own SMODS.Sound that bids for itself. The key must contain "music" (a Steamodded requirement), and you pass its full prefixed key in the music field. The audio file lives in your mod's assets/sounds/ folder.

SMODS.Sound{
  key = 'music_boss',
  path = 'boss.ogg',
  volume = 0.6,
  pitch = 1,
  select_music_track = function(self)
    local st = G.GAME and G.GAME.FinalBoss
    if st and st.encounter and st.encounter.track == self.key and not st.encounter.ended then
      return 10 -- beats vanilla boss music
    end
  end,
}
FinalBoss.register_encounter{blind = 'bl_mymod_boss', tier = 'full', music = 'MyMod_music_boss'}

The FinalBoss.config.music toggle only silences FinalBoss's own tracks; honour it in your bid if you want players to be able to turn your track off too.

Music duck. When a showdown boss changes phase, the music dips for about a second. FinalBoss does this with a silent companion track (FinalBoss_music_duck, 10 minutes long) that it briefly sets as Balatro's music override, so every other track eases toward silence and back. As a result, the duck may restart a custom track that is longer than 600 seconds or that has sync set. Keep your showdown tracks shorter than that and without sync if a restart would bother you.

Line keys

All text lives in misc.quips in your mod's localization. Each moment can have as many variants as you like: write _1, _2, _3, ... with no gaps and FinalBoss finds them all. Variants are picked at random, never repeating the previous one when there are two or more.

<blind> is the full blind key, for example bl_hook. For each moment FinalBoss tries the boss-specific key first, then fb_generic_<moment>_<n>, and otherwise skips the moment. The shared opener, closer and nemesis lines have no generic fallback: if none exist, they are skipped. A rematch or nemesis line replaces the opener of a showdown (in light tier it replaces the boss's threat line, and a rematch line does so only about half the time), and in a showdown the line after it is then the shared fb_generic_name_<n> line ("I am ...!") instead of the boss's own name line. A raw key is never shown to the player. Generic lines receive the boss name as #1#.

Writing tips: each quip is 1 or 2 lines, and each line should stay under about 24 visible characters so it fits the speech bubble. A gloat line is spoken by Jimbo on the game-over screen, mocking you with the boss's catchphrase: write only the line itself (no "Name:" header, no quotation marks) and no placeholders.

Compatibility

• Big-number scores (Talisman) are converted to plain numbers before FinalBoss compares them, but this path has not been tested with Talisman installed.
• FinalBoss ships one Lovely patch (lovely/timescale.toml) for the finale's slow motion; if a game update changes its target line, the finale simply runs at normal speed.
• Boss moves observe Blind:set_blind, press_play, modify_hand, debuff_hand, stay_flipped, drawn_to_hand, disable and wiggle, and G.FUNCS.draw_from_deck_to_hand, by wrapping them: the original always runs first and its results are returned unchanged. A mod that replaces one of these instead of wrapping it loses the moves tied to it.
• Boss memory is stored in your Balatro profile (profile.jkr); resetting the profile resets it.
• Removing FinalBoss in the middle of a Verdant Leaf fight with twists on leaves the withered cards debuffed for the rest of that run.
• Mods that replace (rather than wrap) SMODS.is_showdown_ante or end_round override FinalBoss's behaviour for the showdown schedule and the round-end handling.

Languages

English, German (de), Spanish Latin America (es_419), Spanish Spain (es_ES), French (fr), Indonesian (id), Italian (it), Japanese (ja), Korean (ko), Dutch (nl), Polish (pl), Brazilian Portuguese (pt_BR), Russian (ru), Simplified Chinese (zh_CN) and Traditional Chinese (zh_TW). That is 15 localization files. Missing keys fall back to English. Native-speaker corrections are welcome.

Credits

• Author: SirMaiquis
• Showdown music: Balatro (Main Theme) (Orchestral Cover) by Adam Isiah, used with his permission
• Built on Steamodded and Lovely

License

FinalBoss is released under the MIT License. See the changelog for what changed in each release.