How to score naneinf in Balatro (random seed)

Summary

How I achieved Balatro’s maximum score on a random seed, and how you can replicate it.

Introduction

What is “naneinf”?

In Balatro, your score is represented as a double-precision floating point number. The maximum value of an unsigned double is: $2^{1024}-1\approx 1.80\times 10^{308}$ With a bit of trickery, it is entirely possible score even higher than this value! When you get such a score, the counter breaks and displays naneinf.

Achieving a naneinf on a random unscouted seed (i.e. you just hit the ‘new run’ button and go in blind) takes some luck and a decent amount of skill.

For some context on how long this took:

• Before attempting this, I completed Gold stake on the Blue and Plasma decks.
• I’d estimate I did ~100 runs specifically aimed towards getting naneinf; over half of them were reset during the first 1-2 antes due to poor starting vouchers.
• ~5 of those runs likely had a >50% chance of going infinite, but I’d squandered them early due to poor decision making. I tend to get overly greedy with trying to fish for money/planet/tarot cards during rounds, and sell/rearrange scoring jokers in ways that don’t actually score enough points :(

Prerequisites

This guide is written for those of you who have played Balatro before. I’ll explain any game mechanics relevant to the naneinf run, but won’t go over the basics (like how to make money, what vouchers/tarot/planet/spectral cards do, how antes/scoring progression works). I really like the Balatro University videos for building up your base knowledge and intuition about how to navigate the game.

Ideally, you have a high win percentage on white stake with the Plasma deck. If you’re not confident in your ability to get past Ante 8 consistently, consider playing regular runs until you’ve defeated Gold Stake on the Plasma deck. This will ensure you’re able to get to the interesting part of the naneinf run (which usually occurs between antes 16-32).

Other guides and inspiration

• I highly recommend watching Balatro University’s naneinf explained video in its entirety before proceeding, to get an idea of the various viable strategies (maybe you’ll end up picking a different one than I did!).
• The Balatro Wiki has a great guide that breaks this down in a more comprehensive manner.
• Blurstoftimes has a hidden gem of a guide hidden in a Youtube video description. Much of my early attempts were designed around it, before I found what worked for me.

Run Overview

An unseeded naneinf run is roughly broken down into three phases:

1. Early game (Antes 1-13): Survive by all means possible; get the engine going; make some money ($100-1000) to afford enough re-rolls to get you a Baron and Mime to get to the next phase.
2. Baron/Mime Time (Antes 10-23): Survive off the Baron/Mime combo; get enough money ($1k-$10k) to slowly collect Blueprint/Brainstorms and purple, blue, and red-seal steel/gold Kings.
3. Going Infinite (Antes 16-32): Spend all of your money rolling for Serpents, vouchers, and the final couple cards (last blueprint/brainstorm, last negative) while navigating Antes 16 and 24.

Preambles

Vouchers

Vouchers you ABSOLUTELY need

• Grabber for +1 hand size. If you pick up Heiroglyph (-1 hand size, -1 ante) you’ll need to get Nacho Tong as well for another +1 hand size.
• Blank/Antimatter for +1 Joker slot.
• Director’s Cut/Retcon to roll for the Serpent in the late game.
• Paintbrush/Palette for +1 hand size.

Vouchers you probably need

Without these, your run will be significantly harder. Try to get most or all of these, but it’s possible to naneinf without them.

• Wasteful/Recyclomancy: +1 discard each. Slightly less good compared to the hand-size ones, but can also prevent you from dying, and combos well with Mail-In Rebate for extra money.
• Telescope: Celestial packs always contain your most-played hand. (Early game, your most-played hand will probably be 3/4/5-of-a-kinds. Be careful not to let your High Card count diverge too much, because you’ll need the Telescope to give you Plutos ASAP once you transition to the next phase.)
• Overstock/Overstock Plus: +1 slot in the shop. Makes each re-roll far more valuable.
• Crystal Ball/Omen Globe: +1 consumable slot / spectral cards in Arcana packs. These are fantastic mid/late game, but serve little purpose
• Seed Money/Money Tree/Reroll Surplus/Reroll Glut/Clearance Sale/Liquidation: Gives you more money and/or makes shop items cheaper in various ways. p

Vouchers that are bad early-game, and ok/harmless late-game

Once you get Baron/Mime, it’s good to pick these up so they don’t re-appear and make it hard to get the vouchers you really need.

• Tarot/Planet Merchant: Makes it harder to dig for Jokers (which you’ll need to do a lot of early and late game). But these can actually be useful mid-game when you’re trying to do your deck-fixing.
• Magic Trick/Illusion: You’ll probably never buy playing cards from the shop; they’ll clog up some amount of space in rerolls.
• Observatory: Unless you get Perkeo, you won’t be keeping Plutos in your consumable area, and the (1.5^3)x multiplier will be insignificant anyways.
• Heiroglyph/Petroglyph: Useful for buying some time, but the -1 hand size can be catastrophic.
• Hone/Glow Up: unnecessary, but harmless. (you also need to make sure at least one of your endgame Jokers are regular so you can turn them into a negative with Ectoplasm)

DO NOT BUY

• Ignore Tarot Tycoon and Planet Tycoon completely. They have the potential to kill your run, since you have a very hard time finding your late-game jokers.

Resetting for good vouchers

My condition for proceeding with a naneinf run is getting two good early-game vouchers in a row. Getting good vouchers early compounds quite significantly!

I define the list of “good early game vouchers” as:

• Grabber/Nacho Tong
• Telescope
• Wasteful/Recyclomacy
• Paintbrush/Palette
• Clearance Sale/Liquidation

There are also a few “okay” early-game vouchers that you could probably let in and still succeed:

• Any of the remaining money-making ones outside of Clearance Sale/Liquidation
• Crystal Ball
• Overstock
• Director’s Cut/Retcon

If I see any voucher outside of the above list for the first 2 antes, I reset immediately. (You could also be extra-strict and go for 3 or 4 in a row, if you don’t mind resetting more and want a higher chance of success.)

Using Double Tags to get more vouchers

By the time mid/late game rolls around, I’m typically short a few vouchers I really need. By default, only one voucher shows up per ante (and if you get a bad voucher, it could come back again later), so this introduces a great deal of luck/uncertainty.

To mitigate this, you can buy and immediately sell Diet Cola jokers, which give you +1 Double Tag each. Then, when you see a Voucher Skip Tag, skip the blind to get a large quantity of extra vouchers!

It’s almost always worth it to roll for and pick up Diet Colas any time you have a spare Joker slot open. (Or, once you get enough money to roll 30-40 times per round, dump your Mail-In Rebates for Diet Colas then pick them back up before starting the next round.)

Ways I got lucky

There are a few things that happened on my successful naneinf run that helped tremendously, but ultimately weren’t necessary.

Ante 10 Perkeo

I got Perkeo on Ante 10! (This is a 0.06% chance, i.e. I can expect a Perkeo once every 1,666 cards I see in an Arcana/Spectral pack.)

If this happens to you, here’s how to take advantage of it:

• Make sure you pick up the Observatory voucher. If you can’t find it in a reasonable time, you’ll have to ditch Perkeo :’)
• Pre-Observatory, duplicate money-making Tarot cards,
• If you somehow get a Cryptid from Sixth Sense, congrats- you can now pivot to the standard Perkeo naneinf run (see the guides linked above), which is far easier to pull off than the unseeded style.
• Post-Observatory, and lacking Cryptids, you should duplicate as many Pluto cards as you can. Each one will multiply your score by x1.5, so you’ll have a wider margin of error (and can get a smaller hand size).
• Make sure to duplicate Perkeo with your Blueprints/Brainstorms before hitting the ‘next round’ button!!

Polychromes

I hit a huge amount of polychrome cards this round (each one gives x1.5). The chance of a modifier being polychrome is 3.75% each.

• I got an early Aura hit that converted one of my purple seal gold Kings into a polychrome one. Since I used a Deja Vu card to turn one of them into a red seal, all of my final red seal steel kings also ended up being polychrome.
• Three of my Jokers ended up being polychrome too!

Phase 1: Early Game

Playing the Plasma Deck normally

At this point, you’ve gotten some favorable vouchers out of the first couple antes and are ready to roll! (Antes 1-2 are pretty much free on Plasma deck; you can beat them without any scoring jokers.)

For Antes 3-8, your biggest task is just to survive and play normally. Since the Plasma Deck balances your chips and mult, and it’s much easier to scale chips, try to find good chip-scoring strategies:

• The Stuntman (+250 chips, -2 hand size) is the holy grail. If you get one, you’re pretty much set for the rest of the early game.
• The Runner (+15 chips per straight) and the Square Joker (+4 chips every time you play 4 cards) scale very well, but require some effort. Since we’re trying to get a deck of all Kings, you’ll find yourself unable to play straights fairly quickly, so get as many of them in as early as possible to secure your success.
• The Hierophant (turns two cards into +40-chip bonus cards) and The Tower (converts to stone card) are good Tarot cards to carry around in a pinch.
• Hanging Chad (retrigger first card 2 times) or Sock and Buskin (retrigger all played face cards) alongside Faceless Joker (+30 chips for all face cards)

Side quest: Kingify your deck

A side goal of the early game is to get as many Kings as possible into your deck. It doesn’t matter what kind of King it is yet, but gold Kings are preferred.

• Use Strength to convert Jacks and Queens into Kings.
• Use Hanged Man to destroy cards like Aces, 2’s, 3’s 4’,s and 5’s first, working your way up to all non-King cards.
  • Avoid destroying 6’s because you’ll want to pick up Sixth Sense when you find it to convert them into Spectral cards.
  • Avoid destroying 9’s if you think you’ll want to pick up a Cloud Nine at some point.
• Pick up Venus and Mars cards to take advantage of the extra 3- and 4-of-a-kinds you’ll be getting with your Kings. (Avoid 5-of-a-kind if you can, so that Eris and Planet X cards don’t show up.)
• Make sure you have an escape hatch in case you get hit with The Plant (debuffs all face cards).

Side quest: get rich quick

You’ll need as much money as possible to guarantee a smooth transition into Phase 2. (If you don’t get a Baron and Mime before you run out of money, your run is over!)

• Turn as many Kings into Gold cards as possible with the Devil card. Once you get a Mime, they’ll retrigger and give you a decent cashflow.
  • Pick up the Golden Ticket ($4 per played Gold card) so you can continue playing your Gold cards as 3/4-of-a-kinds until the next phase.
• Mail-In Rebate gets good very quickly, since it has a higher likelihood of choosing Kings as the card to discard as you collect more Kings.
• Keeping an Egg around makes Temperance super powerful.
• Be conservative of rerolling until you get the vouchers to make it more affordable.

Phase 2: Baron Mime Time

The moment you assemble both a Baron and Mime, you are now in Phase 2. Congrats on making it this far!

Plutonium Pivot

To maximize your scoring potential for cards held in hand, you’ll probably only want to play one card at a time. Getting some amount of Pluto cards early will do wonders for your score, so keep an eye out for them even before you get Baron/Mime!

Seal your Kings

Be on the lookout for seals to put onto your Kings! Eventually, 100% of your Kings will need to have a seal.

You can acquire seals easily in one of two ways:

1. Open Standard Packs. Blue/Purple seals are great to collect in general; only pick up Red seals if they’re on 10/J/Q/K’s. Eventually, start looking for Blue/Purple 10/J/Q/K’s that you can use Strength on to convert into Kings as necessary.
2. Open Spectral Packs (or use Sixth Sense)

Throughout this phase, you’ll want your deck to mostly be purple seal gold Kings with a few blue-seal and steel Kings as well. You’ll also need at least 1 red seal steel King handy, since Phase 3 will require you to replace your entire deck with red seal steel kings. But don’t worry, you’ll have ample time to do that sort of deck-fixing at some point.

Look for Negatives

Chances are, you won’t be able to find a natural negative card. Luckily you won’t need one!

• Find Ectoplasm spectral cards. You can only use one of them (since they give you -1 hand size)!
• Find the Antimatter voucher. This requires redeeming the Blank voucher first.

If you max out your Joker slots with useful jokers (i.e. Baron + Mime + Blueprint + Brainstorm + Mail In Rebate), avoid re-rolling until you’re able to get an extra slot up.

Once you have an open slot, look for the following:

• Showman to allow your existing Jokers to re-appear in the shop. You really want to look for blueprint/brainstorm (your goal is to have 4 of them), but extra Barons/Mimes will be amazing in the short-term to ensure you have enough scoring.
• Invisible Joker to duplicate one of your existing jokers. You’ll need to sell everything except for Blueprint/Brainstorm/Mime/Baron when you trigger one, to maximize your chances of getting a good hit.
  • Don’t be afraid to sell duplicate Barons and Mimes if you don’t need them. You are looking for Blueprints and Brainstorms!

Phase 3: Going Infinite

When you are getting close to your final Joker loadout (Baron, Mime, at least 4 total blueprints/brainstorms) and 1 extra Joker slot (probably a Mail-in Rebate at this point), it’s time to go for the endgame!

Getting to this stage could take any amount of antes. I got my final loadout in Ante 21.

• In order to survive in the meantime, you’ll need

DNA DNA DNA

Several antes before your full naneinf attempt, you’ll need to make sure you have enough cards in your deck. At this point, anything that is not a red seal steel King must be tossed out.

Before you sell your Mail-In Rebate, gold seals and other economy cards, ensure you have enough money. You will need to do the following still:

• Roll for Serpent for as many antes as needed. (Serpents take around $100-200 each to fetch.)
• Roll for the Burglar to replace your DNA with in the final round, or whenever you run out of scoring power with DNA alone.
• Roll for enough Hanged Mans to get rid of your non-read-seal-steel-king cards.

Generally, you’ll be super safe if you make 50 or more cards (which will take up to 3 antes, if you are copying your DNA 5 times). You should, at this point, take the guesswork out and calculate exactly the conditions needed to reach naneinf (and/or not die in the process).

It’s math time!!!

The Balatro Calculator tool allows you to plug in your current game state, and it’ll tell you how much it’ll score before you send it for real! Make sure to set the following options:

• Check the ‘Plasma Deck’ option.
• Go to the ‘Hands’ tab and plug in your High Card level.
• If you have Observatory, check the ‘Observatory’ option.

Specifically, this was my calculation in the setup.

Not pictured is 59 held Pluto cards, which added this much mult via Observatory (approximately equivalent to $10^{10}$):

This reading means I need to somehow get a 42-card hand. Doing some mental math:

• I start with 7 cards (+1 from Grabber, -2 from 2x Ectoplasm).
• Every time I play a hand I net 2 additional cards (play 1 card, then get 3 back via Serpent). There are no discards because I have the Burglar.
• (42-7)/2 = I need at least 18 hands.
• I currently have 3 base hands. This means Burglar needs to be trigger 5 total times (3 + (5x3) = 18), which means I need a minimum of 4 blueprints/brainstorms.

It’s very likely that you will have a slightly different calculation (depending on whether or not your cards are Polychrome, if you got Nacho Tong, and so on). Expect to need 5 blueprints/brainstorms, and be pleasantly surprised if you can get away with just 4.

Suffering from Success

One unexpected issue I ran into was that I was scoring too many points! In other words, I was clearing rounds with my minimum-scoring configuration before I had the chance to get to the biggest hand size. So even though I technically had enough scoring power to go infinite by Ante 22, I was unable to do so.

This meant I was going into Ante 24, which was scary because I hadn’t yet calculated whether or not I’d survive it.

Navigating Ante 24

Since Ante 24 is a multiple of 8, it is known as a finisher round and it is impossible to roll The Serpent as the boss. This means you will need to score $3.2\times 10^{77}$ while having close to a normal hand size, which can be extremely difficult.

(Because I had Violet Vessel in my run, I needed to score more than $1.92\times 10^{78}$ without The Serpent. I didn’t bother rerolling since I’d either steamroll this or fall horribly short, and the extra amount wouldn’t make a difference.)

Very fortunately, this was easily clearable with my setup.

• Since there’s no Serpent to bump up my hand size, I needed to sell the Burglar and pick up either DNA or Turtle Bean to increase my hand size by 5. I found DNA, so I picked that up and immediately re-rolled the Burglar in the next shop.

Going Infinite

After slogging through a couple more antes via Suffering From Success, I finally arrived on one that wouldn’t have been clearable without copying the Baron. I actually calculated this incorrectly (I forgot to plug in my High Card level of 117) so I was fully expecting this to fail and have to go to Ante 28, but it worked beautifully!

And with that, I could finally uninstall Balatro and carry on with my life ‍