0.4.0

steph • June 8, 2026

Features

Practice mode

Practice mode was pretty barebones last release. Now it replays your actual games! Play solo against a ghost of your opponent – or yourself - running the exact hands from the source match. The picker pulls the 10 most recent games straight from the Lovely log folder, or just plop any you want into the replays/ folder in the mod. Run either side, with the original seed, decks, stakes, and ruleset.

Dev note: the old Practice mode let you drill lines, but nothing pushed back. Replays fill the other half, and there's no recorder or format to learn: the Lovely log already on disk is the replay. Practice, review, or just replay yesterday's game.

Experimental Tab

New in 0.4.0: an Experimental tab where we workshop ideas before they're ready for primetime. Features here may change shape, break, or disappear between releases.

Currently in Experimental:

  • Experimental (Standard): a rebalance take on the current standard pool. Shops are bigger. Blinds hit harder. Golden Ticket’s been reworked again. There are new stickers now – rolled per run, so two games are never quite the same. Glass got rarer and stronger?? Speedrun’s banned (allegedly to appease streamers). Rerolls cost a dollar more each time. Honestly we’ve lost track.
  • Experimental (Classic): an opinionated take on Legacy Ranked: Glass nerf, Hanging Chad rework, Justice banned, and Let's Go Gambling added.

Modifiers

Stackable settings that compose on top of any non-locked ruleset. Think of them as lobby options extracted into reusable bundles – a home for experimental timer behaviors, pool cuts, and anything else we want to opt into per-match without forking a whole ruleset.

Available now:

  • PvP Timer – The #1 ask - a timer. During PvP. Yup.
  • Pressure Timer – A timer that counts down from the start of each ante. Calculate is faster (but costs you 3.5 seconds). Reaching PvP accelerates your opponents timer by 2×. Base time is doubled so the felt length still lands near a normal round.
  • Pressure Timer+ – Like above but each hand played gives you 15 seconds back - so you can claw time back instead of bleeding out.
  • No-Anim Timer – pauses the timer during animations; faster calc too. Base time is 2/3x.

Massive thanks to @sleepyg11 for the timer work. And no, you can't greed Seltzer and Ice Cream by waiting the timer out – that's handled.

Not just timers, though:

  • Smallworld – random 75% cull of the card pool. Used to be a ruleset of its own; now it's just a modifier you can bolt onto any ruleset.

More modifiers planned (see the new Custom tab).

TAB-hold shortcuts menu

Hold TAB and an overlay fades in showing every shortcut available right where you are – main menu, lobby, or mid-game: join, create, reconnect, view/copy code, leave, lobby info. Let go and it's gone. Nothing to memorize – the menu itself is the cheat sheet.

The combos get fast once they're muscle memory: TAB-C creates a lobby (or copies the code if you're already in one), and my personal favorite, TAB-V, joins a lobby straight from whatever's on your clipboard.

Challenge Decks

Toneblock has cooked up four new challenge decks for your entertainment:

  • Shared Pockets – Hand size, joker slots, and consumable slots are shared.
  • EEEEE – the RNG quietly stops behaving like RNG. Named after the noise you'll make.
  • Planet Tycoon – Planets flood the shop (and Planet vouchers are banned, because you won't need them).
  • Blue Ice – Bacon.

Random deck & stake

Lobby toggle: each player gets a seeded-random deck and stake at game start. Pairs with the existing "different decks" option.

Under the hood

Substantial rewrites to the mod's internals this release. Most of it shouldn't be visible in normal play, but the foundations are cleaner - which is what made Experimental and the new Practice mode possible to ship, and what makes the next round of features less of a fight.

UI overhaul

  • The Balanced sticker now explains what was changed on the card it's attached to.
  • Redesigned the win/lose screen
  • Redesigned timer (UI + behavior + old-timer animation)
  • Redesigned + prettified the in-game lobby info, now also shows skip count
  • Redesigned + prettified the lobby mods panel
  • Enemy lives display – opponent's remaining lives are now shown
  • Redesigned the opponent tracking, now shows where the opponent is live
  • Instant PvP blind appearance - the PvP blind now shows immediately instead of after a delay.

Other changes

  • Version mismatch warning when players are using different versions of Multiplayer and/or Steamodded
  • Pizza is no longer copyable. Copying Pizza used to dissolve the Blueprint as well as the Pizza – very funny, less so for the players who found out by watching their Blueprint evaporate. Now matches how Vanilla treats self-consuming jokers.
  • Sandbox lobby settings are now soft defaults. Sandbox seeds preview/order/lives but the host can override them again instead of hard-locking the lobby settings.
  • Dev-build warning on main menu - shows a popup warning when running a dev build
  • Changed PRNG for Immolate and Ouija to be more deterministic when The Order is enabled
  • Updated Russian localization

Fixes

  • Sandbox: Alloy pulled from rotation - temporary, while SMODS quantum causes slowdowns.
  • Ouija 2.0 & Ectoplasm cost corrected: $3 → $4 – reworks inherited the base-consumable price; now matches vanilla Spectral.
  • Seltzer & Turtle Bean sell value corrected: $5 → $6 – reworks accidentally shipped a dollar under vanilla cost.
  • Sandbox: Fix Castle chips counter
  • Sandbox: Fix crash when Ectoplasm is out of targets
  • Rewrote shop RNG for stability
  • Asteroid no longer crashes the game with modded hands
  • Cocktail deck now plays nice with Cryptid, Aikoshen, and All-in-Jest
  • Title-screen cards no longer crash when other mods are loaded
  • Plus a pile of smaller crash/UI fixes

Thanks

Huge thanks to everyone who contributed code to this patch:

  • Toneblock – RNG and shop internals, challenge decks, smods compat, and fixes across the board (14 commits)
  • SleepyG11 – timers, UI, and a pile of under-the-hood work (14 commits)
  • Virtualized
  • @12problems
  • jabagawee
  • Winibo
  • amnesiaof

As well as everyone patiently playtesting and providing feedback!