Crashing (even after a reinstall)

[lost shard]

Game crashes with the following error:

Oops! Something went wrong:
main.lua:100: module 'luasteam' not found: no field package.preload['luasteam']
no 'luasteam' in LOVE game directories. no file 'luasteam' in LOVE paths.
no file 'luasteam.lua'
no file 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Balatro\lua\luasteam.lua'
no file 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Balatro\lua\luasteam\init.lua'
no file 'C:\Users\***\scoop\apps\lua\current\bin'
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luasteam.dll is present

[honest flicker]

I just ran into this too

From what I can tell, the problem is that Balatro is sensitive to the LUA_CPATH environment variable. When you work with Lua, the value of this variable tells Lua where to look for compiled C modules that can be require-ed in Lua.

One way to do this without affecting your Lua installation is to 1) open a terminal, 2) unset the variable, and 3) run Balatro.exe. For example, with powershell, this would be

Remove-Item Env:LUA_CPATH
cd "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Balatro"
.\Balatro.exe

But note that you **can't **use the steam launcher nor the start menu and desktop shortcuts. You have to use the terminal each time. This stinks.

You could also:

• prepend the Balatro game directory path to the LUA_CPATH variable. This variable uses a special syntax where you need to wildcard the DLLs in the format ?.dll and also semicolon-delimit the values.

[System.Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable('LUA_CPATH', "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Balatro\?.dll;" + [System.Environment]::GetEnvironmentVariable('LUA_CPATH', 'User'), 'User')

_Make sure to completely restart Steam afterwards (system tray -> right click Steam icon -> "Exit Steam")_
But this stinks too because there's no good reason you'd want to search in this path for other general Lua development.

• Just delete the LUA_CPATH variable, but now your Lua is broken.

• Uninstall the lua scoop package, but now you can't use Lua at all.

All of these are unreasonable options. A user may have this variable set for other work on their PC, and Balatro shouldn't take cues on where to find its own stuff from an out-of-band variable value.