Why Blaseball Teams are Doing Battle with a Peanut God

Recent events in the increasingly strange online fantasy baseball sim Blaseball have taken the game in a whole new direction, as players prepare to reckon with the wrath of a god. A seemingly normal (for Blaseball) season championship unexpectedly turned into what many have equated to a JRPG boss-fight, kicking off a new era in Blaseball.

Blaseball is a browser-based game that launched in July 2020. It began with a seemingly innocuous premise: players could choose a fictional baseball team to root for, place in-game bets on the outcomes of matches, and use the winnings to vote on buffs for their teams or other game effects. Within a few weeks, however, it became clear that Blaseball was so much more than a straightforward fantasy baseball simulator. Since the game launched, team members have died and been resurrected, some team members have become encased in peanut shells, and a hellmouth swallowed an entire city.

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But all of the insanity of Blaseball came to a head at the end of season 9, when a peanut god known as The Shelled One arrived and assembled his own team. The Shelled One has been a nebulous force since season three, appearing at random times, sometimes delivery ominous warnings, sometimes drastically affecting the state of Blaseball. Most notably, certain players over the course of several seasons have received a status effect “shelled,” in which they are encased in a giant peanut shell and unable to play. When the Shelled One appeared at the end of season 9, he collected all players that had been shelled, forming a team known as The Shelled One’s Pods, and the game mechanics suddenly transformed from simple baseball into a turn-based boss fight, where outs and strikes did damage to the other team’s Team Spirit. The Shelled One’s Pods did battle with season 9’s champions, the Charleston Shoe Thieves, thoroughly trouncing them.

Is a Blaseball War Brewing Between The Shelled One and The Monitor?

The Shelled One’s attack seems to have been the result of recent interference from another cosmic entity, The Monitor, a being who appears as a squid. In season 8, The Monitor asked for tribute in the form of peanuts, and the audience of Blaseball obliged. Fans were rewarded with the un-shelling of a trapped player, but The Shelled One was angered by the blasphemous use of peanuts, causing his dramatic appearance at the season 9 championship. A potential war is brewing between The Monitor and The Shelled One, as the player The Monitor un-shelled now has the modifier “squiddish.” Perhaps The Monitor may enter the playing field with a team of their own?

Blaseball is a fascinating, evolving story in a niche corner of gaming, all of which is taking place in a browser. Many fans have applauded the fact that Blaseball gives them a sport to root for in a year when physical sport seasons are truncated or non-existent. Since game outcomes are decided with behind-the-scenes algorithms, fans can only affect the story by coordinating votes on things like decrees, or using bizarre currencies like peanuts to appease gods, perhaps resurrecting a beloved incinerated player. There’s also plenty of theory-crafting to be done around various cryptic messages that have appeared throughout the seasons of Blaseball, and what new effects on players mean for the bigger story that is unfolding. It’s yet another example of how a game doesn’t need 4k graphics and cutscenes to capture the hearts and minds of the internet.

 

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