[DEVBLOG#319] Vanilla Events Expanded - Psychic Bloom

Hey everyone and welcome to an interesting (I hope) development blog in which I tell you about the new psychic bloom event, coming in Vanilla Events Expanded remake.

The remake will be entering beta testing tomorrow, so it's definitely something to look out for, as this means the release is getting closer and closer.

Now, in order to really talk about Psychic bloom, let's take a look at this little fragment of my colony map.

That's right - it's just sand, some soil, a few trees and a small herd of boomalopes. Really a very basic coast area.

Suddenly, I get a new purple event pop up.

It is simply called The seeding.

The veil between our reality and somewhere else is wearing dangerously thin.

A tear in the dimensional fabric has ignited a permanent, unnatural purple aurora across the sky. Where the psychic energy bleeds through to the surface, bizarre, alien seedlings are manifesting in the soil. While they are harmless for now, they do not belong in this dimension. You may want to uproot them before they anchor themselves to our reality.

Upon reading that, I get goosebumps. Could it really be? Did Oskar (me) finally draw inspiration from the best story by H.P. Lovecraft called Color Out Of Space?

Now, during the seeding, every give or take 6 hours, a new psychic lotus seedling appears somewhere on the map.

It is, very much, harmless at this stage. In fact, it's quite beautiful to look at, and it glows! What's the worst that can happen?

The seeding stage lasts between 10 to 15 days. This means around 20 to 30 of such seedlings appeared on my map.

Now, I get a new purple event pop up - the psychic bloom is entering the second stage - The bloom.

The dimensional overlap is widening. The seedlings have matured into psychic lotuses, and they are actively terraforming our world to match their own.

The lotuses are mutating nearby flora into vibrant, otherworldly variants, and the ambient psychic sensitivity of everyone in the region has doubled.

Beware the weather, as clouds from the other side are bleeding through. Psychic rain can have devastating effects on anyone caught outside, as time behaves differently in its home dimension.

Now, something bizarre has happened. The psychic lotuses have sprouted - they opened up, and various alien plants started to appear all around.

These weird plants spawn around each psychic lotus (within radius of 12), and they spawn even on surfaces that normally wouldn't support them!

All the plants on the map start growing at a super accelerated pace: 360% growth multiplier! On top of that, Psychic rain can now happen from time to time. Best not get caught in it - each day you're outside in this rain will age you a quadrum.

I bet you thought these plants can be harvested. Well, they yield pretty much nothing. They're from another dimension, they are an invasive species, and you can't use them for anything.

After around 30-45 days, the entire map was already covered in these bizarre plants. They have pushed away normal trees, they have overgrown my farms. And the worst was yet to come.

The superbloom begins.

The boundary between realities has completely collapsed!

The otherworldly flora has entered a catastrophic superbloom, spreading at an uncontrollable rate. Worse, the psychic lotuses are acting as conduits for the crushing psychic weight of an entirely different universe. The intensity of this maddening drone is directly tied to how many lotuses are anchoring the rift to your map.

You must sever their connection by cutting down the lotuses immediately, or the sheer psychic pressure of another dimension will drive your colonists insane.

The radius in which psychic lotuses spawn new bizarre plants more or less doubles. On top of that, extreme psychic drone affects everyone, and scales with the amount of lotuses on your current map. Each lotus is -1 Mood. I had 45.

Plants grow at 540% speed. Lotuses spawn a lot of them, and they can also spawn new lotuses too. Everything looks beautiful, but psychic rain is constant.

Fortunately, this only lasts a handful of days. What comes next, however, is incredibly sad.

After so many days staring at the color display around you, you probably got used to the world looking like that.

Now, in split second comes The withering.

Reality has violently reasserted itself.

The dimensional rift has snapped shut. Cut off from the psychic energy of their home universe, the superbloom has instantly collapsed into a hideous, withered wasteland. The maddening drone is gone, but the dead flora will take years to decay naturally. You will need to burn or chop away these wilted plants to make room for your crops to return.

Psychic Rain remains a lingering threat until the sky fully heals and the aurora dissipates.

Everything is ugly. Wherever you look, the wilted husks of these bizarre plants are staring at you. They will take up space, preventing normal plants from growing back. You need to burn it all to make space for the nature to reclaim the land.

I think the new Psychic bloom created a really interesting scenario, in which you sort of learn to live with it, and eventually even enjoy the visuals of it.

Then it all comes crashing down and what's left is a sad reminder of the beauty that other dimension offered. Let me know what you think, and whether you still prefer the 'old' psychic bloom (which, mind you, simply spawned flowers).