Hello,
It’s Vincent, co-founder of the studio working on Trailblazers: Into the March. In this post, I’d like to talk about the Bloom.
In the March, Bloom is everywhere (unfortunately for you). It attacks your Landship, triggers Perturbations, hinders your progress, and puts constant pressure on your run. Learning how to deal with it, avoid it, or fight it directly is essential if you want your expeditions into the March to survive.
The Trailblazers describe Bloom as the March’s hunger to exist and expand. It is a projection of it’s vital instincts, a corruption altering any carbon-based life it touches. Depending on the host, it can behave like a symbiote, a parasite, or both.
Bloom is also a global pressure system. It measures how much the March has noticed your expedition. The Bloom Gauge and the Bloom Awareness window help you understand its current impact on your journey. Every action has a cost increasing the gauge… from fighting, using your scanner too often, extracting resources, crossing bloom terrain or letting it take root inside your landship.
When the gauge fills, you reach a new Bloom Stage. A Bloom Event is triggered, the run becomes more unstable, and future manifestations of Bloom become more dangerous. Called perturbations, these events can vary a lot, but they all have one thing in common: they are never a good sign.
On the Journey Map, Bloom terrain makes routing more interesting. Sometimes the shortest path goes through a contaminated area. Sometimes an important contract is hidden behind an infested corridor. Eventually just crossing the Bloom will simply be unavoidable. But you will pay the price. Bloom Tiles can appear inside your Landship, slowing your crew, damaging your items, and spreading if ignored. Bloom is not just something you cross on the map. It follows you home.
And then there are the Leeches.
These Bloom creatures attack your Landship in different ways. Some attach themselves to containers and devour your resources. Others explode after a delay, affect crew morale, or latch directly onto a crew member to drain their life.
Thankfully, you are not completely alone against it.
The Heart helps keep Bloom Awareness under control, and the Spirit is becoming increasingly important in that fight. It’s own energy can be turned into Fireflies to fend off the Bloom creeping in your Landship, remove Bloom Tiles, and disinfect certain items. As the Spirit grows stronger, more of these little helpers can appear on board.
This is the direction we want for the game. Bloom should feel threatening. We are currently balancing it so it creates a constant pressure that players have to manage throughout the run. One of our inspirations is the torch in Darkest Dungeon: a simple pressure system that changes visibility, risk, and the way several other systems behave.
In the end, Bloom is corruption, signal, and countdown. It tells the player that their presence in the March is limited. Careful Trail management can help you avoid Bloom in some situations, but sometimes the only viable way to survive will be much more direct.
And sometimes… you bring the flamethrower.
See you very soon, and thank you for following us,
Vincent