Ten seconds after the Great Bloom rises, a column of raw muscle forty blocks high punches up out of the ground east of the gardens, sheds its skin, and opens a slit of teeth down its front. It is what the great flower was holding down. It is also the flower's own doing.
This chapter is the longest. The mod calls its first half "Phase Two" and its second half "the end of it".
The Flesh wakes
A title card reads THE FLESH WAKES, and under it, the flower made it. The red Flesh is the rot the great flower's carrion flies carry, grown in the dark under Rosemont until the Great Bloom rose and let it up. It hates what made it all the same.
that's not the flower. that's what the flower made.
it came out of the flower's rot - and it hates what made it. it'll eat this whole world to get at them.
and it's coming out of the ground. run.
It spreads outward from where it came up, further every day: grass and soil turn to meat, stone and brick go veined and lit red from inside, trees to sinew, glass to membrane. Where it has taken the land the fog goes the colour of meat. That land, its infection and Bloom Serum are covered on the red fog page. It holds about 1000 blocks round where it came up, and 2000 once the Bloom has changed.
Three pieces of a reactor
Once Rosemont stands, the Watcher tells you there's a way to kill the big one: the Laboratory's reactor, in three pieces. A tracker at the top of your screen counts them (0/3). Each part is the only one there is: lose it and it goes back where you found it (the Rear Assembly a minute later). The Rear and Front Assemblies won't go into anything but the Assembly Cradle.
there's a way to kill the big one. the laboratory's reactor. three pieces. the laboratory, the shelter, and a truck in the city.
Rosemont: the Rear Assembly
Rosemont, the broken city, goes down a few hundred blocks from the gardens: six streets of cracked asphalt and abandoned cars, the police precinct, the corner pharmacy, the bus station, an eight-floor apartment block with its floors rotted through, a sinkhole forty blocks deep where the Bloom bit the street off, and in the middle the plaza the army turned into an evacuation checkpoint.
The Rear Assembly sits in the army's Military Cradle on the back of the truck in the plaza, under a lock that takes an axe: three blows, each one setting the mechanism winding for ten seconds and each one bringing more of them over the sandbags. Car alarms call every infected within 48 blocks, rotten floors give way a second after they creak, and pools of the Flesh drag at your feet.
The commuters on the crashed bus are fused into one thing that wears the bus as a shell. The Congregation (400 health) sleeps in the road until something hits it.
The Laboratory: the Reactor Core
The Rosemont Botanical Research Laboratory goes down on the other side of the gardens: a white building above ground and two sublevels under it. You need a Level 2 Keycard (the director kept one in his locked desk: three good blows split the drawer). The airlock's lockers hold hazmat suits. Six tapes tell you what happened, what is in the pool and what it hates. The director's last tape gives the order of the three coolant levers, which is different in every world.
In the reactor hall the Reactor Core sits in its rack over the pool. Hold use on the rack for three seconds and it's yours, and the pool turns to blood and Specimen Zero wakes (350 health): the night technician who cut a sample from the root's end. Burn the staff's bodies first, because it eats them to heal. When it dies the Laboratory locks itself down: ninety seconds to get out of the sublevels.
The tapes are transcribed on Tapes and broadcasts.
Shelter No. 4: the Front Assembly
Rosemont's Civil Defence shelter goes down south of the gardens where the ground allows: a fenced park, a blockhouse with its blast door jammed half open, and stairs down into the dark. There's no power. The fuel for the two generators in the radio room is wedged in the back of one of the shelter's lockers, a different one in every world, and most of the residents are hiding in those lockers, sobbing.
With both generators running, the radio's evacuation notice turns into Control's emergency broadcast and Bunker B's blast door opens. The special forces squad sent to hold it is still holding it, their guns grown into their arms. The Front Assembly is on the dais at the far end. Lift it, and the north wall tears itself out: the Warden of Shelter No. 4.
Kill the Warden and the Watcher leaves you a Civil Defence Compass on the dais, its needle set on Rosemont.
The Rosemont Device
With the Rear Assembly, the Core and the Front Assembly clamped into the Assembly Cradle (in that order), hold use on the cradle with an empty hand for five seconds. The harness goes on, the wiring runs from rear to front, the Core lights blue-white and the strapped-on Geiger counter starts to tick. It is the Rosemont Device now, and there is only one.
Since 1.43.1 there's another way: bring all three parts to a Forsaken Altar and the Watcher takes you to your cradle, puts a bubble of cold light round you, and builds the Device in front of you.
that's it. that's a bomb.
the flesh knows what it's for. it'll let you through while you carry it.
take it to the bloom. to what's left of the glass house.
Carrying it gives you Slowness II, no running and no gliding. While you carry it the Flesh lets you through: its infected stop, turn to watch you pass and step out of your way (hit one and the truce is off for fifteen seconds). The Bloom's things come for you instead. Within 200 blocks of the risen Bloom its roots crack up out of the ground after you, and its music, The Approach, comes up under everything.
The Gardener, reborn twice
Within 32 blocks, the Bloom goes still and turns every petal on the Device. Then it gags, heaves and spits the Gardener back up in a gush of nectar, his body knitting itself together with vines. It folds its petals shut and a ring of thorned roots six blocks high comes up round the arena.
The Gardener, Reborn has 600 health, three phases and the Bloomshears. Since 1.40 he comes back once more: kill him and the Bloom grows him back as the Gardener, Reborn Again, faster and harder. Kill him the second time and the Watcher rips the portal into the Bloom open.
The launch
Every sound drops out except footsteps. The Watcher steps out from right behind you, walks to the shut Bloom, pushes its fingers between two petals and pulls until they tear away and the green rift flares open, wider than before. Then it looks straight at you, and it's gone.
The rift comes out on a ledge, what's left of the Binding's island, hanging over the colossal Bloom's mouth, its tentacles hanging over it, held back. At the far end is the Launch Mark, and the Device goes nowhere else (set it down anywhere else and you're told "Not here. The edge."). On the mark it unfolds into a missile. Hold use on it for three seconds to arm it, then run: ten seconds to get back through the rift.
take it through. put it down past the edge. then run.
don't look at them. i've got them. i can't hold them long.
and then you run. you don't stop, and you don't look back.
Putting the Device into the Great Bloom earns Not Collected: "It's still beating."
It changed
Since 1.40, the camera is taken the moment nobody is left in the Bloom. You watch the Device burst up out of the rift and climb over the Bloom, the Bloom catch it with a tentacle and drag it down its throat, and the Watcher on the crater's rim pour its darkness into a beam. The Device goes off inside it. Everything goes white. Out of the white the sky opens, a column of light comes down on the Bloom, and it changes.
A title card reads IT CHANGED: and its roar went all the way round the world.
i knew it would do that.
the bomb was never going to kill it. i needed it to change. bigger. a soul that size is worth something.
but my darkness isn't enough for it now. i need a stronger soul to pour it through.
The changed Bloom is ten times bigger, its flesh gone blue, its acid purple, its teeth green, sunk in a pit it tears out of the ground. It reaches for anything within ninety blocks, and its roar can be heard from anywhere in the world. Over three days its blight grows out from it: blue flesh where the grass was, blisters of acid, green teeth up out of the ground, a violet haze over all of it. Since 1.42 it grows on what it eats, up to three times the size it changed to, and gets worse the longer it goes without. See the Bloom's page.
The end of it
A gun above the sky
there's a gun up above the sky. they built it before the city fell. they never got to fire it.
it needs a power source. three places woke up when the bloom changed. what you need is in them.
build the core. bring it to the forsaken altar, and i'll put my magic into it. then we kill it.
Three places wake 300 to 1000 blocks from the gardens, and the Watcher gives everyone a needle for each. A tracker counts THE POWER SOURCE (0/3):
- The Uplink Station, where the garrison talked to the gun over the sky: the Targeting Array is in the locker by the consoles.
- The Capacitor Works, still holding its charge, with arcs jumping between the lightning rods and a notice that says DANGER - LIVE BANKS: the Capacitor Cell is in the test cage at the back.
- The Soul Well, a shaft thirty blocks down with its keepers kneeling round the altar at the bottom: the Bound Soul.
Make the Orbital Core from the three, iron and redstone, and set it on a Forsaken Altar. The Watcher pours itself into it and gives it back infused. Build the Orbital Railgun round it. Its strikes call down a slug from SENTINEL, the gun above the sky: sixty damage, fire and a shockwave out to twelve blocks. See the power source parts.
The Ray Gun and the Omni
The railgun's strikes make the changed Bloom scream, but it heals as fast as you tear it. Building the railgun wakes three more places:
...did you hear that. it's calling something up out of the ground.
the gun can hurt it. it can't end it. what can end it is in what it's calling up.
- Ashford Nuclear Plant, its reactor never gone cold: the Nuclear Reactor Core, in the fuel pool (don't go in the water without a suit).
- Meridian Laboratory, its arcs jumping: the Discharge Destabilizer, in the glass cell in the middle of the ring.
- Blackwater Station, an island lab out at sea where something got loose: the Vial of Dark Matter Blood, and the parasites.
Craft the Ray Gun round the railgun and the three parts, or bring them all to a Forsaken Altar and the Watcher builds it. Either way the Watcher wants it ("give it here"). Drop it near him or use it on him, and he gives you back the Omni Orbital Railgun.
The Omni Ray
Stand fifty blocks or more off the changed Bloom's mouth, aim the Omni at the flower and fire. The camera is taken: SENTINEL comes down out of its orbit, a star that moves, then a fireball, then a sonic boom and retro thrusters. Five rings of glyphs close in round the line down to its mouth, TARGET LOCKED, and it fires. The Bloom fires back. If it has eaten too much, the Watcher gives the beam all of its own power.
A title card reads THE OMNI RAY: the bloom is dead. the watcher rests. What's left is a husk. The blight dies back, and so does the Flesh, everywhere but the places it built itself into.
i need time to rest. this took too much power.
but when i come back with our work, i'll be ten times stronger. thanks to you.
i will repay you. but for now, i must rest.
Not so fast
The first time you carry the Omni off the Bloom's blight, the Watcher is in your way. It pulls the gun out of your hands, tears open a rift into its own realm, and throws the gun in. The first time anyone puts a Ray Gun together in a crafting grid afterwards, it's there at the table and burns the recipe out of every recipe book. The Mended guns, which are the Bloom's flesh, rot and jam once it's dead.
wait. not so fast.
it wouldn't be fair to let you take such a destructive toy with you, to use on everything.
from what i see, i see great power. great potential. but zero responsibility for life.
i can see the thoughts in your head, you know.
Ten days later
Ten days later by the world's clock, the Watcher comes back, rested, and finds you wherever you are. In your house it bangs on the window and then comes in, by the door, which creaks open on its own, or through the wall where the glass is. Down a mine it folds itself down the tunnel, and anything there trying to kill you bursts into ink. In the woods its head leans out from behind a tree. Anywhere else, it's right behind you, breathing, until you turn round. This earns the advancement Ten Days Later.
ten days. i'm rested now - stronger, like i said i'd be.
but i didn't come to talk about me. it's the parasites.
the infection in those new places - blackwater - it isn't from here.
it came into this realm from another one. the null static zone.
the flesh is dying back. with the flower dead it's got nothing to grow from.
they don't need the flower. they'll get into anything with blood in it - a cow, a horse, a villager.
you won't see it often. but if something you know starts acting wrong, don't let it near you.
keep your eyes open.
While the Flesh spreads
Through all of this chapter, the Flesh keeps making things worse:
- Mutations. Left alive on its ground for ten minutes (five on the thickest of it), one of the infected changes into a Stalker, a Bloater, a Screamer, a Brute, a Splitter or a Hive, depending on what it was.
- The nests. Where the Flesh has had the land long enough, the ground sinks into a bowl and grows the Flesh's own great flower, the Broodmother (340 health), with rows of brood sacs round her.
- The horde. Some nights, ten to eighteen of its dead climb out of the ground together and walk to you behind a Bellwether ringing its bell. Kill the Bellwether and the horde loses its way.
- Sapromyiophilous. The flower's flies can lay in you. At level III you turn, and what gets up where you fell is you, wearing your armour and carrying everything you had. Kill it to get it all back.
- Swallowed alive. What the Great Bloom eats goes down alive into its stomach. Cut the stomach wall ten times and it throws you back up.
Every one of these is in the bestiary.
What comes next
With the Bloom dead, the Flesh has nothing to grow from and dies back. But the parasites don't need the flower, and the static isn't noise. Chapter five.