The Crystal Growth Mode: Structure That Accretes Instead of Breathing

Crystal Growth is the Bloom engine mode where the structure has a memory: symmetric facets advance from deterministic seed points. Every other growth model in the engine runs a cycle and returns to where it started. This one does not.

Growth that only oscillates is not growth

The engine's shared growth term is a cosine through a lifecycle: it rises, it falls, it comes back. That is the right shape for a flower and the wrong shape for a crystal, because a lattice that breathes in and out never builds anything. Watch it for thirty seconds and you have seen everything it will ever do.

So this mode keeps a single persistent number instead, which the draw code calls the grown fraction. Every latched beat adds a fixed increment to it, capped at fully grown. Between beats it melts back very slowly, with a floor well above zero, so a long quiet passage eventually resets the structure and a paused track does not leave a frozen lattice forever.

How an arm is drawn

Each arm is a polyline of twenty-four segments walking outward from the centre along a fixed angle. The distance along the arm is the accretion fraction, so as the structure grows the line simply gets longer rather than the whole thing being rescaled. The arm length passes through the containment limiter, so the outermost segment approaches the frame margin and never crosses it.

The kinks are the difference between a crystal and a tendril. Both share this code path; the crystal branch uses a small, regular, deterministic lateral fork that scales with distance along the arm, while the branching model uses a much larger fork that moves with the clock. That is why one reads as a facet and the other as a vine, on identical geometry. The crystal is also drawn at nearly twice the stroke width.

The controls, including one that is easy to misread

Seeds is the control that decides how many arms there are. The branch count is derived from it directly, plus a small bounded addition on beats, and capped. It is worth saying plainly, because the mode also ships a Symmetry value of 6 and this draw path does not read Symmetry at all. If the arm count is not changing, Seeds is the slider you want.

• Noise deformation is scoped to this mode alone within the engine, and it multiplies the facet fork. The mode ships it at 0.08: small, because a crystal with too much lateral wander stops looking grown and starts looking drawn.
• Bloom amount and Global glow raise both the opacity and the stroke width of every arm, so glow here thickens the lattice rather than haloing it.
• Beat response is the control with the most leverage on the whole mode, because the accretion advances once per latched beat. A track the analyser reads as half-tempo builds at half the rate.
• Lifecycle and Growth rate belong to the other growth models; this branch reads the persistent fraction instead.

When to reach for it

Anything with a build. Because the structure genuinely accumulates, a track that rises over a minute gets a visual that rises with it, which is unusual in a catalogue of 138 modes where most scenes are steady-state. It suits post-rock, orchestral, progressive house and long intros, and it is a poor fit for a loop where you need the first and last frames to match.

Open Crystal Growth or the editor. For the same engine drawn as waves instead of structure, read The Ripple Blossom Mode: Interference Needs More Than One Ring.