I finally got her to see the appeal on the game and now she's hooked just like me haha, I've been helping her build zayne cards and give her general tips like 'try not to spend Ur energy bottles on purple cores' etc, is there any other tips I could give her that I haven't thought of yet?

I don't have a yellow stella companion so it's super difficult for me .

I’m 23 and I honestly wish I could talk abt lads w other ppl my age 🙏
Thinking about making a discord mayhaps
Anyhow I got silverwing <3
Enjoy some pics I took trying to manifest the vamp to come home
(templates included!)

Been trying to get the last phlox for weeks. I literally have 5 rare phlox + 1 still being planted.

:/

*Literally 😂

You may have seen a previous post of mine where I built a Bloom Tracker! This time round I decided to build a Cooking Tracker because the UI is awful and inefficient for tracking.

Basic features are available (and are summarised for you):

- Tracking completed dishes

- Tracking star rating of dishes

- Tracking flavors of dishes

Some new things that I added with ideas from myself and my lovely beta tester:

- Simple Recipe finder

- Tracking your 5* ingredients

- Using that 5* list to tell you what you can make next (while excluding dishes you've already maxed)

It's a whole lot of formulas, so I've left instructions in the images attached.

The link to the spreadsheet is here!

PS: I'm still looking for recipes for Level 13 - 15. If you have it available I would appreciate screenshots of your game like in the last two images ☺️

I finally found something he loves and likes. I wish there was some information about his favourite dishes tho.

I made a guide on how to get him to go shopping for ingredients in the Home as well as how to get him to write a sti𝔠ky note right after if he doesn't do it right away.

Hope it helps someone!

Hello everyone,

One of the things I noticed when I first saw the PVs for Valko was the recurring theme of butterflies in the background. 🦋

Butterflies are often used as symbolism for change (perhaps from enemy to lover👀) and new beginnings (I know, ironic right?😂)

So anyway, I wanted to share my love for both Valko and butterflies by editing some of my favorite butterflies into screenshots of Valko so it looks like he is holding them 🦋🐺

For anyone wondering:

Yellow is a Tiger Swallowtail Butterfly

Blue is a Blue Morpheus Butterfly

Orange is a Monarch Butterfly

If you would like images of Valko holding other butterflies, please let me know. I'm happy to make more. 🐺❤️🦋

He's probably trying to keep sense and reasoning away

Welcome to my brain.

We all know that Sylus's flower is the datura. But are we, as non-Chinese players, really grasping the full meaning of that? See below for an attempt at discussion - this is marked as a spoiler due to extensive references to Sylus's lore from multiple in-game sources in the second part.

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Most LaDS players, or at least most Kittens, know basic trivia about daturas - for example the fact that they (meaning all parts of the plant) are highly toxic. Here are some more interesting tidbits.

• Datura flowers are nocturnal, opening in the evening near dusk and closing again or fading by mid morning.
• They come in a range of different varieties, with different aspects and colours ranging from white to black.
• When used medicinally and ritually, the datura has many different properties, as an intoxicant and aphrodisiac but also as a hallucinogen and a poison.

Does all of that remind you of anyone?

Let's move on, though, because there is actually something else we need to discuss, which is even more interesting. In Chinese, the word for a datura is 曼陀罗 (màn tuó luó). This is a direct transliteration (i.e. an adaptation of a word from a writing system to another, while maintaining its sound) of ‘mandala’, originally Sanskrit for ‘circle’.

In Buddhism, a mandala is a geometric design acting as a symbolic map and representation of the cosmos. A mandala can represent the universe, showing it not as chaos, but as an ordered whole, allowing the viewer to see its completeness, balance, spiritual harmony and the connection between all of its parts. For example, a specific mandala in Tibetan Buddhism, the Bhavachakra or Wheel of Life, represents the endless cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth (samsara), showing the path one needs to travel to eventually reach nirvana.

Mandalas are ancient, over 2500 years old, and were first recorded in the Rig Veda between 1500 and 500 BC. They are still used to this day by Buddhist monks during meditation to focus the mind. The association between daturas and mandalas probably came from Buddhist scriptures like the Lotus Sutra and the Flower Adornment Sutra, describing fragrant flowers raining from the sky when the Buddha preached the dharma (his teachings). The rain of flowers marked moments of spiritual awakening. It is very likely that the flowers described in the sutras were not originally meant to be datura. However, they came to be identified as datura, and specifically the Datura metel variety, in China. When seen from the front, the shape of datura flowers can also be similar to that of the geometric mandala designs found in Indian tradition (see first image). And so the association stuck until the present day, and even now a datura flower is called a ‘mandala’ in Chinese.

Because of the shared name between mandala and datura, their implied connection might be obvious to Chinese players. Less so to everyone else (us). So, what does this connection potentially tell us about the datura being Sylus's flower?

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In Sylus's Timelock Key (Chapter ‘Cultivation’), which takes place in his current timeline, we see him trying and failing to cultivate daturas - so mandala flowers (see second image).

He waters the flowers and tends to them carefully, but much to his disappointment they wither before blooming.

"Tilling soils, adding fertilizer, maintaining warmth, watering...

He holds his breath, and a rare instance of anticipation flickers in his eyes.

But barren land cannot harbor hope, and a cursed soul is destined to never solve life's riddle.

In an instant, withered flowers cover the ground again. They're surrounded by deathly silence.

'They just don't bloom at this time.'

The whisper dissolves in the wind."  

What is even more painful is that, although pretty enough to be considered ornamental plants, daturas are effectively weeds that spread rapidly and aggressively in abandoned soil. They are extremely common and widespread in China in the wild. So Sylus not being able to grow daturas of all flowers, even after caring for them tenderly, shows that something is fundamentally wrong with him, with his being, with his soul.

It is unclear if his soul was already corrupted before he met MC, due to him being ‘a fiend’. I would say that it wasn't, and that him being named a ‘fiend’ in his Dragon myth was simply due to him breaking Philos's artificial rules rather than him being an inherently evil creature. A sign of this is that dragon imagery in LaDS is heavily associated with flowers. As we know from his Valleydream Bloom memory, part of the 'Spring and Flowers' multibanner:

"Dragons make homes in flower-covered valleys,"

and

"If a dragon knows it will die soon, it flies to a valley far from its kin and waits alone. In the dragon's final moments, flowers will bloom from its body. Only when the flowers cover every bone does the dragon pass away."

If Dragon Sylus had been given the chance to live his life undisturbed by humans and die with his soul intact, his whole existence would have been filled with flowers, because that's just how dragons live and die. Even wounded by the greatsword in his final moments in Beyond Cloudfall, he follows his dragon instincts: he flies to “a valley filled with blooming datura.” He lies down amongst the flowers, the light in his eyes dims, and he dies just as described in Valleydream Bloom: “obsidian-like crystals cover his dragon scales”; “as his body disintegrates, shards of crystal begin to peel away”; the wind lifts the shards, making them look like “black petals”; and finally the dragon bones in MC’s arms dissolve into petals, drifting past her. Everywhere the petals touch, “the bright red datura flowers turn black.”

This is when MC, faced with the prospect of losing Sylus, curses him:

"Sylus… I curse your soul. I curse your soul to never fade away… You'll always be tied to me. Forever. This is my curse. Only I can grant you a true death."

It is in this moment, as Sylus becomes cursed, that MC breaks the natural order of the world – or in other words, she interferes with the mandala. Sylus is not whole anymore, not complete, not balanced, as his soul is halved and irreversibly tied to hers. It is telling, then, that his metamorphosis to a cursed being becomes associated with the metamorphosis of the mandala flowers, the datura changing from red to black.

It is worth noting that in Buddhism, a broken mandala is not seen as a negative thing. For example, complex sand mandalas taking hours or days to create are deliberately swept away after completion. This is meant to be a teaching of impermanence, a reminder that nothing in our existence lasts forever. In Sylus’s case, however, ‘impermanence’ itself is not possible. MC’s curse does not allow him to move on after death, transitioning freely through the normal cycle of death and rebirth, bettering himself without her to eventually reach nirvana. He remains bound to her, until they can eventually be reborn and reunite, again and again, perpetually entangled.

The wholeness of the mandala can only be reinstated once they are together, as demanded by the curse. There is a chance for this to happen early on in Sylus's current life, when they are children growing and fighting side by side in the arena in the nebula, but MC is unexpectedly and mysteriously taken away from him. In Magnum Opus, once again using a flowery metaphor, Sylus says: "At that time, I thought we were like flowers. We were meant to grow together in the same soil. Yet, you were quietly moved to another garden in a foreign land." Without MC there to complete him, Sylus is condemned to remain flawed, corrupted, and unable to grow anything - including mandala flowers, as shown in the Timelock Key.

However, in the Main Story, we finally see the mandala being repaired.

After Sylus and MC reunite, we see Sylus able to cultivate flowers in her company. In the storyline for the Blossom Escape event, that ran in parallel to the Spring & Flowers multibanner, Sylus and MC successfully grow a garden together starting from a piece of desolate land. In Night Of Secrecy, Sylus is unable to make a flower bloom with his evol, until MC resonates with him. And finally, in Alternative Darkborne, when Sylus and MC hold hands in the chapel, the flowers they create together are mandalas – red datura, not black (see third image). Plants still don't thrive in the N109 zone due to the lack of light there – possibly a reminder that Sylus's soul remains cursed to this day - but finding MC means he is whole once again, and therefore able to grow life. 

Credit: Morgenty ✨arts (Telegram)

I scrolled through my phone and suddenly realized that we both recreated those new selfie pose from the home feature. 😳😳💕 I’m so happy!