Maybe don't recreate these Love and Deepspace drinks at home.
It’s been a while since Love and Deepspace found itself in the gaming community spotlight, and once again, it might not be for the best reasons.
On Tuesday (29 September), the game’s official social media accounts shared a promotional post featuring animated cocktail recipes tied to its ongoing Moonlit Reserve event and A Night That Never Ends limited Wish Pool.
The drinks come from A Sip of Splendour, a Moonlit Reserve mini-game where players work with their Blobbu crew to gather ingredients, brew blends, and complete drink orders. The event runs from 22 September until 10 October.
The drinks certainly look pretty, and the animation is actually quite cute. There is, however, one rather important problem with at least two of the drinks: their recipe ingredients include real flowers that are poisonous to humans.
One recipe calls for Sweet Peach Juice, Flame Lily, and Gelatin Sheets, while the other combines Crimson Pomegranate Juice, Datura, and Cinnamon. In both cases, the flowers are presented as garnishes. X’s Community Notes feature has since placed a warning beneath the post, stating that Flame Lily and Datura are poisonous and should not be used in real drinks.
And no, this is not simply a case of picking the wrong flower for happy hour.
What are Flame Lily and Datura, and are they poisonous?
Unfortunately for anyone tempted to recreate Rafayel’s drink, the Flame Lily is not the sort of garnish that should be anywhere near an actual cocktail.
Flame Lily, or Gloriosa superba, is a striking red-and-yellow flowering plant native to parts of Africa and Asia. It also happens to be extremely poisonous. The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew states that all parts of the plant, particularly its tubers, are “extremely poisonous” and that ingestion can be fatal. Kew also notes that it contains toxic alkaloids including colchicine.
Then there is Datura, which somehow manages to be an even more ominous cocktail ingredient. Datura is a group of flowering plants known for its large trumpet-shaped blooms. A 2021 toxicology review indexed on PubMed notes that Datura contains toxic tropane alkaloids including atropine, scopolamine, and hyoscyamine.
A more recent review of Datura stramonium poisoning cases found that all parts of the plant contain these alkaloids and can cause anticholinergic poisoning, with reported cases linked to accidental ingestion, misidentification, and deliberate misuse. Medical literature has also documented accidental food poisoning involving Datura. In one published case, three members of the same family were poisoned after eating a meal prepared with Datura flowers.
Symptoms of Datura poisoning can include hallucinations and other severe anticholinergic effects. Consumption of any part of the plant can result in serious toxicity, with severe cases potentially becoming life-threatening.
So while both flowers may look perfectly at home in one of Love and Deepspace’s dreamy animated drinks, they are very much a leave-them-on-the-screen situation in real life.
How are Flame Lily and Datura connected to Love and Deepspace?
The choice of flowers does not appear to be completely random, at least. Both already have direct connections to Rafayel and Sylus in Love and Deepspace’s in-game story content.
Rafayel’s Home System Love Timeline includes an entry titled “A World Filled by Him” that says: “And the flame lily will keep track of every moment he grows a little closer to me.” It doesn't just appear once randomly either. In Rafayel’s Evermore Bond story, the main character traces a flame lily on the face of a watch and says, “A flame lily that never fades...”
Sylus has a similarly direct connection to Datura. His Home System Love Timeline includes the entry “Onychinus Leader’s Nest”, which says: “The dark datura seeds already told me the answer.”
Another Sylus story, Embroidered Vividness, makes the connection even more direct when he says: “Have you ever seen a dark datura? Use that.”
So there is an in-game reason for Flame Lily appearing in Rafayel’s drink and Datura appearing in Sylus’. The symbolism works perfectly well inside Linkon City, but players pointed out that it could be dangerous when used in the outside world.
Love and Deepspace players warn others not to recreate the drinks
The recipes quickly attracted attention outside the Love and Deepspace community. Over on the Love and Deepspace subreddit, players separately warned others not to use Datura or Flame Lily when recreating the drinks. One commenter pointed out that members of the fandom have recreated cakes, food, and drinks from the game before, which is why they felt a warning would have been useful.
Another discussion on the “gacha gaming” subreddit passed 1,000 upvotes as players debated how dangerous the post could be if someone attempted to recreate the drinks.
One recurring argument was that most people simply would not recognise Datura or know that it was poisonous. Reddit user SoaringSwordDev argued that “most people dont even know what Datura is,” adding that knowing which varieties of plants are poisonous is “NOT common sense.” They continued: “also i googled Datura and it showed a FLOWER. A FLOWER. that i've never seen before,” arguing that most people would not necessarily know which flowers are dangerous just by looking at them.
Other commenters raised similar concerns, particularly because the post presents the flowers alongside ordinary ingredients in the same recipe format. Reddit user Orangelemonyyyy pushed back against arguments that players should simply know better, writing: “Deadass I've read several people defending this by saying something like ‘You should have enough common sense to not make it’ and it made me swear.”
Others took a more forgiving view and stressed that the drinks come from a fictional mini-game, rather than being presented as a real-world bartending guide.
As of writing, Infold Games has not publicly addressed concerns surrounding the recipes, or added its own warning explaining that Flame Lily and Datura should not be used in real drinks.
