The developers behind the popular RPG-dating sim Love and Deepspace have issued an urgent safety warning to players after officially publishing cocktail recipes that included highly poisonous plants as garnishes — recipes that fans quickly realised could have fatal consequences if recreated in real life.
On 28 September, the official Love and Deepspace social media account shared five “Shimmering Blend” cocktail recipes as part of an in-game event, each themed around one of the game’s romanceable characters. The drinks looked visually striking, but two of them featured garnishes made from genuinely toxic plants.
Which Recipes Were Dangerous?
One recipe called for a mixture of crimson pomegranate juice and cinnamon, topped with a datura garnish. Datura is a notoriously poisonous plant — all parts of it are toxic, and ingestion can cause severe hallucinations, delirium, fever, tachycardia, respiratory failure, and potentially death.
Another recipe combined sweet peach juice with gelatin sheets and a flame lily garnish. Every part of the flame lily plant contains colchicine, a chemical that can be lethal when consumed, causing symptoms including fever, vomiting, diarrhoea, and hypovolemic shock — a condition where the body loses lethal amounts of blood and bodily fluids.
Both plants are real and readily available. Fans could technically order them online, which is precisely what alarmed the community when they noticed the ingredients.
Community Backlash and the Delayed Safety Notice
Players quickly flooded the comments section, urging the developers to delete the post before anyone attempted to mix the drinks at home. An X Community Note was attached to the original post, warning users that “Flame Lily and Datura listed as garnishes are extremely poisonous. All parts can cause severe poisoning or death if ingested. Do not use in real drinks.”
Despite the immediate outcry, it took the developers more than a day to respond. On 30 September, Infold Games — the studio behind Love and Deepspace — posted a follow-up statement clarifying that the visual guides were purely thematic and never intended for real-world consumption.
“Safety Notice: All drinks shown are fictional and for in-game purposes only,” the official Love and Deepspace account wrote. “Do not attempt to recreate or consume them in reality.”
How Did This Happen?
Each protagonist in the sci-fi dating game is associated with a specific symbolic flower, and the marketing team apparently incorporated these flowers as aesthetic garnishes in the recipes without researching their real-world toxicity. The result was a promotional post that looked beautiful but contained genuinely dangerous information.
While most people would recognise in-game items as fictional, the recipes were presented as real ingredient lists with real plant names — creating a scenario where someone unfamiliar with botanical toxicity might attempt to recreate them. The absence of any initial disclaimer made the situation worse.
The Broader Lesson for Game Marketing
Love and Deepspace remains one of the most successful gacha games on the market, and the incident highlights a gap that can exist between creative marketing teams and basic safety research. When promotional material crosses from purely fictional into using real-world plant names and ingredient formats, a disclaimer should be standard practice — not something added after community backlash.
The developers have since clarified their position, but the incident serves as a reminder that even fictional in-game events can have real-world consequences when the line between fantasy and reality blurs — especially when poisonous plants are involved.
