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When you start a new island in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, you’ll find an assortment of flowers of one type on your cliffs. As you play, you’ll be able to buy more flower seeds and plant a variety of flower species to spruce up your island paradise. All of these flowers will be red, yellow, or white, but there are also quite a few other colors you can get if you learn to garden the Animal Crossing way.

These “hybrid” flowers include black, blue, purple, pink, and orange variations of the flowers you can plant normally. Hybrid flowers aren’t just pretty–they can sometimes attract rare bugs you couldn’t get otherwise and can also be used as crafting ingredients, so it’s a good idea to have at least a few on your island.

Types Of Flowers

Like with your native island fruit, there will be one type of flower that grows on your cliffs when you start the game; keep in mind that you’ll need a ladder to scale the cliffs. You can buy other varieties of flowers (in seed form) from Tommy in Resident Services or at Nook’s Cranny when it opens. The flower varieties include:

• Lily
• Tulip
• Rose
• Pansy
• Cosmos
• Windflower
• Hyacinth
• Mum

While the Nook’s Cranny stock rotates each day, there will be some kinds of flowers they’ll never sell, so you’ll have to buy those from friends’ shops. For example, your shop might sell lilies, tulips, pansies, windflowers, and hyacinths, but never roses, cosmos, or mums, so you’d have to find a friend whose shop does sell one of those in order to plant them on your island.

Each of these flowers comes in red, white, and yellow varieties aside from windflowers, which come in red, white, and orange initially. All other colors aren’t sold at Nook’s Cranny and are considered rare.

How To Grow Hybrid Flowers

The main way to grow hybrid flowers is by crossbreeding two others. Flowers can crossbreed if they’re the same species of flower, they’re planted next to each other (either directly or diagonally), and they’ve been watered with any kind of watering can or by rain. If these conditions are met, a new flower has a chance of sprouting on nearby empty spaces the next day.

To maximize your chances of producing a new flower, try planting your flowers in a crosshatch pattern so that the flowers are touching diagonally but not directly side-to-side. This will leave enough room between flowers for new ones to spawn. If you’re having trouble planting them in a pattern, try digging holes where you want them to go and then planting the flowers; your character will prioritize planting them in nearby holes first before planting them on flat ground. This should help you better control the spacing of your flowers so you don’t have to dig them up and replant them a bunch.

Hybrid flowers generally follow standard color-mixing rules, but there are some strange exceptions, including colors that you can only get through a chain of flower-breeding. Note that you won’t always get a rare color from crossbreeding, so read on for which combinations of flowers can produce hybrid flowers. We’ll continue to update this list as we confirm more colors and combinations.

Hybrid Flower Combinations

Lily

• Pink = Red + White
• Orange = Red + Yellow
• Black = Red + Red

Tulip

• Pink = Red + White
• Orange = Red + Yellow
• Black = Red + Red
• Purple = Orange + Orange

Rose

• Pink = Red + White
• Orange = Red + Yellow
• Black = Red + Red
• Purple = White + White
• Blue
• Gold

Pansy

• Orange = Red + Yellow
• Blue = White + White

Cosmos

• Pink = Red + White
• Orange = Red + Yellow
• Black

Windflower

• Pink = Red + White
• Blue

Hyacinth

• Pink = Red + White
• Purple
• Blue = White + White

Mum

• Stay tuned!

Other Ways To Get Hybrid Flowers

While you mostly have to grow hybrid flowers yourself, if you’re lucky, you may find rare flowers while on a deserted island Mystery Tour. In order to take some home with you, you’ll need a shovel; dig up the flowers and you’ll be able to replant them on your own island. This also goes for flowers on your Best Friends’ islands if you ask nicely!

Unlike in previous Animal Crossing games, you can pick flowers without losing the whole plant. If you need hybrid flowers for a DIY recipe or just decoration, simply pick them using Y and they’ll grow back within a few days.

Housing is hard to come by in the MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV, as there’s limited space and lots within the game’s residential areas. It’s why Square Enix also has a condition that if a house hasn’t been accessed for 30 days, it’ll be marked for automatic demolition–and after 45 days of inactivity, the house will then be removed. However, citing the effects of coronavirus and its impact on people’s situations–and by extension, its player base–Square Enix has enacted a temporary freeze on its housing policy.

On the official FFXIV site, Square Enix put out a statement about the change and stated, “Taking into account the world-wide spread of the COVID-19 (also known as ‘novel coronavirus’) and the economical effects of various cities going into lock-down, we have decided to temporarily suspend automatic housing demolition.”

The freeze on housing demolition went into effect immediately. However, if your house had already been marked for demolition prior to the change in policy, you’ll need to access your house in order to save it. The freeze will be in effect indefinitely as the FFXIV team said that it will “monitor the situation in the coming days, and inform you all when we have come to a decision that auto-demolition can commence again.”

Considering that in-game housing is tough to get in FFXIV, and the fact that many who own estates put a ton of time and effort into designing their homes, it’s a nice gesture to those who might have trouble accessing the game at this time. It’d be pretty sad to come back to the game to see the property you’ve invested in demolished, especially if the current real-world circumstances have prevented you from playing FFXIV.

The second of Borderlands 3‘s DLC expansions–Guns, Love, and Tentacles: The Marriage of Wainwright & Hammerlock–has been released and so I figured it would be as good a time as any to jump back into Gearbox’s first-person loot shooter. The Borderlands franchise has a decent track record when it comes to DLC and it’s been a few months since I played the third mainline installment so, ya know, why not?

However, I wasn’t particularly enthused by my time with Guns, Love, and Tentacles, largely because Gearbox’s interpretation of H.P. Lovecraft’s work incorporates some of the problematic parts of the author’s worldview and then does nothing to address them.

It’s the DLC’s portrayal of black people that irks me the most, largely because of the Borderlands franchise’s style of storytelling. Borderlands games traditionally explore concepts or pieces of pop culture through sarcasm, satire, or playful homage. Gearbox takes something that already exists and adapts it to match its style of irreverent Borderlands mayhem.

When this process works, it really works. For example, Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep from Borderlands 2, which sends you on a tabletop RPG adventure that riffs on Dungeons & Dragons, is a fun DLC, both in terms of theme and gameplay. There’s also the whole Greek mythology symbolism that acts as a throughline for all four games, such as each Siren being a beautiful but dangerous woman and the planet Pandora acting as a vault, all of which contributes to the more fascinating aspects of Borderlands’ lore.

Guns, Love, and Tentacles is a Lovecraft-themed DLC, incorporating certain aspects of H.P. Lovecraft’s stories and the Cthulhu Mythos as the backdrop to the overall narrative. Unfortunately, what makes the DLC feel more adaptive than interpretive is in how it treats Sir Hammerlock and Wainwright Jakobs, the two characters who are at the center of Guns, Love, and Tentacles. The DLC is about the two characters getting married and facing the unfortunate snag of holding the venue on a planet ruled by a cult. The cult’s leader, Eleanor, deems the couple’s love to be impure and weak and so Wainwright becomes the unwilling host of her husband’s spirit–doomed to slowly transform into her beloved unless you decide to do something to stop the process. As Hammerlock is rendered a passive bystander for pretty much the entire DLC (he helps you on your quest to save his fiance on only one occasion), all the agency falls to you.

So the story of the DLC is that a woman who’s essentially an otherworldly witch robs a gay couple of their happy day, questions their relationship, and then tries to fix the “flaw” of their love by transforming one of the men into her own husband, so as to create a supposedly more pure love. That’s already a little strange and more than a bit homophobic, but when you also consider that this DLC is Lovecraft-inspired, it becomes even more problematic.

It all boils down to this: H.P. Lovecraft was racist–and an outspoken white supremacist-level racist at that. This isn’t a case where we must separate the artist from his art either, as the man incorporated his views on people of color into his literary works. Just look at his poem “On the Creation of Niggers,” which states that the gods created man and beast and then created black people as some unexplainable in-between creature.

His hateful opinions regarding people of color extend to his stories that cover the occult and cosmic horror as well. For instance, “The Horror at Red Hook” refers to Brooklyn, a New York City borough with a citizenship mostly composed of colored folks, as “leporous and cancerous with evil dragged from elder worlds” and the people who live there as “hordes of prowlers” who elicit a “babel of sound and filth.” The third chapter of “The Call of Cthulhu” refers to the murder of the “queer and evil-looking crew of Kanakas and half-castes” as a “duty,” seeing as the group of people of color and those of mixed race are of “abominable quality.” The Deep Ones in “The Shadow over Innsmouth” are meant to be monstrously horrifying because they represent the impure offspring of interracial couples.

So now, looking at the storyline of Guns, Love, and Tentacles, you have to take into account how Gearbox has written the black characters–in this case, Wainwright and Hammerlock–because that’s a part of Lovecraft fiction too. And in this sense, Gearbox is rather spot-on. The two black men are too worthless to help themselves and have a love that’s constantly scrutinized and questioned throughout a majority of the DLC, while the antagonist is “purifying” their love by transforming one of them into her white, heterosexual husband. If she just falls in love with and marries Wainwright, that would be, in Lovecraft’s eyes, a gross intermixing of the races, so Wainwright has to transform into her husband first in order for the love to be genuine. Lots of red flags there, but very Lovecraft.

The problem is that Gearbox does nothing to dismiss them.

Now, I get it. It’s a Borderlands game. I don’t expect Borderlands 3 to tackle the nuanced ins-and-outs of every aspect of what makes a Lovecraftian story. But if your game is going to adapt Lovecraft’s stories and incorporate the themes and messages of those stories, then you should address their problematic parts too. Guns, Love, and Tentacles doesn’t do that. Wainwright and Hammerlock don’t even get the chance to showcase how their love is worthy of overcoming Eleanor and her husband–you defeat the villainous couple while your allies helplessly watch. Guns, Love, and Tentacles is one of the few situations where Borderlands’ traditional irreverence could have been sharpley used to mock Lovecraft’s horrible views and actually address issues with his work, but the DLC makes no attempt to do so despite the opportunity.

And, of course, in doing so, Guns, Love, and Tentacles takes on the same flaws as Lovecraft’s work. The actual mission structure in Guns, Love, and Tentacles is of okay quality–like Borderlands 3’s main campaign, you have too many annoying platforming sections and bullet-sponge boss fights breaking up the enjoyable bouts of looting and shooting. But Gearbox’s seemingly wilful hand-waving of Lovecraft’s views in Guns, Love, and Tentacles gives the DLC’s story a terrible aftertaste that ultimately results in a poor campaign expansion for Borderlands 3.

Nintendo shared a new trailer for Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition during this week’s surprise Nintendo Direct Mini. Along with giving us another look at the upcoming game, the presentation revealed that there will be entirely new story content, and you’ll be able to play it right from the beginning.

Nintendo confirmed on Twitter that the new epilogue story in Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition–called Xenoblade Chronicles: Future Connected–will be available from the outset, so you won’t first need to clear the main storyline to access it. That’s good news if you’ve previously played the game and want to jump right into the new content, as the main story can take upwards of 100 hours to finish.

Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition is slated to launch on May 29. However, as Nintendo noted at the start of the Direct Mini, release dates that were announced during the presentation are subject to change due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

In addition to the standard edition of the game, Nintendo is releasing a special “Definitive Works” version that comes with a physical copy of the game and a hardcover art book. Europe, meanwhile, is receiving a more lavish Collector’s Edition, which includes a steel book game case, art book, poster, and vinyl and digital soundtrack. You can learn more in our Xenoblade Chronicles Definitive Edition pre-order guide.

Jared Leto made the most of his Thursday night by dressing up as Joe Exotic, a central figure in the Netflix True-crime documentary Tiger King, which Leto was hosting a viewing for on Twitter.

Leto announced Wednesday afternoon that he would be hosting a Tiger King viewing party that night at 6 p.m. PDT on Twitter. The tweet came with a picture of Leto’s face edited onto Joe Exotic, who is the subject of the documentary miniseries and the most-watched program of the day on Netflix in the United States. The series focuses on an eccentric man who bought an Oklahoma horse farm in the 90s and converted it into a zoo. The Netflix Twitter account clarified 30 minutes before the event began that it would be a viewing party of just the first episode.

 

Leto posted his first tweet one minute before the 6 p.m. start time. “Got my popcorn. Pressing play on #TigerKing Episode 1. Let’s do this @Netflix #JaredLetoCinemaClub,” Leto wrote. An image accompanying the tweet showed Leto in a colorful collared shirt in the essence of the flamboyant subject of the documentary. Instead of a real tiger, Leto has what looks like a stuffed animal bracelet.

 

Leto then says in a follow-up tweet that he’s already seen the entire series and promises viewers a wild “ride.” In his next two tweets, he thanked Netflix “for keeping us entertained during this challenging time” and thanked Joe “for keeping fringe alive.”

The multi-hyphenate consistently commented on the wardrobe of the people in the documentary and found a striking comparison between a shirt that he previously wore and a shirt that somebody wears in the show.

Leto tweeted throughout the episode and ended his viewing party with more praise for the Netflix miniseries.

“Wow. Mind blown again – end of episode one,” Leto wrote. “Masterful direction and great job to all involved with the production!!!”

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Tiger King consists of seven episodes running 40-50 minutes each and was released on March 20 on Netflix. IGN’s review of the series calls it “a fascinating and depressing look inside a community of big cat fanatics.” Kate McKinnon is starring in a scripted miniseries based on Joe Exotic’s story, and Dax Shepard and Edward Norton are fan-casting themselves as Joe Exotic.

For those that have seen the series, here is what the subjects of the series are doing today. Leto was also in the news himself recently after finding out about the coronavirus way later than most people.

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Petey Oneto is a freelance writer for IGN.