The DragonVale logo.
Have you ever heard of DragonVale? It's a game where you breed and obtain dragons and you compete in Dragon Races, Colloseum, and more. But, there are some dark sides to DragonVale that no one else knows about, except few people.
Something Very Strange
It all started back around the end of April or the start of May. I had missed my chance to get a Sakura, and was going back to trying hopelessly to get a Panlong dragon. Using the combos Mud + Blazing and Lava + Fog, I got...an army of useless dragons. Each one was sent to the Hibernation Cave to do who-knows-what.
On a particular lucky (or was it unlucky?) day, I bred Mud + Blazing and suddenly noticed that the time was 3:23:59:55. Excitement filled my heart before I realized: wait, what? 96 hours was impossible. I passed it off as a wierd glitch, but, not in the mood to wait four days for my breeding cave to fill up, I spent $5.00 worth of gems and got the wierd thing out of the breeding cave. Strangely, the egg that popped up wasn't a rainbow egg like I expected it to be (since 96 hours is closest to 48 hours,) but just a wierd pitch-black egg.
I took a picture of it and searched Google to see if it had anything like it. I found a few pics, but they were just recolorings of other eggs. The black egg was entirely unique. Later on, I deleted the picture.
Anyways, with my breeding cave freed, I faithfully went back to Mud + Blazing...and it's a 48 hour incubation time. Hoping that this rainbow wouldn't be glitched like the other one, I waited four days to hatch both the black egg and the rainbow. After two days, I moved the rainbow out of the nursery, and, hoping that after all of my luck I would get a panlong, stuck Mud + Blazing into the breeding cave again.
8 hours. Ugggghhhhh.
After the four days of anticipation, I hatched both eggs. Both of them wanted a Rainbow Habitat, so I bought a second and threw them in there. One was a normal rainbow dragon, as I expected. The other, however, was a black version of the LYD/Rainbow. Thinking that I might have found a new dragon, I looked at the black one's description (wierdly, it was in a different font than all other dragons' descriptions.)
"The extraordinarily rare Phantom Dragon is only handled by select few breeders, and many wizards do not know of their existance. Much like the rare rainbow dragon once was, the Phantom Dragon is a creature of revered legend. In the wild, Phantom Dragons fly endlessly through space, looking for something...mysterious."
After I bred the phantom dragon, I noticed slight changes in the happy-go-lucky music of Dragonvale. I quickly cooked up some Sarjins and levelled up my Rainbow and Phantom to level 10.
Afterwards, I began searching the internet for reports of the Phantom Dragon. I only found one that was worth my while; it was a story eerily similar to mine. I tried to contact this person, but three days later the website I found it at went down.
About a day later, I noticed that the Rainbow Habitat my Phantom had been inhabiting was slowly turning darker; the coins in the pot of gold turned black, and the rainbow's colors got signifigantly shadier. The money limit for the Phantom's Habitat began to slowly go up from 1 million to 1.5 million. However. its earn rate was still the same as the rainbow's. Eventually, I thought to look at the description of the habitat. Unfortunately, I didn't write this one down, and I have forgotten it. I do remember being shocked at what it said; it was something about a "rivalry" between Phantom and Rainbow dragons.
I need to go; I'll finish telling my tale later today. This story is true, although strange.
Second Post: Part 2
Ugh, I feel like such a liar. I'm fed up with keeping this secret, but it's going to bring a lot of skepticism. IF THIS HAS HAPPENED TO ANYBODY ELSE, TELL ME!!!
Continued from last blog post-
Around this time, I had no idea how to screenshot on an iPhone and thus any pictures I took with my old camera were blurry. Unsatisfied, I deleted them and decided against taking any more pictures (which I now regret.)
A few days after the habitat turned completely dark, I went on to DragonVale and, after my usual panlong breeding failure, went back to collect the cash from my rainbow dragon. I stopped short. There was a Phantom Dragon where my Rainbow should have been.
I looked around the island to see that, surely enough, my old phantom dragon was there as well. Had my Rainbow Dragon glitched into being a Phantom Dragon? I doubted it. To make sure this didn't happen to any other dragons, I moved all buildings off of my fifth island and put the two Phantoms on it. Out of curiousity, once the Sandstorm Dragon I got from Lava + Fog hatched, I bred the two Phantoms together. It was just another 96-hour egg, however, and I waited four lonnnnnng days.
In the Phantom Dragon excitement, I forgot about breeding a Butterfly and Emerald. After that 96-hour wait time finished in the breeding cave, I began going with Crystal + Lichen. As such, it took me completely by surprise when I realized that my metal habitat had dissappeared.
Alarmed, I checked the fifth island. I didn't see anything. However, when I looked around a bit, I noticed more Phantom Habitats with Phantom Dragons that had the names of my old metal and metal hybrids. I tried to sell the Phantoms, but the game displayed a message along the lines of "You can't sell this dragon now!"
Although I enjoyed being one of the few people to breed an extraordinarily rare dragon, I didn't want them taking over my park. I surrounded all of the Phantom Habitats with decoration (as if that would do anything,) took down my paths, and moved all of my habitats and buildings onto two islands. It did nothing, and the Air Habitat went down the second day.
I sent an angry message to Backflip, but the response said that there was no such thing as a Phantom Dragon and that they couldn't help me. One lucky dragon shouldn't be able to tear down your whole park!
Soon random decoration, the Fountain of Youth, and more habitats became black. This was annoying. I started buying more habitats and breeding my basic dragons to fill them up, slowing the advance of the Phantom Dragons. It didn't work well. Soon only a few habitats and buildings remained. Then my Breeding Cave became a Phantom Cave.
Suddenly, I couldn't breed dragons other than Phantoms anymore. I bred two together for no reason, and the incubation time was only a minute. My Treat Farms could now grow Phantom Weed, which cost 1000 DragonCash, took 10 minutes to prepare, and gave 100,000 food. I refused to do anything and began leaving DragonVale for long periods of time (2-3 days.) Finally, everything became Phantomified. The islands' texture became darker and darker.
When I tapped on the original Phantom Habitat, a wierd dialogue came up.
"The Phantom Dragon was banished from this world by the Wizards that discovered it early in history. Its existance was hushed up, but it was never entirely removed. Occasionally, a breeder will be able to find one. Their park will soon fall."
I wrote it down and then tapped OK. Another dialogue box came up.
"Do you really think the dragons enjoyed this? This was a game for you, wasn't it? Being trapped in an awful habitat, treated like animals when you are a beautiful, intelligent creature...the Phantom Dragon isn't evil. It is liberating your poor dragons."
What? This couldn't be true. The dragons enjoyed their habitats, didn't they? And this was just a game, anyways. It's not as if it were real.
"You and those wizards are terrible people. They abduct dragons from the wild and sell them to you just to make as much money as possible. And you do it for fun! The poor dragons cannot choose who to breed with, even who they live with; they're forced to earn money for you. They are slaves."
Bogus. I wrote it down again and tapped the button.
"There are other ones that you torture, too. Let the Phantom Dragon liberate more..."
When I hit OK, the game went to the home screen randomly. I re-opened DragonVale, but it displayed the same message, and I hit OK again. The same thing happened.
Not wanting any more games to be corrupted, I deleted the DragonVale app, then went back and played another game several hours later. Nothing bad happened. Eventually I re-downloaded DragonVale on another device with a different Game Center account. I lost my Phantom-ified park, but that was more of a relief than a downside. A few days ago I worked up the courage to redownload it on my iPhone and log on with the same Game Center account. Wierdly, the game treated it like a new game, but one last dialogue box came up.
"Thank you for letting me liberate those dragons." When I hit OK, it went into the tutorial and nothing strange has happened since.
When I unlock the air dragon, I'll breed Blazing + Mud over and over in an attempt to get a Phantom and prove this. Over time, I came up with a theory for why this could have happened.
I'll specify in the next blog post.
Blog Post III (My Theory)
It took me a long while to figure this out. I believe this is the best possible explanation as to why what happened happened.
In the early days of DragonVale (see the line-Wizards that discovered it early in history) someone at Backflip thought about the game morally. The dragon descriptions hint at them once having lived in the wild. The dragons clearly wouldn't want to live in a park, breed with who their masters said to, and earn money, even be sold, when they could be having a wonderful life in the wild, where they came from. The developer probably wanted to create a figurative way of ending the generations of slavery that the intelligent dragons had to do.
When the developers created the Rainbow Dragon, this particular developer created a recolor called the Phantom Dragon and hid it in the code. The developer probably let several others in but kept it quiet from the rest of them.Its existance was hushed up, but it was never entirely removed. That seems to indicate that someone discovered it and they pretended to delete it, but never did.
The chances of breeding a Phantom Dragon would be INSANELY low. Only a few (un)lucky people (one of which is me) would happen to get one. Things would go like I told. I have no idea if there was malicious software in there that did wierd things to other games (Dragon Story for instance) or if it was just supposed to make you reconsider the morals of simulation games like DragonVale.
I'm wondering-since Mud + Blazing reportedly equals a Solstice Dragon, and that's the combo I got the Phantom with, perhaps more people will breed a Phantom. IF YOU DO, TELL ME! And if you wouldn't mind, please give me some pictures as evidence. (I don't have any, but that doesn't mean you won't.)
Blog Post 4 (An update on the story; posted four days after the original three)
OK. I've been searching desperately for evidence that this is true, as a combination of bad luck and utter stupidity blocked me from getting it. First of all, apparently someone discovered this and blabbed to all of their friends, because I now have insane amounts of comments.
Secondly, I'l puzzled at how, if we have access to the game files, nothing like this has been found. Nothing.
Perhaps it wasn't chance...was I specially selected somehow? I don't know. I'll do research later. Anyways, I got the brilliant idea to look at my search history-and the website where I found the report of the phantom dragon was still in it! I checked it out-it's apparently a blog...that doesn't exist anymore. I can't find any history for it, either.
NOTE: As I said, the link went down three days after I discovered it. It hasn't gone back up. In fact, all evidence that dragondecember has ever existed is gone.
I recall that in the blog post, the person told of a story similar to mine-including that they waited several weeks to give it to the public. I find it strange that it went down only three days later-and all of the previous posts to it vanished as well. Unfortunately, every time I think about it I come to the exact same conclusion: someone or somebody is trying to keep the existance of this dragon hushed up. But then why not remove it in the first place?
But let's backtrack. If I was "specially selected" to receive this dragon, why would I have been picked? Wouldn't the logical choice be to pick someone who was rough and didn't seem to care about their dragons? I don't fit that description at all; I even made my Bloom Dragon a special habitat all to itself.
Finally, I'm not giving out the username and password to my old account. Even if I did, the phantoms are GONE. It's an average new game. I'm also working towards reaching level 14 so I can get a blazing dragon and begin spamming mud + blazing. If I get another phantom, I can confirm its existance and confirm the theory that I was specially selected for this.
By the way-since this is clearly getting a lot of hype-I'd appreciate it if some of you would help me find evidence. I've been searching for days but haven't found anything, but maybe this army of commenters would have better luck.
EDIT: Fixed typo in link that made it 404. Now it displays the "this blog does not exist" blogger message.
OK, now that these four are compliled, I'll delete the other three....
Blog Post 5 (well really an edit but whatever)
First thing's first: After my brother messed around with the LYD egg sprite for a few hours (kudos to you if you're reading this, Ember,) I can confirm that the Phantom Egg was simply a recoloring of that (or perhaps the LYD was a recoloring of the Phantom...) I don't think that would be too hard to hide in the game files.
A supposed screenshot... Or a total hoax?
My Day on DragonVale
I was on my dragonvale yesterday and the screen started rippling and I touch it I get twisted into my dragonvale and my dragons were almost as surprised as I was I told them I was Jacob and I hoped they believed me but they took one look at me and... didn’t roar I took another look at them and they were building a tree fort I was so happy I was crying. Night came by quickly not just because I only have a moon dragon but because I had such a fun day I went to the dragon library and inn, I went to the Colosseum and got to see my dragon fight and train it was my rock he came first I was so happy I hoped when I woke up the next day I would still be in my dragonvale I woke up in a nice big cozy bed and then ROAR I thought it was supposed to be a rooster and then this is what happened every day for a week and then the last day I was supposed to leave “supposedly” but it was also the day my pearl was supposed to give me gems how or were is the entrance to the gemstone island? So I go to ask moon and she says there is none wizards have only seen them through telescopes like me and sun. OH NO this is a problem not because I want the gems but because that’s the only way I could get back home through the sapphire cave. I was so sad I would never see my home again.I thought for ages but not a day and then I finally got it how could I be so stupid there is no way to get to the gemstone island but dragons have “wings” to let them “fly” I started laughing my head off it was so funny so I get out of my tree fort and start whistling to my pearl dragon and Ord (the name of my pearl dragon) notices he flies to me I give off a giggle and I ask him to fly me to the gemstone island and he does I go look at the place that nobody has ever seen before and finally I yell goodbye to all my dragons then go into the cave of sapphires and just like that I got back sitting on my coach like no time at all had gone by!??
The Acursed Plant Dragon
Once, I bought a plant dragon from the market, as I was just starting to build up dragons for my shrine. After waiting the ordinary fifteen seconds, I hatched it, kept its heartbreakingly stupid name of Petal (it wouldn't live for long, only enough to be overfed growth hormones and then sold) and fed it to level 10. But as I moved to sell it, I suddenly remembered that I had left my breeding cave empty, and hastened away for fear of losing a few seconds of breeding time. I painstakingly chose my two dragons (mud and blazing, by an entirely meaningless coincidence I would have it) and by the time the bar had gathered itself and proudly displayed to me a grand time of 8 hours, I had forgotten all about Petal.
Overnight, something happened.
I didn't notice it until I came to collect the measly 500 coins from the habitat. I clicked on it, and then turned to my lightning habitats on the same island- when I noticed something odd. The plant habitat containing Petal was glowing- flashing lights, like when you select a habitat it glows on and off. But I hadn't selected it. Curious, I tapped on it again, and noticing I hadn't sold Petal the day before, I tapped on his/her (whaddaya know, a hermaphrodite dragon) icon. But given the normal array of tedious information and food bars, I found the picture, instead of doing the crazy yappy dance and roaring was staring levelly straight at me. Most of you have never seen a plant dragon from the front and it is a bit horrifying. The picture started to glow suddenly, like the habitat had, and just as I got creeped out and jabbed at the Sell button the app quit unexpectedly and flashed instantly to the menu. I tapped the app again, but the loading screen tips and tricks were different... instead of saying "Gold shrines allow dragons to get fatter" or "Flower dragons are unromantic" or "Give us money and your collection of small colored pixels will hatch quicker" It said simply- "we have found enlightenment."
When I arrived in my park strange things were happening. All the habitats had started to glow and the dragons had lost their glazed, this-is-the-only-facial-expression-I-can-muster-and-it's-not-exactly-flattering appearances, and were dancing in midair. Creeped out now I went back to Petal's habitat but when I tapped it all the dragons simply flew out of the habitat with Petal at the helm. They flew around my park collecting dragons until there was a glowing streak of dancing dragons flying across my park. I just sat and watched it all. Then a message appeared on the screen that said "Peytal and his followers have found enlightenment. There is nothing you can do. Peytal is the supreme god and this park is now a holy place." The screen became pure white and the cloud of dragons faded into it. I like to believe Peytal is still in there with his followers even if I can't see them. Either way, I seriously rethought the game and now use the glowing screen as a flashlight.
The moral of this story is to look both ways before you cross the street.
A Plant Dragon in DragonVale.