I do believe you just encountered the one-off event... trying to remember, It's been a real long time. Lemmie check the Walkthrough, because it's probably mentioned in there
...
mm- from sylestia walkthrough "

Uh...don't pick this option. I'm not entirely sure what happened, but all my pets ended up dead when I chose to dig, and it didn't even tell me what happened."

yeah, just a one-off event, don't know why it doesn't have a descriptor page, it's something Krin would need to check in the code, I expect. He's in chat right now, so I'll go ask

answer:
"Krinadon: [19:08] Hiya
Me: [19:10] Newer player just ran into that one event in Enigmatic Grotto that ohko's your entire party with no explanation- what's with that, anyway?
Me: [19:10] figured since you were here you might be able to provide at least some insight on that event
Krinadon: [19:10] Sometimes devs are evil developers
Sakina: [19:12] Because sometimes life just wants to screw you over.
Krinadon: [19:12] I think the real reason (it was made 8 years ago so a long time ago) was to make players have a doubt on whether to just auto engage with every single event they ever encounter
Krinadon: [19:12] I think at the time, mindset was... I didn't want people just to always autopilot engage every pop up event w/ no concern of consequences
Pirate: [19:12] Krin is just evil in general
Krinadon: [19:13] Definitely not the greatest design choice - there are way better ways to go about such a thing. But alas, that's how it is and it's never been overhauled so it still remains to this day [Tongue emoji]
Sakina: [19:13] didn't work
Pupzee: [19:14] haha when that happened to me i was like oop i should pay more attention to the storyline :')"

ah. well. good to know? seems unfun to me but hey, there's a whole festival zone that doesn't have weird tpks and the chest rewards in there are better anyway. thanks for the heads up about it, clearly the walkthrough is more needed than I thought to do the story stuff XD

it's literally the only tpk in the whole of sylestia, so it isn't something to worry about really

fair enough... definitely not gonna forget what it looks like! so that helps

Link: https://www.sylestia.com/forums/?thread=35149&page=3#29 Author: Kharma Time Posted: 4/19/2016 at 5:03 PM Does the active pet gain any advantage for being an active pet? Is there a way to link to a specific post in a thread, instead of the person having to scroll through the thread? Kind of like how ping works, when you click the link it takes you right to the specific post.

Is there a way to change the active pet?

the active pet is whichever pet is in slot 1 of the party (so typically it's the Tank, once you've got a full team) (so swapping which pet is in slot 1 via the party page or the explore or battle party shuffling options changes which one is the active pet)
The only thing a pet being the 'active' pet does is that it's the one that visibly follows the player when in Region 3 areas, Fest Zones, and the Lost Grove. Literally nothing else.

Hi, I'm Shadow and I'm very new. I keep seeing all these amazng costumes and pet designs. Do you have to spend a lot of money for stuff like that or can you get it through grinding and hard work?

Sorry to threadjack and I'm sure this is a dumb question, but where's the festival zone? I'm fairly new so I know I haven't encountered it yet, but I'm wondering if I will be able to encounter it before time runs out.

avatar items can be obtained in a multitude of ways, some are random drops from certain enemies you encounter (some from regular mobs, such as undead arm helds potentially dropping from undead mobs, others from specific bosses), some you can buy from the fest shops using festival currency during one of the four seasonal festivals, some you get from things like Advent calendar.
You can also go to the trade broker and look at any of the avatar item categories for things other players are selling


Pet designs it depends on what you... mean, exactly?
Like, anyone can design coloursets etc. in the generator to just, y'know, look at, not a real pet, but an idea

Generator essences (guide here which covers things like how to get and how to use them) can be used to make pets with up to 4tp (2vis, or 1vis/2carry, or 4carries) if you have an Enhanced or Mystical essence
You can buy pets from other players that are the results of completed projects or the like, or do your own project to get the results

Doing your own project could be fairly simple (eg, you get lucky, get two enhanced essence drops of the same species, and you want to make a single 3v pet, you just need to make one pet of each gender, each with 1v/2c, and get a bit lucky with rng) or take over a year (eg, 6v, and/or max stat, which take multiple generations, though exact amount would depend on starting stock. Max stat also take a lot of supplies)
(though you want to make sure you understand how sylesti genetics and breeding in general work if you're doing a project)

there's no fest zone for 'minor fests'- Week of Love, Easter, Fortune Festival, and Patriotic Event- only for the four seasonal festivals.

While main part of these typically takes perceived as taking place in the Lost Grove (it's actually fairly easy to bulldoze through the whole of the main plot to reach LG, some people have done it in just a few days, though LG is a fair amount tougher than the stuff before it, so you want to make sure you're running the right kind of gear on your team and such when you reach it), since that's where the bosses typically spawn, there's often also bosses loose in the two region 3 areas (it's just there's generally better rewards in LG to kind of encourage people to progress in there).

You can also still make candy heart sets (or event-specific equivalent), since you can get hearts for completing tasks on the event daily task log (none of which are LG-specific), and for doing daily completion of the dungeons in regions 1 and 2 (nightfall bandit dungeon in viridian meadows, dungeon of the forsaken in umbra forest)