How to complete Rafayel’s 2026 birthday event in Love and Deepspace

How to participate in Rafayel's birthday event "Each Step To You" in LaDS.

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Rafayel gets the honour of being the first Love and Deepspace romanceable companion to celebrate his birthday in each new calendar year. This means that he gets to debut any changes to the birthday event rotation, giving a glimpse of what we can expect when the other four get their turn. In other words, Rafayel’s birthday is a bit of an event in LaDS (even more so than it already technically is).

While the game’s lineup of 2024 and 2025 birthday events were very similar, it seems that things are switching up a bit for 2026. Some of the original minigames have been phased out in favour of a new set of activities, although the overall vibe remains pretty consistent – and Raf gets the honour of showcasing it all.

Rafayel’s birthday event for 2026 is Each Step To You, which will be running in-game from March 1st to 8th. That means you only have a little over a week to complete all of the event tasks and wish on both his new and rerun birthday banners. Read on for everything you need to know about Rafayel’s 2026 birthday celebrations in Love and Deepspace!

How to complete the Each Step To You event in LaDS

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In order to take part in Rafayel’s 2026 birthday event, you simply need to have unlocked him as a love interest. All you need to do to meet that criteria is play the first main story arc up to Chapter 2-12, which should be easily achievable within the event timeframe even if you’re brand new to the game.

After you’ve met this requirement, logging into the game during Rafayel’s birthday week and opening the Events tab will take you directly to the Each Step To You event landing page.

Here, you can see all of the various activities available for celebrating Rafayel’s birthday. You don’t have to complete every part of the event – although some activities are pre-requisites for others – but more or less anything you do will grant you a generous helping of Campus Maps, the unique limited event currency which can only be spent in the time-limited Softshine Shop for Rafayel’s birthday event.

Why Campus Maps, you ask? Every LaDS event gets its own unique currency that follows the current theme – and Rafayel’s Year 3 birthday event harks back to when he was the heroine’s university lecturer. Don’t worry, they didn’t hook up until several years later – although he did only take the gig in order to be closer to her covertly before introducing himself, so maybe let’s not think about it any longer and just enjoy how cute he looks in those glasses.

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Each Step To You activities and minigames

As mentioned above, Rafayel’s 2026 birthday marks the first major departure from the initial format established two years ago.

Most noticeably, the cake baking activity has been sidelined, and the ingredient collection minigame is absent completely. The option to write a card message for the birthday boy is also gone – instead, a preset cake will be delivered on the birthday itself, essentially merging those two former main activities into a single smaller one.

Here’s what there is to do now:

• Birthday Warm-Up Storyline: The only part of the birthday event to remain completely unchanged, this is a unique four-part storyline releasing one chapter per day on March 1st, March 3rd, and March 5th-6th, culminating on Rafayel’s birthday itself. Birthday Stories don’t repeat in subsequent years, so 2026 is your only chance to accompany Rafayel through his arduous task of grading his art students’ submission pieces.
• Treasured Threads: Replacing the timed falling object collection game from previous years, this match-3 inspired minigame challenges you to chain as many matching icons as possible in a set number of moves, with the object of collecting Woven Hearts customisation tokens (see below). Four levels unlock daily from the start of the event up until March 4th, and you can replay each level an unlimited number of times to max out your tokens and star rankings.
• Woven Hearts: Spend the tokens you earned playing Treasured Threads to unlock various customisation options in Wardrobe. (Note that unlike in previous years, there aren’t multiple token types required to unlock different customisation options – it all goes into one general pool.)





• Wardrobe: Use the cosmetics unlocked in Woven Hearts to customise a plushie of Rafayel – including outfit, hair accessory, facial accessory, and up to three freely-placeable miscellaneous decorations (including but not limited to handheld items). You can save up to 20 drafts daily of different plushie designs prior to finalising it on Rafayel’s birthday, and your current plushie design will display on the main event landing page.
• Cake Prep: Unlike previous years where customising a birthday cake was among the main birthday event activities, this year a premade cake is automatically «prepping» up until it’s ready for delivery on the birthday itself.

Finally, beginning on Rafayel’s actual birthday (March 6th), you’ll receive a video call from him recounting his thoughts on his birthday celebrations with you.

Softshine Shop event details

On the main event page, you can check Wishwave Plan for a list of activities – a mixture of event-related feats, more general in-game dailies, and of course banner pulls – that will earn you Rafayel’s unique Year 3 birthday currency, Campus Maps. Navigating to Shop > Exchange > Softshine Shop will give you a chance to exchange any Campus Maps you earn for the following items:

Note that the shop selection has expanded compared to previous years with the addition of designs for use in the journal feature that was introduced last summer – but also that returning outfits and 3-star Memories are now officially limited to the previous year’s birthday event, and thus this time do not include items that were available in the original 2024 birthday event for Rafayel.

If you find yourself with leftover Campus Maps at the end of the event, you can exchange each extra for 25 Gold through the Softshine Shop, which is definitely worth doing.

Otherwise, as with other LaDS limited currencies, you can expect them to automatically convert to a permanent currency once the event is through – so you won’t lose out completely if you forget to spend them all in time, though their buying power will likely be reduced.

Finally, don’t forget to check your mail during the event, either, as you’ll receive 10 Limited Deepspace Wishes that can only be redeemed on the new Duskbright Steps banner. You can’t even use them for Rafayel’s Heartbound Wish double birthday rerun, sadly, since reruns require either regular Deepspace Wishes or their own special banner currency (Limited Time Wishes) that are incompatible with Limited Deepspace Wishes.

However, if you don’t use them before the banner expires, they’ll be converted to regular Empyrian Wishes that can be used on the permanent X-Space Echo banner instead. In other words, whether you intend to wish on Rafayel’s new birthday banner or not, it’s still worth claiming them – and you don’t need to worry about accidentally resetting pity if you’d rather just wait to spend them on the X-Space Echo permanent banner instead.

Love and Deepspace codes are sadly all too few and far between, but that just makes it all the better to avoid missing out when a new one gets released, so be sure to follow our codes list page there for all the freebies you can currently claim!