The easy way to get an Auto-Petter in Stardew Valley is to simply go the Joja Mart route and buy it for 50,000g. But if you are like me and have literally put through 1,000+ hours into the game and have no intention of EVER selling the soul to Joja Mart, then you might assume you can’t get an Auto-Petter – but that’s actually not true!
The Auto-Petter is available to players who finish the Community Center in Skull Cavern. The player can find it as a treasure in Skull Cavern, a special item drop from a destroyed crate or barrel during the Danger in the Deep quest or from rare drops when the Shrine of Challenge is active.
Auto-Petters can be extremely useful and help a player to fully automate their barns and coops in the late game, saving enormous amounts of time.
What Is The Auto-Petter?
The Auto Petter is a nifty little machine in Stardew Valley that automatically pets every animal in a building. This stops friendship decay from your animals (assuming you’re still feeding them) and can even raise the love and affection (heart level) of your animals, although at only half the speed of actually going in and petting them.
It looks like the picture to the left, and this automated petting machine is literally about the most Joja thing I have ever seen. But hey, it’s effective, and one of the few things that many players who go the Community Center route wish they could actually get from the Joja Mart route.
Admittedly, the ranching side of Stardew Valley can get tedious if you feel especially pressed for time, so being able to automate that side of taking care of the animals, which along with the Auto-Feeder and Auto-Collector allow you to basically automate this entire side of the game.
However, there is only one way to acquire it during the regular game before you hit up some Qi quests, which does open another often deadlier option.
Here are all the possibilities for getting an Auto-Petter in Stardew without selling your soul to Joja Corp.
How Can You Get the Auto-Petter in Stardew Valley If You Hate Joja Mart?
There are a handful of ways that a player going the much more popular Community Center Route can acquire an Auto-Petter. These are never for sale, not even at the Travelling Cart, if you aren’t going the Joja route, so you will need to find enough Auto-Petters through these methods to automate all your farm buildings.
Skull Cavern Treasure Chests
This is how I even found out that the Stardew Valley Auto-Petter even existed. Skull Cavern has treasure rooms where if you get lucky, there’s a treasure chest with some type of goodie available, and the Auto-Petter is one of those potential treasures (and a useful one at that)!
Treasure rooms are not set in stone on specific floors, but once you get past floor 10 they occur randomly.
According to the Stardew Wiki, the mathematical formula for randomly determining if a room past level 10 of Skull Cavern is a Treasure Room or not is:
0.01 + (Daily Luck / 10) + (Luck Buffs / 100)
The long and short of the math is that your base chance for a floor being a treasure room is only 1% with that moving up or down by a few points depending on the levels of luck buffs you have.
While getting a Treasure Room isn’t a guarantee of an Auto-Petter, it’s the only way to get one in Stardew Valley via the Community Center route without kicking off the Danger in the Deep quest or activating the Shrine of Challenge.
This means to increase your chances of finding an Auto-Petter in Skull Cavern you’ll want to eat meals that increase luck like:
- Lucky Lunch
- Spicy Eel
- Mgic Rock Candy
- Banana Pudding
- Fried Eel
- Ginger Ale
- Pumpkin SOup
- Shrimp Cocktail
You can also wear a Lucky Ring or a combo ring using the Lucky Ring as one of the combined rings to increase this number. All these boosts stack and even then your chances aren’t going to be above 7%, and even with a good food buff it’s more likely to be in the 4-5% range for most players, or even lower if you only have a +1 luck food.
However, it only takes one or two of these rooms to have one or two Auto-Petters – and that is really handy, especially if you have auto feeders and spend way too much time ranching.
Danger in the Deep Quest
Danger in the Deep is a special quest from Qi. In this quest or “special order” you’re informed that the elevator systems to the Town Mine have been reset and suddenly the mines are much more dangerous than they used to be as new monsters have seemingly emerged out of nowhere.
For the quest itself you have 7 days to reach the bottom of the mine (remember – that’s NOT floor 100!). While the mines are infested with these extra dangerous enemies during these 7 days, drops from crates and barrels can include special items that weren’t available in the game before now, including the Auto-Petter.
There’s a 2.2% chance of a crate or barrel dropping a special item, and during this time one of those potential items is an Auto-Petter.
This makes it a longshot, but there are enough crates and barrels that you should actually get plenty of chances for that fortuitous drop.
Shrine of Challenge
Once you complete the Danger in the Deep Quest, the Shrine of Challenge becomes available. This lets the player toggle the Mine dangers from normal back up to high. When the danger level is set on high, the advanced drops like iridium daggers (or “needles” if you want to get technical) and Auto-Petter machines are back in play.
While your percentages of finding an Auto-Petter in Stardew Valley this way still remain small, they are a very rare item, after all, it’s the same chance you have with the other options, so it’s worth keeping in mind that given a long enough time line you will probably get the Auto-Petters that you’re looking for.
Saves Time Ranching
While I don’t mind the ranching aspect of Stardew Valley, and I know some of my friends enjoy it more than the farming, I’m on the other side of things. The animals are great, but caring for a lot of animals, harvesting everything, putting it in machines for artisan goods, petting everyone, collecting it all again – it’s a hassle. The more of that process I can automate, the better, and the Auto-Petter lets me put the barns and coops on auto pilot!
Now you know how to get an Auto-Petter for your animals in Stardew Valley.
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Proud to embrace the locally created moniker of “Corrupt Overlord” from one of the all time great Lords of Waterdeep runs, Shane is one member of the Assorted Meeples crew and will be hard at work creating awesome content for the website. He is a long-time player of board games, one time semi-professional poker player, and tends to run to the quirky or RPG side of things when it comes to playing video games. He loves tabletop roleplaying systems like Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, Werewolf, Fate, and others, and not only has been a player but has run games as DM for years. You can find his other work in publications like Level Skip or Hobby Lark.