Stardew Valley Auto-petter | What is it, What Does it Do?

Stardew Valley patch 1.5 offers a lot of nice, quality of life options for your farm. And nothing’s better than a corporate entity to help you keep your farm animals tamed! The Auto-Petter is a mechanical device that’s designed to take over the “petting” action that you must do to raise the friendship of your animals. If you’re away from your farm for a while, this Auto-Petter guide will teach you how to take care of your animals, albeit poorly.

Auto-petter in Stardew Valley

The auto-petter is a strange, wooden device, apparently designed by Joja Co. It has two hands on it which seem designed to spin when an animal interacts with it.

How to Get It

The Auto-Petter can be gotten in a few ways. Firstly, and most consistently, you can purchase it for 50,000g after completing the Joja Warehouse. This does mean you’ve sided with Jojamart, and thus you’ve changed your community center into the Warehouse. That might not sit well with a lot of players!

Thankfully, there are a few other ways to obtain it. You can find it in Skull Cavern, rarely in treasure chests. So, farming out Skull Cavern might get you this item without needing to sell your town to corporations, if that’s a problem for you.

Finally, if you’ve activated Danger mode in The Mines (such as during Danger In The Deep or using the Shrine of Challenge), it’s a rare drop from monsters. This is a relatively rough grind, especially since it’s late game, but if you need Radioactive ore then it’ll happen concurrently.

Uses

The Auto-Petter, when placed inside of a coop or barn, keeps the friendship level of your animals from dropping. It does not raise friendship towards you; it just keeps it from dropping. You can still hand-pet animals while the Auto-Petter is doing it’s thing. So, it’s just a good safety measure in case you’re questing and can’t spend time on pets.

If you don’t know, Friendship determines what quality goods the animal produces each day. The higher the animal’s friendship, the more likely they are to get higher-star goods. So, if you’ve made a really happy Cow, then it benefits you to keep that cow happy! The Auto-Petter can do that, but you’re going to have to put in the time to make the cow happy in the first place.