How Your Pet Grows in StockPets: Species, Looks, Wishes and Generations

Updated: October 12, 2026 · StockPets team

How does pet growth work in StockPets?

StockPets is part farm game, part virtual pet game. Your pet is with you from the very first month in January 1996, and it grows up on a steady schedule measured in game months. Basic care is always free and always enough for it to grow, so you never have to choose between your companion and your crops.

What changes is how your pet turns out. When it becomes a grown companion, its appearance reflects that generation’s crop returns and the time you spent together — how attentive your care was and how many of its monthly wishes you fulfilled. It’s a gentle way of making your farm’s story visible without turning it into a scoreboard.

Which pets can you raise?

There are eight species to choose from. You pick one when you start and give it a name of up to 12 characters.

• Cat
• Dog
• Rabbit
• Hamster
• Squirrel
• Turtle
• Owl
• Bear

There’s no “best” species. All eight follow the same growth stages, share the same free care and have the same five grown looks, so the choice is purely about which companion you’d like to spend a few game years with. The name matters more than you might expect: it’s the name you’ll see next to every birthday cake, every monthly memory in your Album and, eventually, in the Family garden.

Your pet also lives in a room that changes with the times. Over the years you’ll see it in the radio years, the computer years and the smartphone years, sometimes sitting on the keyboard when a new-email chime rings out.

What are the growth stages?

There are little celebrations along the way: birthday events at 1 and 2 years old, complete with a tiny cake. When your pet reaches 36 months, advancing stops early so you don’t skip past the moment it grows up. Since your first 12 months can be played as fast as you like and later months use calendar pages that refill every 8 hours, growing up is something you watch happen rather than rush. Our beginner’s guide to the rules explains the pacing.

Free care: Feed, Play and Clean

Each month you can Feed, Play with and Clean your pet. These keep track of two things: fullness and mood. Basic care is always free, and it’s enough for your pet to grow.

If you turn several months at once, free basic care can be included automatically, so a busy day doesn’t mean a neglected companion. And because time only moves when you choose, your pet doesn’t get hungry while the app is closed.

Monthly wishes and treats

On top of basic care, your pet has a small wish each month. It might be a special meal, a new toy or a garden picnic. These are treats rather than necessities, and they follow one simple rule: treats and gifts are paid for only from harvest profit, meaning the coins you gained by harvesting above what you paid.

That rule ties the pet side and the farm side together in a nice way. You can’t spend your starting coins on treats; you have to grow something first. A good harvest becomes a picnic in the garden. Fulfilled wishes also matter for how your pet looks when it grows up.

What are the five grown looks?

Every species has five grown appearances. Which one your pet gets depends roughly on how that generation’s crops did, plus the care and attention you gave along the way. The game doesn’t publish exact thresholds, and that’s on purpose: it’s meant to feel like a memory, not a target.

With eight species and five looks each, there are 40 grown appearances in total. Your Collection tracks them as x/40, along with every seed you’ve planted.

Can your pet die from market losses?

No. Market losses never kill your pet. A rough stretch — say, living through the early-2000s bust or the 2008 crisis — might lead to the Scruffy or Raincoat look, but those are just appearances, and they count toward your Collection like any other. A Raincoat pet isn’t a failure screen; it’s a record of a stormy stretch you got through together.

The only thing on the farm that can “die” is a crop, when its company is delisted. That’s a farm rule, and it never touches your pet. Read more in what happens when a stock is delisted.

Generations, family traits and the Family garden

Once your pet grows up at 36 months, you can welcome the next generation or keep this one with you longer. When a new generation arrives, a few things carry over:

• One family trait passes on: Gentle, Curious or Steady.
• Your coins, crops and farm stay with you.
• Earlier generations stay in the Family garden, so no companion is ever lost.

Because the farm continues, each generation grows up in a different stretch of market history. A pet raised through the late-’90s boom may end up looking very different from one raised through the years after it. Over a long journey, the Family garden becomes a kind of family album of the decades you’ve lived through. To see how those decades unfold, take a look at the eras of StockPets, or start from the beginning with what StockPets is.

StockPets is a game that uses virtual coins only. Nothing on this page is investment advice, and past price changes do not predict future results.