Tomodachi Life: Living The Dream - The Complete Pet Guide And Animal List
Giving your unstable digital clones a pet to take care of is easily the best new feature added to the island, but the game makes you work to unlock the good ones.
Furniture in the original game always felt a bit like set dressing. You'd deck out an apartment beautifully and your Mii would still just kind of exist in it. The addition of pets changes that. Cats, dogs, ghosts, UFOs, even the occasional dinosaur can now move into your island alongside your residents, and they actually do things once they're there.
How Pets Actually Work
Once you've pulled an animal, it doesn't go straight to a resident. It sits in your inventory until you decide who gets it. Head over to a Mii's apartment, pick the Treasure option, and you'll find a dedicated Pet tab waiting for you.
Handing an animal to a resident isn't a one and done decoration moment either. The pet wanders the apartment on its own, and your Mii will occasionally pause whatever they're doing to feed it or play with it. It's a nice touch that makes the whole island feel a little more alive.
There's a practical use here too. A pet can genuinely calm down a chaotic resident. If you've got someone constantly stirring up drama with their neighbors, something this island management trick touches on, giving them a higher tier animal like a Dog or a T-Rex tends to keep them busy and out of trouble. Just know there's an inventory cap per Mii, so you can't cram forty cats into one apartment and call it a day.
Where Pets Actually Come From
Pets don't show up in the clothing shop or the food stalls. The game files them under Treasures, which means you're earning them the same way you earn gold bars and toilet paper, through minigames.
Keep an eye out for a green line coming off a Mii's apartment. That's your cue they want to play. Win the minigame and you'll get a choice between a Small, Medium, or Large Prize Box. Which one you pick determines your odds, and from there it's down to chance.
The Small Box tends to hand out bugs and tiny critters, think Frogs, Butterflies, or Hamsters. Step up to the Medium Box and you're looking at more standard companions like Dogs, Cats, and Pigs. If you want the genuinely wild stuff, the Large Box is where a T-Rex, a Lion, or a Unicorn can actually show up. Since the boxes gate what's possible, picking Large every time is the only way to have a shot at the rarer animals, even if it means more whiffs along the way. For a deeper look at how these minigame odds are stacked, the mechanics behind these Prize Boxes are worth a read before you commit to a grinding session.
The Full Pet List
Here's every default pet in the game along with which box it comes from and what it'll sell for if you'd rather cash it in. Knowing the sell values ahead of time makes it a lot easier to decide whether an animal is worth keeping or worth flipping for quick funds.
Once you've actually pulled something, it sits in your inventory until you assign it. Visit a Mii, choose Treasure, then head into the Pet tab, and whatever you hand over gets equipped right away. It's not just sitting in the corner either. The animal wanders the apartment on its own, and the Mii will stop what they're doing now and then to feed it or play with it, which makes the whole space feel a lot less staged.
There's a nice side effect to this too. A pet can genuinely settle down a resident who keeps stirring up drama with their neighbors, something our breakdown of friendship fights gets into in more detail. Hand that Mii a high tier animal and they'll spend a lot more time fussing over it and a lot less time causing problems. Just watch your inventory cap, since you can't stack forty pets into a single apartment no matter how tempting that is.
If the RNG grind isn't your thing, there's a way around it entirely. Rank up the Wishing Fountain to Level 6 using Warm Fuzzies earned from taking care of your residents, then spend a Wish to unlock Treasures in the Palette House Workshop. From that point on, you can design your own pet from scratch, no boxes involved. Once it exists in the catalog, the My Treasures Shop lets you buy duplicates with regular cash, so your custom creation can end up in every apartment on the island if you want it everywhere.
For more on how the Prize Box odds actually work under the hood, our minigames and treasures guide covers it in more depth.
