There are Purple pets in Stardew Valley, but nobody knows how to get them

One of the most beloved features of Stardew Valley is the ability to adopt pets to live on your farm, build up friendships with and now even dress up in hats. With update 1.6, we gained more cat and dog varieties, and even some turtles, to bring home with us from Marnie’s. 

However, there is a particular type of pet that is eluding the playerbase – purple cats and dogs. 

If you follow Stardew Valley in any capacity, you’d be hard-pressed to avoid the discussion of these purple pets on YouTube, TikTok, Reddit and Twitter. Talk of these mauve moggies and plum pooches is seemingly everywhere, but every video or comment ends in the same way – how are we supposed to get them?

There are various clickbait videos claiming to know how to get purple pets, but they always end the same way—you can mod these cuties into your game, but they don’t know the actual method. The worst part is that they don’t share the mod, but I’ve found this one that comes pretty close. 

There is one purple pet that can be purchased from Marnie – the iridium turtle. This little guy costs a whopping 500,000 Gold, and again, nobody is really sure why, but I’m convinced it’s somehow pivotal in getting the purple cat and dog. Maybe.

How to get purple pets in Stardew Valley

So far, no one has figured it out, and trust me, we’ve been trying. I can’t tell you how to get the Purple Pets, as much as I would love to be able to. What I can do is give you a list of things I’ve done (or seen done) to try and get them, so you can learn from our mistakes.

Below is a list of things that I’ve done or witnessed, none of which have resulted in a purple cat or dog:

• Using Butterfly Powder on the iridium turtle
• Getting the iridium turtle to full hearts
• Using Butterfly Powder on a cat or dog with full hearts
• Getting every other pet and increasing their hearts to maximum
• Reaching Perfection
• Feeding iridium to an existing pet
• Putting Mayor Lewis’ Lucky Purple Shorts on a pet as you would a hat
• Completing Mr. Qi’s challenge “Qi’s Crop”
• Achieve maximum hearts with every villager
• Changing a pet’s appearance at the Shrine of Illusions
• Feeding them Raisins
• Treating it like a shiny Pokémon and adopting countless other pets
• Assuming it’s a random event like the Witch bringing a Void Egg

My theory, which I’m a little too confident about, is that this has something to do with the newly added method to get up to 99 pairs of Mayor Lewis’ Lucky Purple Shorts. Because, well, they’re purple. 

When you go to give these shorts to Lewis (or any other villager), you get a notification saying “wrong person,” but showing them to Marnie elicits an embarrassed response. She seems to be the only villager who reacts to these shorts in any way, so my theory is that we extort these purple friends out of her using the Shorts. 

I know it’s a loose theory, but it’s all I’ve got. Sorry. 

For now, this seems like an example of things being in the game files but not actually accessible within the game. It’s not the first time this has happened. Spouse Weapons were added during update 1.1 in 2016 but took eight years to become obtainable. As of the 1.6 update, they can now be purchased at the Desert Festival (if you’re lucky).