Hellopet House Beginners’ Guide

It’s a story-based affair, with the stars you earn by completing time-management stages allowing you to move the plot forward and buy items to decorate your home with. You’ll also acquire new pets to look after from time to time.

The core gameplay involves serving food to your pets in the style of Cook, Serve, Delicious – so we’ll spend most of this guide explaining how to succeed at these tough stages.

But there’s a lot more to Hellopet House, so we’ll start with a quick overview of the various in-game currencies, how you earn them, and what they let you do.

Currencies

There are six different currencies in Hellopet House. They are: gems, hearts, candies, stars, energy, and coins. Here’s what they do.

Gems: You obtain these by completing daily missions, and by completing time-management stages. You spend them on boosters, and on upgrades when you don’t have enough coins to cover the cost. You can also spend gems on buying yourself a bit more time if you’ve fallen short in a stage.

Hearts: You obtain these by completing missions, but they also regenerate naturally over time. They’ll regenerate to a maximum of four, but you can have more than that if you also collect them as rewards. You spend them on caring for your pets.

Candies: You obtain these by completing all of your daily and weekly missions, by completing stages, and by interacting with a given pet in all four ways (washing, stroking, feeding, and playing). You spend them on decorative items and adopting new pets – who also have a range of accessories.

Stars: You earn these by completing stages, and you spend them on story cards.

Energy: You obtain this through completing missions, though it also regenerates quite quickly over time. You spend it on playing stages, but you only lose a unit of energy if you fail.

Coins: You earn coins by completing stages, and you spend them on upgrades.

Gameplay

The basic gameplay in Hellopet House’s stages involves serving dishes to order. At first these are basic – you just need to tap on an ingredient to cook it, and tap it again to serve.

But things soon become more complex. Not only does the number of dishes your customers can order increase, but you need to customise these dishes too, by adding vegetables for instance – as long as the customer asks for vegetables.

This quickly gets tricky as you have to juggle multiple orders at once, making sure that you’ve got ingredients plated up or cooking (but not cooking for too long, or they’ll burn). Your customers are impatient, too – if you take too long to get a meal out, they’ll leave.

Fortunately, you can buy time by fulfilling parts of their orders. If they want water and a meat dish, for instance, you can give them their water while you’re cooking their meat.

You’ve also got a combo meter to contend with. You can build up your combo by serving dishes quickly, but it’s all too-easy to lose your combo progress once things get busy. It’s also practically impossible to pay attention to your combo meter while frantically preparing food.

Goals, Restrictions, and Termination Conditions

Each stage in Hellopet House is actually three stages, with a different reward for completing each of the three sub-stages. And each one comes with its own particular goals, restrictions, and terminations conditions, which dictate how you should play.

These goals are to prepare a certain number of meals, to earn a certain number of coins, or to get a certain number of Likes. You can review a stage’s goals before tapping Play.

Termination conditions, meanwhile, include completing your goals within a certain number of customers and completing your goals within a set time limit.

Restrictions include finishing the stage without a customer leaving, finishing a stage without breaking anything, and finishing a stage without discarding any food (by double-tapping on it).

Failing to meet these restrictions results in abrupt failure, so you need to avoid violating them at all costs. That means if you overcook an ingredient in a stage with a Cannot Damage restriction, you’re forced to leave it in the pan rather than binning it. This restricts the number of cooking slots at your disposal and makes it even harder to meet your goals.

So don’t burn your food.

Upgrades

As you advance through the stages and level-up you’ll be able to spend coins and gems on upgrading your kitchen.

New dishes are added to your menu as you unlock the relevant stages, but you can upgrade these to earn more points per serving. You can also upgrade your equipment, which has a variety of different effects.

For instance, upgrading your frying pan gives you an extra pan for cooking meat in, increasing your prep speed and output, while upgrading your water pot lets you fill your water bowl faster.

An upgraded meat dish stand, meanwhile, gives you extra storage for your cooked meat, and an upgraded oven reduces your prep time for cookies.

In general, prep speed and storage are your two main concerns in Hellopet House’s time-management sections, and the sooner you can get everything upgraded to the max the easier you’ll find it to meet your goals.

Boosters

As you level up you’ll unlock various boosters. These are single-use items that you can buy with gems. They include the item protection pack, which prevents materials from getting burned, the double coin pack, which doubles your coins in one level, and the instant complete pack, which saves you the trouble of completing a stage.

There’s also a special treat pack, which restores all pets’ stamina up to three times.

Boosters are incredibly effective, helping you complete levels that might otherwise seem beyond your reach – particularly if you’ve reached a point where you can’t level-up and you’ve upgraded everything in your kitchen.

They’re not particularly cheap, with the best one – Instant Complete Pack – costing a massive 200 gems for a bundle of three. But they’re well worth saving up your gems for.

Being a free to play game, Hellopet House unquestionably wants you to fork out real money for this precious commodity, though it lets you claim a couple at a time by watching ads. You can avoid spending cash, however, by being patient and budgeting carefully.

As tempting as it might be to drop 20 gems at a time on keeping a stage attempt alive, or to make up for a coin shortfall with gems when buying an upgrade, we recommend at least trying to have some set aside for a few boosts to help you out of a tricky spot.

Follow these tips and you’ll be living in a fully renovated, pet-packed mansion in no time. Check out the game for yourself on the App Store and