Shift At Midnight Pets and Hats: Every Cosmetic Unlock

Updated 2026-09-03 · Steam Shift At Midnight

Shift at Midnight pets are not cosmetics at all: your pet is the reason your character takes the night shift, and whether it lives decides which ending you get. You pick one of four animals in the opening cutscene, name it, and then have to earn enough personal profit to cover its medicine. Hats are the purely decorative layer, and there is exactly one way to get them: the five-token spinner in the break room.

The four pets and how you choose one

Developer Bun Muen introduced pets in a July 2026 update post, framed as a "bring your pet to work" policy at the Midnight Mart. Before your first shift the game runs a prologue cutscene: your character visits an animal shelter, an animal follows him home, and you pick which one it was.

Pet	Also called	Notes
Puppy	Golden Retriever in the promo art	One of the two dog options
Husky	—	The second dog option
Kitty	Cat	The cat option
Goose	Duck	The community wiki calls it a nod to the Rubber Duck item

After you choose, the game asks you to give the pet a name, and that name is used later in the ending text. According to the community wiki you can swap pets afterwards by clicking the pet icon on the main menu, and the game files hold five expressions per pet: happy, sad, sleepy, and two sick states.

The medicine deadline

This is the part players usually search for. Per the developer's own post, your pet needs its medicine within your first three shifts. Paying for it is why your character took a job at a store where the customers may not be human, and the money has to come out of your personal profit, not the store quota.

Keep the margins up and you unlock what the developer calls the best perk in the game: the pet comes to work with you. On shift it wanders the store, keeps you company through the dead hours, and cleans up part of the mess customers leave behind, including the mess left by the ones who do not survive. That frees you to restock, run the register, and actually check IDs properly.

Miss the payments and the run ends. The community wiki records the failure screen plainly: you can no longer keep up with the medication, you bury the pet, and your progress is reset.

If the money feels tight, note that the August 20, 2026 patch equalised product prices specifically so that reaching the true ending depends less on random luck. See patch notes.

Pets, endings and achievements

Three of the game's ten achievements are decided by your pet, and they interact with the character Clyde. This section is a spoiler for the last stretch of story mode.

Achievement	Requirement	Notes
True Ending	Both your pet and Clyde survive	Listed on the community wiki as one of the rarest
Grave Decision	Clyde dies so your pet lives	The opposite trade
Empty Home	Your pet dies so Clyde lives	Called the rarest achievement in the game

The pet you pick before playing a single minute is what the whole story mode is scored on. Full breakdowns live on endings and achievements.

Pets in Endless Mode

The September 1, 2026 update changed how pets work outside story mode. Two lines in that changelog matter: you can now buy your pet for the store in Endless Mode, and the End of Day Report in Endless Mode no longer shows quota, personal funds, or pet information. In other words the medicine clock is a story mode mechanic; in Endless Mode the pet is something you acquire rather than something you are racing to save.

Hats: the break room spinner

Hats arrived alongside the spin wheel, the terminal store, and store decorations in the February 2026 demo overhaul, filed under "morale and incentives" in the developer's changelog. According to the community wiki they are cosmetic only and give no gameplay benefit.

There is a single source for them. The spinner sits in the break room, a spin costs five tokens, and it may pay out a random hat. Tokens are the secondary currency: small gold coins scattered around the gas station, also spent on cola cans.

Three details from the community wiki are worth knowing before you start feeding it tokens:

Hats you win are unlocked for everyone in the lobby, not just you. In a co-op run it makes sense for one person to farm the spinner rather than all of you.
The spinner will not hand you a duplicate of something already unlocked.
If every hat is already unlocked and the wheel lands on the hat segment, your five tokens are refunded.

To wear one, use the locker just left of the spinner. It lets you browse unlocked hats, try them on, and equip one at any point during a shift, all inside the break room.

Every hat in the game files

The community wiki's hat locker gallery lists 30 icons, one of which is the default bare head. That leaves 29 wearable hats as of September 3, 2026. Nothing on the wiki assigns them rarity tiers or individual odds, so treat the spinner as a flat random draw until someone documents otherwise.


Banana Peel	Beanie	Beard + Hair
Big Tongue	Bunny Ears	Burger On Head
Cat Ears	Clown Nose	Crown
Duck On Head	Ear Muffs	Farmer Hat
Flower In Hair	Gas Mask	Googly Eyes
Hard Hat	Headband	Little Guy Hat
Mask	Paper Bag	Pig Head
Pirate Hat	Propeller Hat	Stache
Sunglasses	Tengu Mask	Traffic Cone
Unicorn Hat	Ushanka

Store decorations

Decorations are the third cosmetic layer: things you buy from the terminal store and place around the shop. The community wiki's shop table sorts every purchasable into Decorative, Weapons, Healing, and Upgrades, and the decorative column currently holds 24 entries.

Decoration	Listed cost
Aisle Signs, ATM, Banner, Basket Rack	Not documented yet
Books, Boombox, Burger, Ceiling Fans	Not documented yet
Clock, Deer Head Trophy, Fake Ivy, Figurine	Not documented yet
Gumball Machine, Mailbox, Plant (four variants)	Not documented yet
Robot, Rubber Duck, String Lights	Not documented yet
Sunglasses Rack, Trash Can, Water Cooler	Not documented yet

An important caveat: decoration prices are not confirmed. Every cost cell in that table is a placeholder reading 0.00 and every description is still marked to be done, so anyone quoting exact decoration prices is not working from a documented source. The store's non-cosmetic side is covered on shop and items.

The Rubber Duck sits in both worlds: a decorative purchase, and a throwable that bounces around damaging what it hits. Per the community wiki it was added after a Discord member posted duck images for sixteen straight days asking for it.

Jordan Cat is not a pet

Worth clearing up, because the name sends people to the wrong page. Jordan Cat is a human: a Joe's Diner employee who went missing on May 23rd, known through an N.E.T. missing poster. He has nothing to do with the cat you can adopt. Threads like his belong with the easter eggs and secrets.

Sources and last check

Checked on 2026-09-03. The pet adoption system, the three-shift medicine deadline, and the on-shift cleaning perk come from developer Bun Muen's official Steam announcement of 8 July 2026. The Endless Mode pet purchase, the End of Day Report change, and the price equalisation note come from the official patch notes of 1 September and 20 August 2026. Everything else, including the pet names and sprite states, the main-menu pet swap, the five-token spin cost, the lobby-wide unlock and refund rules, the locker, the 30 hat icons, the shop's decorative category, the Rubber Duck trivia, and the Jordan Cat details, comes from the community-run Shift At Midnight Fandom wiki and is community-written, not official. Decoration prices stay unconfirmed because that wiki's cost column is unfilled, and nobody has documented hat drop odds.