Remember our old friend Jomie @npc 53
, who helps us find out in more detail the Intimacy and Hunger of our Pets? This guy can also evolve Baby Homunculus Pets into their adult forms and Elemental Pets into higher Levels, unlocking their additional bonuses. This requires you to raise your Pet's Intimacy to Full 1000/1000 Loyal Intimacy when checked with Jomie) and to provide 100 Gacha Coins for each evolution. Here is what I've found after experimenting with three Levels of my Aqua Elemental Pet:
All three Levels of Elemental Pets:
start with 100 / 1000 Intimacy - Awkward,
start with 100 / 100 Hunger - Stuffed,
drop 1 point of Hunger every 2 minutes,
get 10 points of Hunger when fed,
get 5 points of Intimacy when fed - does not matter if fed when Hungry or Neutral.
Yep, you've read it right - they get 5 points of intimacy per one Guild Contribution at all Levels. I've done the math: It takes 50 minutes to drop an Elemental Pet's Hunger from 100 (Stuffed) to 75 (Neutral), where you can then feed your Pet with maximum efficiency.
You need to feed the pet 180 times to raise their Intimacy from 100 (Awkward) to 1000 (Full Loyal). You should feed your Pet as soon as the Hunger drops to Neutral, so every 20 minutes.
180 x 20 minutes + 50 minutes = 60 hours and 50 minutes <- this is how long it takes to be able to evolve your pet to Level 2.
Double that to evolve to Level 3 -> 121 hours and 40 minutes. And then it takes another 180x Guild Contributions fed to your Pet every 20 minutes (after waiting 50 minutes for Hunger to drop to Neutral) to get it to Full 1000/1000 Loyal Intimacy again.
180 x 20 minutes + 50 minutes = 3650 minutes, or 60 hours and 50 minutes of non-stop feeding every 20 minutes. In short: you can max out an Elemental Pet after feeding it 540 Guild Contributions every 20 minutes for 182 hours and 30 minutes.
Keep in mind that bonuses activate when pets are Loyal, so you need to feed it at least 160x Guild Contribution to get the bonus effects to work. Is it worth spending so much time for extra 5%/10% resistance compared to Level 1?
Level 1 and Level 2 Elemental Pets provide ALL of the bonuses. The only thing that increases with their evolution Levels are the elemental resistances, if you only care about Movement Speed or Stat bonuses, the fastest and cheapest way to get them is to leave your Elemental Pet at Level 1.
Baby Homunculus Pets behave in exactly the same way - gain 5 Intimacy per feed, so it takes 60 hours and 50 minutes to get their Intimacy to Full 1000/1000 Loyal to evolve, and then another 60 hours and 50 minutes to fill it to full again when evolved to their adult forms.
In their case, however, the Intimacy grind is very much worth it - you only get the +50% movement speed bonus when your Homunculus Pet is evolved and has Cordial or Loyal Intimacy.