Neopian Pound

Browsing

There are multiple ways to explore the pets located in the Pound.

Pound Surfing

The easiest and most common way to browse pets in the Pound is doing what's known as "pound surfing", which involves browsing the Pound through the regular "Adopt" interface. Simply press "View More Neopets »" (or refresh the whole page) over and over again, hoping to stumble on interesting pets.

Not that kind of surfing...

While this is the most straightforward method, it is quite limited, seemingly only ever displaying a handful of the same pets over and over, sometimes even displaying none at all with the slightly confusing message "No abandoned Neopets were found with that name." For more on this limitation, check out the next section!

Stuck Pets

The Pound will only ever display pets with certain names. Other pets whose names begin with certain characters will never be displayed while pound surfing, and must be found using other methods and adopted by entering their name directly into the Pound search. These pets are called "stuck".

Which Pets Get Stuck?

The exact machinations of how the Pound displays pets are complicated and mysterious, but we present a simplistic explanation here.

Whether or not a pet will be stuck is determined by the first 3 characters of its name. When the pound page displays pets, it first randomly chooses a 2-character prefix, such as JE. It will then randomly choose up to 3 pets whose names have that prefix. However, it seems to only select from the first few thousand pets (alphabetically) with that prefix. If a pet's name sorts it after whatever that cutoff number is, it cannot be chosen for display.

Because of this, some rare and unusual prefixes (say, XG) will never get stuck, but very common prefixes (such as MA) will get stuck at some point. Pets with later letters as their third character are more likely to be stuck than early letters; for example, Matthew123 may be stuck while Mackenzie789 is not.

For a current list of stuck prefixes and which 3rd character they begin to get stuck, Jellyneo recommends the /~Megablade petpage.

Not that kind of stuck...

Finding Stuck Pets

Our affiliate site Lost and Pound maintains a list of stuck pets by species, and also highlights notable details such as high stats or age. Lost and Pound is a certified Neopets fan site, so you are able to mention them by name (but not link to directly) on Neopets.

There are also a few methods for finding stuck pets on your own. The most efficient method is known as "tilesetting" and uses a spreadsheet program (such as Excel) and your own petpage; this method is described in detail on /~Megablade. Lost and Pound's pet page /~Lorrenn includes instructions on a brute force manual method.

In the past, stuck pets could also be found with some creative Google searches; you may still see this method recommended on some older pages, but changes made to pet lookups in early 2016 made this method infeasible as search engines are no longer able to index them.

pound_release

On April 28th 2007, the Pound closed down to perform some maintenance due to the recent conversion for customisation. It didn't reopen again until a full year later, on April 29th 2008. During the time in between, pets could be abandoned, but not adopted or transferred. Because of this, a large backlog of pets waiting to enter the pound built up. According to TNT, this backlog consisted of millions of pets.

In order to avoid a debilitating strain on the servers by adding these pets to the pound all at once, TNT decided to add them slowly over time. To do so, TNT created a staff account called pound_release and made it the owner of these millions of pets. The account is frozen to prevent users from easily seeing all the pets, some of which are unconverted or have highly desirable names.

Release Timing

For years, pets were released from pound_release twice daily around 9:45 am/pm NST; the precise minute began to drift after Neopets transitioned servers in 2014, but remained approximately 12 hours apart.

Pets were released quasi-alphabetically: a handful of two character prefixes would be randomly selected, and a small number of pets would be released alphabetically within them. For example, if one of the prefixes chosen was JE, a pet whose name started with JEA would be released before a pet whose name started with JEL. Numbers are sorted before letters, and letters are sorted before underscores. Users could use this to see if a pet on pound_release they were interested in was likely to be released soon.

On November 22, 2019, pound_release stopped releasing pets due to a change by TNT that modified the owner of all pets on pound_release to instead become "none". It is unknown whether this change was intentional. In December 2020, TNT stated they would look into reactivating it while updating the Pound for the mobile-friendly site conversion.

Finding Pets on pound_release

There are many strategies for finding and tracking pets on pound_release. Many users track and share lists publicly on pet pages. If you are interested in learning about recent releases or methods of finding/tracking pets on pound_release, Jellyneo recommends posting on the Pound Neoboard asking for users to direct you to active projects.

Other Holding Accounts

TNT has several other staff accounts used for holding unowned pets, but unlike pound_release none of these have ever been known to release pets. You may occasionally run into these while searching for stuck or pound_release pets.

• breik_u5: a mysterious account holding similar pets as pound_release, but with an intriguingly high proportion of Grundos.
• baduser: used to house pets that were removed for inappropriate names.
• testflash: a destination for Lutaris that were abandoned and the reason why those Lutaris' names cannot be reused!

This page was last updated on February 8, 2026.