The median said every neon pays off. Splitting by price said the opposite.

In Adopt Me, a Roblox game with a large trading economy, you can merge four copies of a pet into one neon version. Players ask the obvious question all the time: is it worth it? Is one neon worth more than the four pets it costs?

The community keeps a value list for every pet and every version, so this looks like a five-minute job: divide the neon value by four times the regular value, take the median, done.

I did that first. The answer was a confident yes, and it was wrong for exactly the pets where the question matters.

The aggregate

The values come from adoptmevalues.app, read on 3 October 2026. I took every pet with both a regular and a neon value and no potions (fly/ride change the price and would muddy the comparison). That left 783 pets.

const ratio = (p: Pet) => p.neon / (4 * p.regular)

median(pets.map(ratio)) // 1.34
pets.filter((p) => ratio(p) >= 1).length // 725 of 783

A median of ×1.34, and 93% of pets "gain" from going neon. Write that up and you have told a trader with a Frost Dragon to merge four of them.

The split

The trouble is who those 783 pets are. 566 of them, 72%, have a regular value below 1. Any statement about "the typical pet" is a statement about cheap pets.

Split the same ratio by the price of the regular version and the picture turns over:

Among pets worth 100 or more, the neon is worth less than the four pets in 15 cases out of 17. Some examples:

The only two exceptions at the top are Amethyst Penguin (×1.06) and Orchid Butterfly (×1.00, a dead heat).

So the honest answer is a gradient, not a yes: neon pays on cheap pets, breaks even somewhere around 5–20, and loses money on expensive ones. The overall median wasn't a summary of that gradient. It was the bottom band speaking for everyone.

Why this keeps happening

Nothing here is exotic. It's a mixture of very different groups summarised by one number, with one group outnumbering the others ten to one. What made it easy to miss:

1. The aggregate was true. 725 of 783 pets really do gain. The number wasn't a bug, so nothing flagged it.
2. The question has a hidden weight. Nobody agonises over whether to neon a pet worth 0.1. The decision matters in proportion to the value at stake, and the unweighted median gives the 0.1 pet the same vote as the Bat Dragon.
3. The headline answers a different question. "Does neon pay for the typical pet?" and "should I neon this pet?" sound alike and have opposite answers at the top of the list.

What I changed in practice: when a per-item ratio feeds a recommendation, I print it per band of the thing the reader is risking (here, the regular value), never just the overall figure. If one band holds most of the rows, that alone tells you the aggregate will speak for it.

One more trap in the same table

The next step up is mega neon: four neons merge into one mega. Among the 17 pets worth 100 or more, 5 have a mega worth exactly four neons, to the hundredth: Frost Dragon 630 → 2,520, Giraffe 1,156 → 4,624, Parrot 485.5 → 1,942. In the 20–100 band, none do.

Read naively, that is a market that priced the merge perfectly. It may also be a cell that was derived as "4 × neon" because nobody had a separate estimate. The data alone can't tell the two apart, and the list doesn't say. When the same exact multiple recurs across rows, ask how the cell was filled before reading it as an equilibrium, and don't let those rows vote in a median.

I run FairStash, which publishes Roblox trading values with their sources and history. The per-version values for every pet are on the Adopt Me pet list, and each pet's page shows its neon and mega neon next to the regular one, for example Frost Dragon, and the trade calculator prices neon and mega neon as separate items rather than as a multiple of the regular pet. Values are the community's, not ours: we say where each number comes from on the methodology page.