I may have missed it in the various SWRPG books, but in reading various topics I realized that I don't know how to upgrade a minon's stats to rival stats. This is mainly a question of possibly using various minion creatures as animal compainions.

Any help of this will be appreciated.

There isn't really any rules on "upgrading" the type of adversary but by looking at the descriptions of what they can do in the Adversaries section of the Core Rulebooks & looking at some of the official stats for things, I think you'll get a pretty good idea of what to do. Typically, give the Rival the same amount of wounds as a starting character, 10-15 or so. Give them their own skill ranks rather than having to rely on group skills but usually not many past 2 ranks. They also operate on their own, like Nemeses and PCs, so each Rival is a separate target and typically don't form groups, as those are for Minions exclusively. While they won't have a strain threshold, they will be able to perform abilities & maneuvers that cost strain but take wounds instead of strain. In some cases, Rivals also benefit from the Adversary Talent. Rivals also take crits in the same way as Nemeses and PCs, in that they aren't immediately defeated when you deal a critical hit to one but you roll on the chart for the crit.

As a little aside related to your question I'm yet to decide if a Bonded animal could actually be a Minion Group. I think the rules are clear it's supposed to be an individual creature. But having a beast master with a close connection to a pack of animals would be really cool and create interesting narrative opportunities. It's probably a house rule to allow it, and needs the right attitude from the player for it to not get out of hand.

Speaking of bonded animals, I've got a player that is just collecting as many animals as he can and they're starting to mess up the group's ship since only one of them is trained... I'm thinking he should start a zoo.

I tend to have unnamed characters who survive a combat encounter with the party gain a name.

Named characters who survive a combat encounter gain something else. A skill, an upgrade from minion to rival. Rivals have not risen to the level of a nemesis yet. They do not appear enough to gain something like that. But I could see a recurring nemesis gaining a point of Adversary , WT, ST, or a skill boost or two as a campaign progresses.

I think having a recurring villain rise up to really be a problem is fun to exploit. Plus it reinforced past parts of a campaign. It is, mechanically, a new character perhaps, so re-creating all stats and making the one-time minion a challenge would be fair too.

Thanks for the help guys.

I was thinking about the minion to rival thing because of some of the creatures listed as minion types that might be fun as bonded animals.