Palworld tips and tricks for beginners
Here is all the essential information you need to survive and thrive in Palworld
Looking for Palworld tips for beginners? Palworld is a creature capture game full of colourful 'Pals'. Elemental creatures that can form a team and help you in combat or can be assigned to work at your base and help produce crafting materials.
As you expand your base and fight to complete the full Paldeck, you'll face new survival challenges. Join us as we go through the crucial top tips for beginners that will help you in your first few hours of Palworld and beyond.
In this guide:
- Palworld map
- How to assign Pals to jobs
- Prioritise Cloth
- Spend Technology Points wisely
- Watch for healthbars
- Berries are your friend
- Build a Parachute
- Strategic spawning
- Find a mount
- Prepare for raids
- Get free Pals at Syndicate Camps
- Know your elements
- Other ways to get rare Pals
- Other quality-of-life tips
Palworld map
To help you with your adventures through the Palpagos Island, we've built an interactive Palword map to make your Pal collecting journey a little easier. Here, you'll find key locations of things to help you progress through the game like alpha pals, dungeons, eggs for an Egg Incubator and more.
How to assign Pals to jobs
One of the key things that separates Palword from other creature capture games is the survival crafting element. In the game, you can assign jobs to Pals to get them to log, mine, farm and gather materials. This is a very useful tool, but it can feel limited early on. To increase your base building capabilities, you need to build a Palbox.
Once you build a Palbox, you can house up to 480 Pals inside. Alas, you can't have that many living loose on the base, but you can increase the number of worker Pals available to you by levelling up your base. This can be accessed via the Missions prompt at the Palbox. To unlock more working Pals on your base, you need to focus on these tasks.
Once you have a slot free for a Pal, simply drag their portrait from within the Palbox to the 'Pals at base' section of the menu. This will drop the Pal into your base. Pals are clever critters and will usually go to tasks automatically if they are proficient in them.
To manually assign a job to a Pal, walk towards them and lift them. Then launch them towards the activity you want them to focus on.
Prioritise Cloth
The most cumbersome survival mechanic in the early game of Palworld is the cold system. If you're out at night without clothing or a torch, your character will slowly start to freeze to death.
Although torches are relatively easy to make, they take up a vital hand slot. Instead, you can make clothes from Cloth to stave off the cold. To do so, you'll need Wool which you can get by either defeating a Lamball or by assigning them to a Ranch at your base.
Turn the Wool into Cloth and the Cloth into clothes at a workbench. As you level up you'll unlock clothing recipes that will give you better protection against both Pals and harsh climates.
Spend Technology Points wisely
As you increase your player level in Palworld you'll accrue Technology points. From the main menu, the Technology tab holds crafting recipes for many pieces of equipment and Pal skills. While it can be tempting to spend them all straight away, it's best to be prudent and check your Palbox first.
Palbox missions often require you to build things for your base, meaning you'll need Technology Points to unlock the crafting specs first. Often you can get stuck on a Palbox mission because you're waiting to level up your main player level first. If in doubt, it's good to keep a small surplus of points on hand.
If you're desperate for points it is worth noting that you can also get a Technology point for every new waypoint you discover.
Watch for healthbars
When hunting new Pals, keep in mind a general rule - the lower their health bar, the easier they are to catch. You can also get a bonus chance for success if you sneak up behind a Pal.
During the throes of combat it can be easy to lose track of the Pal's health, especially if you have other Pals involved in the same fight. If the Pal gets to zero health, it will fall unconscious and you won't be able to catch it. For that reason, be extra mindful in combat, especially if you have a Pal tethered to you as they will automatically attack.
Berries are your friend
In the first few days of a Palworld playthrough, you'll need something for yourself and Pals to eat. Berries are plentiful and bushes respawn after a few days. You can also unlock a Berry Plantation and grow your own. This is an easy system to establish and keep your Pals well-fed.
Build a Parachute
Traversal in Palworld can be somewhat slow if you have a low stamina capacity. Climbing cliffs and getting across ravines are a lot easier once you have a Parachute. You can build a Parachute once you unlock the recipe for it at level five. Just remember that you can only glide for as long as your stamina lasts, the minute you run out of stamina you'll hurtle to the ground.
For extra style points, pair your parachute with a Grappling Gun and sling your way from cliff to cliff like Lara Croft.
Strategic spawning
When you die in Palworld, you drop all your items including the clothes off your back. Don't worry though, you'll get a little red cross to mark where you died and you'll be able to recover your loot.
Upon death, you'll be presented with a map and be asked to choose a place to respawn in the game. Be mindful that wherever you choose to respawn you'll have no tools or clothes and will start to feel the cold as soon as it gets dark. For that reason, it is usually a good option to just respawn at your base where you can get some backup clothes or a torch and then use your Palbox to then fast travel to where your last location of death was.
Find a mount
There are some Pals that can be used as a mount to significantly speed up traversal. There are ground, swimming, gliding and flying mounts but you'll first need to catch the Pals and then unlock the crafting specs for their saddles in the Technology menu.
Even so, it's well worth doing as the stamina in the early sections of Palworld is rather lacklustre. The fastest mount for early sections of Palworld is by far the Direhowl. Although these creatures hunt in packs, it isn't too hard to capture one early. When you do, exploration becomes a lot more fun and less of a chore.
Prepare for raids
Even if you're playing offline you will receive a raid on your base from time to time by enemy NPCs. Fortunately, you can build alert systems at your base to deal with these effectively.
I recommend building an Alarm Bell early on as you'll be able to command your Pals from here and order them to defend your base. Often when I have a raid I don't need to do anything, my Pals will take care of it for me.
As you progress through the game and gather more materials like Pal Fluids, Coal, Ancient Civilization Parts and more, you'll be able to craft better defenses like stone walls to protect your base. Be sure to check out our best base locations guide where we go through the best places to live that are near these resources and are easier to defend.
Get free Pals at Syndicate Camps
You can get rare Pals that are from biomes you haven't even visited yet at Syndicate Camps. These are hostile camps where NPCs will attack you on-sight. Usually, they have a Pal locked in a cage at the centre of these camps. When you defeat the NPCs and unlock the cage, the Pal will be instantly teleported to your Palbox. This is an excellent way to find rarer Pals if you don't have access to better capture Spheres yet.
Know your elements
The above picture is a Palworld type chart and is a good representation of how elements work in the game. Essentially each element has another element that they are strong or weak against. This means when fighting a Pal, it's good to pick an opposing Pal with opposite elemental abilities. For example, Electric Pals are strong against Water types but weak against Ground types.
With this information, you can tailor your Pal team to the boss you are fighting and increase your odds of success.
Other ways to get rare Pals
As we've discussed, when you're starting in your Palworld playthrough, it isn't advisable to travel to higher map levels straight away. If you're eager to get your hands on rare Pals there are a couple of other methods, however.
- Hatching Pals from Eggs: As you traverse the Palworld Map, you'll come across a variety of Pal Eggs in the Wild. These can be hatched in an Egg Incubator for a surprise Pal. Usually the larger the Egg, the more uncommon the hatched Pal will be. Check our full Egg Incubator guide for more info.
- Breeding Pals: As you level up, you'll be able to unlock a Breeding Farm where you can breed new, rarer Pals if you're lucky. We have a full Breeding Guide for more info but essentially each Pal pair will give a percentage chance for producing different offspring. Some Pals like the Elphidran Aqua and the Reptyro Cryst can only be obtained through breeding.
Other handy things to know about Palworld
Along with the above Palword tips, here's a selection of things to do in a new game to save yourself some hassle:
- Spheres: There are six different types of Spheres that increase in quality. You can craft these once you unlock them in the Technology tab. Make sure you focus on these as they will instantly increase your chance of catching rare Pals.
- Shield: There is also a crafting recipe for a Shield. It's a type of force field that will regenerate out of combat and is well worth the investment.
- Small Feed Bag: Within the Technology tab (on the right-hand side) is a purple 'Ancient Technology' section that contains more recipes. The Small Feed Bag is worth the investment as it will automatically feed you and your team Pals with food from your inventory. This is an upgrade that will save you the faff of manually doing it yourself.
- Check for trapped Pals: At your base you may receive the message that your Pals are hungry even though they have a full Feed Box supply. This is usually because they are trapped on a piece of environment. The easiest way to reset a Pal is to re-allocate them at a Palbox.
- Keep an eye on SAN: SAN is a sanity meter which monitors a Pal's work ethic. If their SAN falls they will become demotivated and may stop working. Luckily, there are nourishment activities you can invest in to keep your Pals happy, like the Hot Spring.
That rounds off our guide to the best Palworld top tips for beginners. Hopefully, this will give you a helping hand as you take on the charms of Palworld and complete the full Paldex. For more Palworld content, check out our guide to the best Pals in Palworld and get yourself the optimal companions for combat, ranch life and more.