Palworld launched on Steam and Xbox on Friday, and quickly became a hot new release over the weekend. Billed as “Pokémon with guns,” Palworld is a survival game that mixes Monster Hunter and Pokémon into one fun adventure. While Palworld is similar to those games, it takes a different approach to each genre, and if you think you already know how to play, you’re missing out on a lot of the nuance that the game’s mechanics have to offer. To make sure you don’t miss out on anything important, we’ve put together some beginner tips to help you get up to speed in Palworld.
Choosing the perfect location for your first base
Truth be told, there is no wrong place to place your first base. Right after you launch Palworld, you will find a large flat area that is a good place to start, but you can do better if you really want to make your first few hours in Palworld a little easier.
While flat ground may seem like the most important factor when choosing a location for your base, it’s not. The most important factor for getting started quickly in Palworld is what resources can be found within your base’s radius. Your pals have job suitability ratings that determine what types of jobs they can perform while in your base. For example, pals with a logging ability will automatically cut down trees near your base, giving you a constant supply of wood for crafting.
So, when you are going to place your first base in the world, you need to find a place that has trees, stone, and ore within the radius of your base. Palladium deposits are another great resource to have near your base. Resources are much more important than location, as you can use your base to travel to any fast travel points that you have unlocked.
One more thing. If you’ve already placed your base, you can always dismantle the palladium box and move to a new location. And if you’ve found the “perfect” spot for your base and there are no resources nearby, don’t fret. You can unlock resource-generating structures like the Lumber Yard and Stone Pit early in the game to automate your basic resource gathering.
Gain experience quickly
Almost everything you do, from catching palaeons to building your base, earns experience points. However, the fastest way to gain experience early in the game is to catch palaeons. You get bonus experience for the first ten palaeons of each type you catch. After that, the experience for catching additional palaeons of that type drops off sharply.
Aside from catching palaeons, the next fastest way to gain experience is by completing quests in your palaeontology box. Most of the quests you receive will be tutorials, asking you to craft specific items to improve your base, or use palaeons to do work for you, and introducing you to other useful things you can do while playing Palworld. While completing the quest itself does not award experience, the tasks you need to complete to complete it usually do. And as an added bonus, completing each quest will level up your palaeontology box, which in turn will allow you to build more items in your base, allowing you to gain more experience, and so on.
Choose your features wisely
It is currently not possible to change the selected stats. Choose wisely when allocating the points you earn with each level up.
- Health – You’ll need some health to keep bosses from one-shotting you, but other stats can be important too.
- Stamina – Mounts will reduce the need for stamina, but if you’re a person who just loves to explore, climb, and parachute around the world for fun, you’ll need a ton of stamina to do so.
- Attack – Attack is a bit of a mystery at this point. Each stat point only increases your attack by two points, which doesn’t seem like a worthwhile value. Attack may become more important later in the game, but it’s best to focus on getting better weapons and use stat points elsewhere.
- Defense – Defense is not increased by stat points. You simply need to craft and equip better armor to increase this very useful stat.
- Work Speed - Work Speed increases the speed of building and crafting. Your pallbearers will be doing most of the work around your base, so adding points to Work Speed can be considered inefficient.
- Weight – The more weight you can carry, the less often you’ll have to return to base to turn in supplies. If you’re the type of player who simply must loot everything they find, this is a stat worth investing heavily in.
Fight with your pals
Since we know you’re going to start collecting paladins first, let’s cover a little bit about combat before we dive into everything else you need to know about your paladin. Just like in that other game, your paladins will have a type. Each paladin type is stronger against one other type, and weaker against another (the exceptions being fire and neutral). This may all sound very familiar – water is strong against fire and weak against electricity – but here’s a quick reference chart for all the types in Palworld. And don’t forget that some paladins have two types, so take advantage of that when possible.
During battles, any active paladin you have will automatically attack other wild paladins that attack you. If you don’t want your paladin to attack, or want it to attack your current target, you can command it to do so by using the radial menu (key 4 on PC) and selecting the appropriate option.
Each pala has up to three active skills available during battle. You can find skill fruits that can teach your palas new active skills, and unlike Pokémon, you don’t have to erase the current skill to learn a new one. Teach a pala enough skills, and you can swap them out depending on what type of pala you’re fighting next.
Affiliate and Passive Skills
Each paladin has one partner skill and up to four passive skills. Partner skills are often combat-focused, such as Tanzi’s Fun Rifle skill, which causes Tanzi to attack enemies with an assault rifle. Other partner skills allow you to ride a paladin, while others buff you or other paladins simply by being in your party. Choose your team wisely, and everyone on it will be useful even when they’re not fighting.
Passive skills work similarly to partner skills, but the paladin has a randomly generated set of passive skills. These skills can have positive and/or negative effects on your paladin, and each passive skill can have one of three tiers that increase or decrease its effect.
Fitness for Work – Taming the Firewood
Palworld is called “Pokemon” with guns, but that’s not exactly true. Yes, Pals are very similar to some Pokemon, and much of the battling in Palworld is the same as in Pokemon, but there’s a lot more to Palworld than meets the eye. The biggest difference between Palword and Pokemon is how you use your Pals. Sure, you can battle with your Pals to collect them all, but your Pals will also help you with your survival in Palworld.
Job Fitness is a set of 12 traits that determine what jobs a Pole can do in your base. When placed in your base, a Pole will automatically attempt to perform any of the tasks it is qualified for. For example, all Foxsparks have the Kindling trait, so they will help with cooking, smelting, and any other tasks that require fire. By choosing the right Pole, you can automate almost any task you need to do, even when you are not there.
Here is a quick reference table to help you choose which Pole you want to recruit to work in your base.
If it’s shiny, take it.
While there are too many basic resources like wood and stone to collect them all, you’ll want to stop and grab anything that glitters. Palladium orbs, Palladium fragments, and many other valuable resources can be obtained for free. You’ll also come across eggs to hatch, chests to open, and other goodies to collect. Simply put, if it doesn’t look like it’s found in the wild, it should be in your inventory.
Customize the game rules to suit your play style
Chances are, when you first opened up your new world, you skipped all the options except customizing your character’s appearance. You may have set the difficulty higher than the default if you were looking for a challenge, but the three presets are just that: presets. If you click on the “Custom” difficulty level, you’ll be presented with a variety of sliders and toggles that let you customize the game world to your liking. Don’t want to deal with hunger or stamina? Slide the slider all the way to the left. Want more experience for each capture? Toggle it on. Or my personal favorite, turn off the death penalty so you don’t lose your stuff when you die.
Bonus round
We could list all the tips that will help you get started in Palworld, but we have a few tips that don’t require a lot of explanation, so here they are:
- If you catch a paladin of a higher level than your character, it will sync with your level, so you won’t get much of an advantage in fights.
- If you catch a new paladin when your party is full, it will automatically go into your paladin box.
- All party members gain experience in battles, even if they are not used during the battle.
- Palworld on Xbox Game Pass only has 4-player co-op. It’s nice to play the game without the $30 price tag, but if you want to run a 32-player server, you’ll need to buy a copy on Steam to do so.
- While the daylight pygmies sleep at night, the other pygmies come out to play.
- Having trouble picking off paladins that run away from you? Just wait until nightfall and they’ll fall asleep, allowing you to easily sneak up and start the fight.
- When attempting to capture a low level palad, make sure you do not use a high level palad in the battle, especially if it is strong against the type you are fighting. In many cases, they will end up killing the palad you are trying to capture before you have a chance to throw the palad orb to capture it.
- Only the first paladin in your group needs food. If you are low on food, replace your paladin with another one so that the hungry paladin does not die of exhaustion.
- Incubate eggs to get palls that you can’t normally catch.