Palworld

Palworld is a survival crafting game wearing a creature collector as a coat. You wake up on an island with nothing, punch a tree, and within an hour you are throwing spheres at a sheep with a fluffy body to make it carry your ore.

The part that makes it its own thing: the creatures, the Pals, are not just party members. They are labour. Every Pal has work suitabilities, so a Pal you caught for its fire breath is also the thing that keeps your furnace lit while you are asleep. Your base runs itself out of the creatures you brought home, and it runs badly if you brought home the wrong ones.

• Three systems, braided: survival (hunger, temperature, stamina), base building and automation, and creature collecting.
• Combat is a third person shooter. You have guns, bows, spears and a Pal fighting beside you.
• Progress is a technology tree, unlocked with points you earn from levelling and from bosses.
• It is funny, and then it is quietly grim. The jokes are load bearing.

1. 1

   Gather wood and stone by hand

   Punch trees, hit rocks. You need enough for a workbench, a Pal Sphere or two, and a campfire.

2. 2

   Craft Pal Spheres and catch everything

   Weaken a Pal first, then throw. Catch rate rises the lower its health, and rises again from behind. Catch duplicates on purpose: they feed the systems below.

3. 3

   Place your Palbox

   The Palbox marks your base and its build radius. Put it somewhere flat, near trees, stone and a water edge if you can. Moving later is a chore.

4. 4

   Build a bed, a campfire and a chest

   A bed for you and beds for your Pals. Sleeping restores your Pals and skips the night, and a Pal with nowhere to sleep gets miserable and stops working.

5. 5

   Assign Pals to the base

   Drop caught Pals at the Palbox. They automatically pick up jobs they are suited for: chopping, mining, watering, crafting, hauling.

6. 6

   Eat, and feed them

   Build a Feed Box and keep berries in it. A starving base is a base that stops working and then starts fighting.

There are nine elements: Neutral, Fire, Water, Grass, Electric, Ice, Ground, Dark and Dragon. They trade advantages in a rock-paper-scissors way, and it matters in fights against bosses far more than it matters against wildlife.

Separately from combat, each Pal has work suitabilities, and this is the system that runs your base. Kindling lights furnaces, Watering waters crops and puts out fires, Planting sows seeds, Generating Electricity powers machines, Handiwork does most crafting, Gathering and Lumbering and Mining harvest, Medicine Production makes potions, Cooling refrigerates, Transporting hauls to chests, Farming produces goods like eggs, milk and wool on its own.

• A base needs Handiwork above everything else. Underbuild it and every craft queue stalls.
• One Kindling Pal and one Watering Pal early saves you a hundred manual trips.
• Transporting is invisible until you do not have it, and then nothing ever reaches a chest.
• Pals have a Sanity bar. Overworked, unfed or unrested Pals break down, get sick and eventually run away.

Pals also carry passive skills (traits like Workaholic, Lucky, Ferocious) that stack, and a star rank you can raise. Two ways to make a Pal better: condensing (feed duplicates of the same species into it to raise its rank) and Pal Souls (found in the world and in dungeons, they raise attack, defence and work speed at the Statue of Power).

You get several base slots, and the mistake almost everyone makes is trying to make one base do everything. Split the work: a main base where you live and craft, a mining base parked on an ore field, a ranch base full of Farming Pals producing wool, eggs and milk while you are away.

1. 1

   Flatten before you build

   Pals path badly on slopes and stairs. A flat platform prevents most of the "why is my Pal stuck in a wall" problems.

2. 2

   Keep production close

   Ore node, furnace, chest, workbench, all within a short walk. Transporting Pals waste their day on distance.

3. 3

   Roof and walls are not decoration

   They keep the temperature survivable and keep raiders and wild Pals out of your crafting floor.

4. 4

   Defend it

   Raids come. Leave fighters assigned at the base, build defensive turrets when you unlock them, and do not leave the Palbox exposed.

Progress is measured in technology points, which come from levelling up, and Ancient Technology Points, which come from bosses. The technology tree is the real quest log: look at what you want to unlock next and the game tells you what to go do.

• Alpha Pals are named field bosses standing in the open world. They are the cleanest source of early power.
• Dungeons hold chests, ores and a boss at the end. Good loot, low risk once you can fight.
• Tower bosses are the island's faction leaders, each a human and their signature Pal, each a serious step up. Beating one unlocks Ancient Technology and moves the story on.
• Raid bosses are summoned at your own base with an item and are built for a full team.

The island is called the Palpagos Islands, and it is beautiful, and it is a crime scene. Between the cheerful creature catching sits a genuinely dark setting: poachers who hunt Pals for parts, a Free Pal Alliance who want them liberated, syndicates who traffic them, and a Church of the Eternal Pyre with an interest in what the Pals are for.

• The factions each hold a tower, and each tower boss is a person with a stated ideology and a signature Pal.
• The ruins, altars and ancient technology scattered across the map imply a civilisation that had all of this figured out and is not around any more.
• Human NPCs can be caught with spheres, which the game presents as a punchline and then does not take back.
• Later areas lean hard into the science-facility side of the story, and the tone shifts from comedy survival to something closer to horror.

You are not told any of this directly. It arrives in item descriptions, in the paperwork lying around bases you raid, and in what the bosses say before they fight you.

Co-op holds a small group in the host's world, and everyone builds and catches in the same save. A dedicated server holds far more people, keeps running when the host logs off, and is the right answer for a community that plays at different hours.

• On a shared world, guilds own bases. Join the same guild before you build or you will be locked out of each other's chests.
• Split the labour: one person on Handiwork infrastructure, one on ore, one out catching. Chaos is fun, duplicated effort is not.
• Level scaling is loose. A much higher level player can carry a new one through bosses without breaking anything.
• Server settings are generous: catch rates, damage, XP and base limits are all adjustable, and most community servers turn several of them up.

• Catch low level Pals you already own. Ten commons condensed is a stronger Pal than the one you had.
• Always carry a pickaxe upgrade before an ore trip, and always carry food.
• Ride a mount everywhere. Walking is the slowest way to play this game and mounts are cheap.
• Weakened, not dead. A Pal at a sliver of health is a catch, a Pal at zero is a drop.
• Check work suitability icons before you release anything. That "useless" Pal may be your only Cooling.
• Sleep in a bed to reset your Pals' sanity and heal them for free.
• Turn on the base alarm and keep fighters home. Losing a base to a raid you were not there for is the classic Palworld heartbreak.

• The official site and patch notes: the fastest way to know what changed in the last update.
• The community wiki has per-Pal work suitability tables, breeding combination charts and boss weaknesses.
• Ask in our Discord during a Palworld night. The stream chat has usually just made the mistake you are about to.