Palworld guide to help you become a master Pal trainer

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Review
Online and co-op
Character creation
Pals
Breeding
Bosses
Weapons
Travel
Resources and survival
Commands and mods

With this Palworld guide, you can get caught up on all the basics of Pals, weapons, and resources to help you survive out in the wild. It’s a bizarre but slightly charming mashup of creature collecting and survival with cute monsters roaming around that you can capture and keep in your party for battles or put to work or even arm with guns. That all means there are a lot of systems and mechanics mingling together, which can get quite confusing, so it’s always good to have a helping hand.

The game is still in early access too, so there are bound to be lots more changes and updates, but all the essential information for new starters is covered here, from Pal types, weapons, and playing with friends, to advanced breeding, resource gathering, and mods.

Palworld review

For our Palworld review-in-progress, we said that it’s a strange game that “can’t help feeling like a tonal car crash”, but nonetheless “shows effort and some real thought running through its core design”. Be sure to read the rest of our thoughts on the game’s early access phase in our full unscored review.

Palworld online and playing with friends

Palword multiplayer allows you to team up with friends, build bases together, and show off your prime Pals – if you’re playing on Steam, you may even want to consider setting up Palworld dedicated servers for you and your friends, and we’ve explained the whole process in the linked guide. However, the limitations of Palworld crossplay mean you can’t join players on platforms other than your own.

Palworld character creation

Creating your on-screen avatar’s look is the first thing you’ll do when starting a new game. Although, you might have some questions about how it works, how it might affect gameplay, and whether you can change your appearance later, so we’ve explained Palworld character creation in a separate guide for beginners.

Palworld Pal basics

The titular Pals of Palworld are obviously a huge part of the game and can be befriended so that you can order them around – you can get them to gather resources, defend your territory, or follow you around, However, you don’t get to pick a starter monster unlike a certain other creature-collecting series, so you need to know how to catch Pals in Palworld using Pal Spheres first.

After that, it’s a good idea to learn about the best Palworld starters that you can capture easily and provide the best utility for your game. As you collect more Pals and explore far and wide, you’ll come across many different types of Pals, each of which have their own advantages and disadvantages when battling other Pals, so make sure you understand how this all works with our Palworld type chart guide. You might also come across eggs that you can hatch, but only if you’ve got some Palworld incubators.

Palworld Pal breeding

Do Pals evolve in Palworld? Not really, but breeding is the closest thing to an evolution mechanic in the game. Essentially, with the right tools, you can get certain Pals to breed and create a different Pal species, but there are a lot of limitations to this, so we’ve explained the whole system in our Palworld breeding guide.

There are also several highly desirable Pals, both because they’re great monsters to have around in your party or are needed to breed with other Pals to create other species, and we’ve got guides for them here:

How to breed Anubis in Palworld: Anubis is a powerful Pal and definitely worth having in your party if you can breed one, and you can breed one to help you get the almighty Faleris too.
How to breed Faleris in Palworld: The massive phoenix Pal is very rare in the wild and very difficult to breed too.
How to breed Jormuntide in Palworld: Beating Jormuntide with the hopes of capturing it isn’t worth it as there are several breeding combinations for you to pursue.
Blazamut in Palworld: While you can technically get a Blazamut from breeding, you first have to catch one of these rare and formidable monsters out in the wild.

Palworld boss fights

As you level up and improve your tools, Pals, and base, you can challenge yourself by fighting several powerful Palworld bosses that hang out in large towers found around the map. Each boss fight consists of a particularly mighty Pal accompanied by their trainer, forcing you to dodge all sorts of attacks and carefully consider your own Pal party to overcome them efficiently. You can also defeat them as many times as you want as all Palworld bosses respawn, including Alpha Pals that you may have accidentally defeated after failing to capture.

Palworld weapons

Palworld guns — (Image credit: Pocketpair, Inc.)

Fighting the most hostile Pals and most dangerous bosses means you’re going to need some serious weaponry to deal with them. Luckily, there’s a substantial armory of Palworld guns, grenades, bows, and other armaments for you to unlock and craft. However, you need to craft ammunition for each weapon, and each one also needs to be maintained to keep it functioning and intact, so make sure you know how to repair weapons in Palworld with our guide.

Palworld travel

You’ve got a few options for travelling around the map in Palworld. Obviously, you can slum it on foot, but we’ve also explained how Palworld fast travel works in this guide. However, if you want to make another Pal work for you and want to fly in style, you should learn how to get Palworld flying mounts with our help.

Palworld resource and survival tips

Despite all the cute monsters, Palworld is first and foremost a survival crafting game, which means there are vital resources to collect if you want to stay alive and keep your Pals happy. It also means that building a simple shelter that you can eventually expand into a proper base is essential, but you should learn about the best Palworld base locations first.

With the basics sorted, you can start heading out on exploratory missions across the map, but make sure you avoid or come prepared for variable climates and dealing with Palworld cold and hot weather. Finally, to help you on your mining expeditions and resource farming, we’ve got a whole host of guides below to help you get what you need to survive in Palworld:

Palworld commands and mods

If you’re playing the Steam version of Palworld, you might want to make life a bit easier for yourself with a few Palworld console commands, affecting just you or even the entire server and other players. Additionally, if you’re after some more radical changes, such as enhanced visuals, a new minimap, or faster breeding, consider installing the Palworld mods listed in our guide.

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