Palworld devs tease upcoming patch with the Pal task management menu players have wanted since launch 2 months ago: "Enjoy some relaxing base management"

Palworld
(Image credit: Pocketpair)

Since launch in January, Palworld players have been begging for the survival game to add an essential colony sim feature: the ability to precisely assign workers to different tasks. In a new image posted to Discord by community manager Bucky, developer Pocketpair has teased just that. Have a look:

Palworld base menu

(Image credit: Pocketpair)

This new Pal management menu is tied to the Monitoring Stand, a base installation that, funnily enough, players initially expected to be used exactly for this purpose, only to find out that it's only good for telling your Pals to work themselves to death. But following an "upcoming [update]," the stand will let you enable or disable base tasks Pal by Pal, prioritizing certain functions.

It looks like a simple yes/no system. If you only want a Pal to do one job, like smelting a bunch of metal or watering the fields, without getting distracted by the gravitational pull of your base's mining and woodcutting nodes, you can disable unrelated work skills. Don't want them on the farm, working the ranch, or getting bogged down transporting items? Just turn those skills off. 

"When you're not taking on Bellanoir, enjoy some relaxing base management," Bucky said on Discord, referring to the newly announced Palworld raid featuring new goth Pal Bellanoir.

This update will naturally devalue Pals that only have one work skill, or even a small number of skills with one high-level standout, but those Pals are already generally underwhelming and the tradeoff is more than worth it. Now you won't have to rely on one-skill Pals to get specific jobs done. Anyone can be a focused worker under this new system, so if anything Pals with lots of high-level skills will just allow for a more flexible pool of potential assignments. Done farming for now? Un-tick the whole farming column and send them to the crafting bench, and so on. Now we just have to hope that Pals quickly and accurately change jobs when you update their assignments. 

Palworld creator wants to avoid "big-budget triple-A games" in the future as the hit survival game's profits are "too big for a studio with our size to handle."

Austin Wood

Austin freelanced for the likes of PC Gamer, Eurogamer, IGN, Sports Illustrated, and more while finishing his journalism degree, and he's been with GamesRadar+ since 2019. They've yet to realize that his position as a senior writer is just a cover up for his career-spanning Destiny column, and he's kept the ruse going with a focus on news and the occasional feature, all while playing as many roguelikes as possible.