Palworld Beginner's Guide: What to Do First

Palworld drops you onto the Palpagos Islands with nothing but your fists and almost no hand-holding. This guide covers exactly what to prioritize in your first few hours so your base starts running itself while you go exploring and catching.

Catch your first Pals

Your first real goal is Pal Spheres. Craft a stack at the workbench from Paldium Fragments, wood and stone, then look for weak, low-level Pals near your spawn. Whittle a target's health down with melee or ranged attacks first, because the catch rate climbs sharply as HP drops and a full-health Pal almost always breaks free. Throwing a Sphere from behind a Pal adds a catch bonus, and any status effect you can inflict helps too. Don't stress about combat power early on; the Pals that matter most in your opening hours are workers, not fighters.

Grab a Cattiva as soon as you can. It is a superb all-rounder that can do Handiwork, Gathering, Mining and Transporting, so a single one keeps your base ticking. Lamball and Lifmunk fill similar roles and appear all over the starting zone. Foxparks is worth catching for its Kindling suitability, which powers your furnace and cooking pot, and its partner skill turns it into a handheld flamethrower for early fights. Pengullet brings Watering, and Vixy can be dropped on a Ranch to dig up extra Pal Spheres, gold coins and arrows over time. Try to catch ten of each species you like, since doing so grants a permanent capture-power bonus plus useful rewards.

Where to place your first base

You anchor a base by dropping a Palbox, and where you put it matters more than beginners expect. Look for reasonably flat ground with trees, stone nodes and ideally an ore vein all inside the base circle, with water close by. Flat terrain is not just cosmetic: your Pals navigate the base on foot, and steep or cluttered ground makes them get stuck and stop working. Avoid spots crawling with aggressive Pals or sitting next to a boss, since raids and wandering enemies can wreck an undefended camp. You can relocate a Palbox later, so don't agonize, but a resource-rich, level plot near the starting Plateau of Beginnings saves you hours of hauling.

Put Pals to work at your base

Once your Palbox is down, build the essentials in roughly this order: a Primitive Workbench, a Logging Site for wood, a Stone Pit for stone and ore, a Berry Plantation for food, and a Feed Box so your Pals can eat. Then open your party and toss Pals into the base; they automatically pick up jobs that match their work suitability. Each Pal shows icons for the tasks it can handle, such as Handiwork, Lumbering, Mining, Watering, Planting, Kindling and Transporting, with a number rating its speed. Keep at least one Pal covering each core job, add Pal Beds so they can rest, and set down a campfire and cooking pot to turn raw berries and meat into better meals that restore more hunger.

Manage hunger, stamina and Pal food

You have your own survival bars to watch. Hunger ticks down constantly, and an empty stomach starts draining your health, so cook food early and carry a stack with you. Stamina governs sprinting, climbing and gliding, and it also drops faster when you are cold or badly overloaded, so resist the urge to over-encumber yourself with ore. Your Pals get hungry too, and a starving worker slows down and can fall sick, which is exactly why the Feed Box and a Berry Plantation are early priorities. Keep an eye on each Pal's sanity (SAN) bar as well, because overworked, unrested Pals lose motivation and eventually refuse to do their jobs.

Your first hours, step by step

1. Punch trees and mine stone by hand to gather starting wood and stone, then open the Technology menu and craft a Workbench.
2. Build a Primitive Workbench and craft a bundle of Pal Spheres from Paldium Fragments, wood and stone.
3. Weaken a nearby low-level Pal such as Lamball, Cattiva or Lifmunk, then throw a Sphere to make your first catch.
4. Place your Palbox on flat ground with trees, stone and ideally ore inside the base circle and water nearby.
5. Add a Logging Site, Stone Pit, Berry Plantation, Feed Box and Pal Beds, then assign your caught Pals to those stations.
6. Catch a Foxparks for Kindling and a Watering Pal like Pengullet so cooking and crop stations keep running.
7. Cook food at a campfire, keep your hunger bar up, and set out to catch more Pals and find the first Tower boss when you're ready.

Systems to know exist (but not stress about yet)

A few systems are worth knowing about even if you leave them for later. The Paldeck is your in-game encyclopedia, and filling it out while catching multiples powers up your future captures. Breeding lets you place two Pals in a Breeding Farm with a Cake to produce eggs that can inherit better stats and passive skills; it is powerful, but a mid-game project rather than a first-hour one. Leveling up earns Technology points, and early on you should prioritize better Pal Spheres, a Pal mount saddle and the Egg Incubator, then grab the Grappling Gun around level 12 for mobility. Finally, Palworld's 1.0 release adds a Wing Pack glider, floating Sky Islands and a World Tree endgame region above the map, which make great goals to chase once your base runs itself.