Palworld Beginner's Guide: How to Survive Your First Days

Palworld drops you onto the Palpagos Islands with basically nothing but a stick and a dream. The first couple of in-game days can feel rough, since you start out hungry, squishy, and broke. The good news is that the opening stretch is pretty forgiving once you know what to grab first. Get your base spot right, catch a few work Pals, and the whole thing clicks into place fast. Here's how to get through those first days without starving or losing all your stuff.

Choosing Your Starting Landmass and Base Location

You spawn on the Plateau of Beginnings, stay there a while

When you load in, you wake up on a big flat area called the Plateau of Beginnings. It's the safe, low-level starting zone, and it's packed with easy Pals and loose resources. A lot of new players immediately sprint across the bridge chasing cooler stuff. Don't. The plateau has everything you need for the first several levels, and wandering off too early usually ends with you getting flattened by something ten levels higher.

Stick close until you've got a base, a few Pals, and at least stone tools. The rest of the islands will still be there.

What makes a good base spot

Your base circle comes from dropping a Palbox, so before you place it, scout the area on foot for a minute. You want a few things at once:

• Flat ground. Walls and crafting stations hate slopes. A flat patch saves you a ton of fighting with the build system.
• Ore nearby. Ore looks like reddish-brown rock veins, and it's the bottleneck for the whole mid-game. Even one or two nodes inside your base circle is a big deal.
• Wood and stone close by. Trees and plain rock piles are the fuel for almost everything early on.
• Water not too far off. Some later recipes and a lot of cooking want water, and being near a stream keeps your fast-travel options open.

You won't find a perfect spot on day one, and that's fine. Get most of these and you're set.

Concrete spot picks

If you want a hand-me-down location, the Plateau of Beginnings itself is the safest first base, roughly around coordinates 235, -510. Those numbers drift a little between patches, so treat them as a ballpark. It's flat, it's right next to your spawn, and there are Pal and resource spawns all around.

Once you're a few levels in and you want ore, the hillside near the bridge (around 3, -520) is a popular second pick. Another strong one is south of the Tower of the Free Pal Alliance, roughly 189, -38. That spot sits on higher ground, which sounds cosmetic but actually helps with raids, since attackers have to climb up at you and your Pals get free hits while they do.

Don't build right on a fast travel point

One easy mistake: slapping a base down directly on top of a fast travel statue or a boss spawn. It can cause weird spawn clashes and put boss fights inside your walls. Build a short walk away from those points instead. Your base runs smoother for it.

Catching Your First Pals Without Wasting Spheres

Pal Spheres are cheap, but not free

You unlock the Pal Sphere at level 2 for one Technology Point. Each one costs 1 Paldium Fragment, 3 Wood, and 3 Stone to craft at a Primitive Workbench. That's cheap as dirt on paper, but early on you're crafting every single one by hand, so blowing a pile of them on full-health Pals stings. Treat spheres like a limited thing until you have a few base workers pumping them out.

The basic Pal Sphere has a Capture Power of 7. That sounds abstract, but it just means the sphere is built for low-level Pals. Throw it at a level 20+ thing and the catch chance is basically zero. Match the sphere to the target.

Weaken first, then throw

The single biggest thing you can do for your catch rate is lower the Pal's health first. Knock it down to a sliver of HP and the catch chance jumps way up. A Wooden Club or a few arrows gets the job done early. Just be careful not to actually KO the thing, since a dead Pal can't be caught.

After low health, the next boost is the back bonus. If you throw the sphere while the Pal's back is turned to you, you get an extra capture bonus (roughly around plus 20 percent, give or take, depending on its level). It's free, so always try to circle behind before you throw.

The Pals worth grabbing in hour one

For your first handful of catches, focus on base workers rather than fighters. A few good picks:

• Cattiva: a great all-rounder. It does Mining, Handiwork, Gathering, and Transporting, eats little food, and its Partner Skill boosts how much you can carry. Probably the single most useful first catch.
• Lamball: handy for Handiwork and Transporting, and it drops wool you'll need later for cloth armor.
• Foxparks: your first Kindling Pal, so it lights campfires and forges for you. Decent in early scraps, too.
• Tanzee: a flexible gatherer that also pulls its weight in a fight.
• Depresso or Lifmunk: solid little workers. Depresso in particular is a quietly great base hand.

You don't need all of them. Two or three Cattiva plus one Foxparks covers most of your early base jobs on its own.

Don't chase every shiny Pal yet

It's tempting to lob spheres at everything that moves. Save your early stock for Pals that actually do work you need right now. Catching a combat Pal that just sits in your box doesn't help you survive day three. Grab workers first, and save the cool fighters for when spheres are flowing and you can afford to miss a throw.

Building a Basic Shelter and Crafting Stations

Palbox first, everything else second

The Palbox isn't built at a workbench. You drop it straight from the build menu, and placing it claims your base circle. Until it's down, you can't assign Pals to work. So the very first thing you do at a new spot is set the Palbox. Everything else radiates out from it.

Once the box is down, the game nudges you through base levels. Level 1 wants a deployed Pal and a Wooden Chest. Level 2 wants a Primitive Workbench and a Shoddy Bed. Level 3 wants a Feed Box and three Straw Pal Beds. Following that chain basically builds your starter base for you.

The crafting stations you need right now

Keep it small at first. A tight starter set looks like this:

• Primitive Workbench: makes your tools and your first spheres. Build the Stone Axe and Stone Pickaxe here the second it's up.
• Campfire: cooks raw food so it fills more hunger and doesn't make you sick. It's also your early heat source for smelting basics.
• Wooden Chest: storage. You'll fill your pockets fast, and a chest keeps your carry weight down so you can actually run.
• Palbox: the heart of the base, as above.

You can skip fancier stations like the Weapon Workbench or the Pal Gear Workbench until later. They're hungry for materials you don't have yet.

A shelter can be ugly and still work

For the actual building, you do not need anything pretty. A foundation, four walls, and a roof keeps the rain and night spawns off your crafting stations, which is all that really matters early. A lot of players just wall in their workbenches and call it done.

Roofs matter more than you'd think, because some crafting can't run out in the rain without cover. Stone walls hold up better than wood if something raids your base, but wood is faster to throw up. Pick whichever you have more of at the time.

Give your Pals beds

Straw Pal Beds aren't just decoration. Pals need to sleep, and a base with no beds is a base full of grumpy, slacking Pals. Drop at least one bed per working Pal, the base level 3 step has you build three, which is a decent target to aim for. Put them somewhere flat and close to the work so your Pals don't waste half the night walking to bed.

Managing Hunger, Stamina, and Sanity Early On

Your own hunger bar

You've got a hunger bar just like your Pals do. When it empties, your health stops regenerating and you get weak, which is a great way to die to a random Cattiva you'd normally ignore. The fix is simple: keep something cooked on you at all times.

Raw berries and raw meat work in a pinch, but cooked food fills a lot more hunger per bite. Once you have a campfire, cook the meat your Pals drop (Raw Lamball Mutton, Chikipi Poultry, and the rest) into proper food. A small stack of cooked meat in your hotbar saves you from a lot of dumb deaths out in the field.

Stamina is your real movement stat

Stamina powers sprinting, climbing, gliding, and even how far you can wade through water. Run out mid-climb and you fall. Run out while overloaded and you basically crawl. Early on your stamina pool is small, so you'll be stopping to catch your breath a lot.

This is one of the few places where leveling up matters a ton. Most of your early stat points are well spent on Weight, so you can carry more without slowing, and Stamina, so you can actually get around. A little Health helps you survive getting hit. Dumping everything into attack sounds fun, but you'll spend way more time walking than fighting in the opening hours.

Plus, carry weight drains stamina faster when you're over the limit. Mining a big ore node and trying to jog home with a full pack is a classic newbie trap. Make a couple of trips instead of hoarding.

Sanity, your Pals' mood meter

Sanity, shown as SAN, is the mood meter for your Pals, not for you. It drops as they work, especially on tasks they hate or when they're overworked and underfed. Low-sanity Pals slack off, get depressed, stop eating, and in bad cases get sick. A depressed Pal works slow, and that drags down your whole base.

The basic fixes are cheap:

• Beds. Tired Pals recover sanity by sleeping, so enough beds for everyone is step one.
• A Feed Box stocked with food. Hungry Pals lose sanity fast.
• Cooked food over raw. Plain cooked food beats raw, and fancier recipes down the line restore even more.

A little later, the Hot Spring is the big sanity tool. Pals hop in on their own and recharge, and the upgraded High Quality Hot Spring works even better. For your first days, though, beds plus food plus not cramming forty Pals into a three-Pal base is more than enough.

Progressing the Tech Tree Toward Better Gear

How the tech tree works

You earn Technology Points by leveling up and spend them to unlock recipes at each level tier. Every level hands you more points to play with, but there's never quite enough to grab everything, so the order you spend in matters early. There's a second track, Ancient Technology Points, that comes from bosses and unlocks special sphere and gear recipes. You can ignore that for now.

What to grab first

At level 2, take the Palbox, the Pal Sphere, the Campfire, the Wooden Chest, and the Repair Bench. That's your survival kit. The Repair Bench is easy to overlook, but it fixes your tools and weapons for cheap instead of rebuilding them, which saves materials fast.

After that, push toward better gathering and defense:

• Stone Axe and Stone Pickaxe: your first real tools. Way faster than fists.
• Cloth Outfit, and the armor that follows: raises your survivability a lot. Dying less is the best gear you can buy.
• Mega Sphere: the next tier up from the Pal Sphere, with higher Capture Power for tougher Pals.
• Crossbow or a better bow: your ranged damage jump. Bows carry you a long way before guns are even affordable.

Don't sleep on the Repair Bench

Tools and weapons lose durability and break. New players often just rebuild them, which eats your wood and stone and time. The Repair Bench tops them back up for a fraction of the crafting cost. Make repairing a habit whenever you pass the base, and your material bill drops hard.

Follow the natural gear curve

The short version of the early progression is: fists to stone tools, cloth to metal armor, Pal Spheres to Mega Spheres, and bows to the first crossbow. Each tier lets you fight tougher Pals, mine faster, and die less. Don't tunnel-vision on one path. A player with great weapons but no armor still gets one-shot, and one with great armor but a wooden club kills things way too slowly. Spread your points around a little.

Aim for the ore unlock

The real early-game goal is to reach the tech that lets you build a Furnace and smelt ingots from ore. That unlocks the next whole tier of gear: metal tools, metal armor, better spheres. Once you can process the ore you've been hoarding, the difficulty curve flattens out and the rest of the islands open up. Get to that Furnace, and your first days are officially behind you.