Your Guide to Palworld Pals - Skills, Base Jobs, and Evolution

Pals are a key part of the Palworld experience, and in this guide we'll teach you everything you need to know about the fluffy, adorable creatures you'll be putting hard to work at your base, or wielding guns on your behalf.

How To Catch New Palworld Pals

At it’s simplest level, you throw a Pal Sphere at a Pal and attempt to catch it.

But, much like other monster collecting games there are various things you can do to improve your chances to catch Pals. Unlike some monster catching games, Palworld does tell you the chance you have of catching the creature you're targeting when you aim the ball at them, so you have an idea how it’s going before

One of the first, and most obvious ways to improve your chances is to damage the wild Pal you want to catch. By doing damage, you are able to weaken them and make them more likely to stay in the Pal Sphere. Be warned though, that if you kill the Pal by depleting its HP, you’ll be unable to catch it.

Beyond attacking enemy Pals to deal HP damage, you can also apply status effects on them to improve your chances of catching them. Burning is an easily available status effect you can apply on Pals, either by using a Foxpark, or by swinging your own torch at them. Poison, and other conditions also apply here, and make a wild Pal more susceptible to being caught.

Throwing Position Matters

Palworld also considers your position in regards to the Pal you are attempting to catch. If you are hitting the back of a wild Pal, you are more likely to catch it than if you are standing in front of it, especially if it is hostile to you.

Palworld Has Traps!

One other tool also available to you in Palworld is the use of traps. Beginning with the Hanging Trap you can unlock at level 4 on the technology tree, you can set up traps and Pals caught in them will be easier to catch for you.

Last, but not least, you can simply use a bigger Pal Sphere to catch the pal. Mega Spheres are craftable as the game goes on, and you can find some lying around in the wild. Much like Great Balls in certain other monster tamer games, these are the next step in the ball line and will improve your catch chance.

The Palworld Elemental Affinities

Each Pal has an elemental affinity, and each has matches it is strong or weak against. Palworld avoids the 18 type confusion of certain other franchises, with a relatively simple 9 elemental affinities (no rock and ground here).

The types are:

• Grass
• Ground
• Electric
• Water
• Fire
• Ice
• Dragon
• Dark
• Neutral. 

Here’s a quick graphic from the game that shows the game’s rock/paper/scissors breakdown of elements.

Palworld Pals Partner Skill

One of the most important things each Pal species has is its partner skill. These skills come in a wide variety of forms.

At the simplest end are passive abilities like Cattiva's Cat Helper which grant a 50 point boost to carrying capacity at level 1 of the Partner Skill, and needs no additional gear.

Then you have active abilities that require no gear, like Lamball's Fluffy Shield, where it jumps in your arms to protect you from danger.

Most Pals Partner skills though, require that you build gear for them at the Pal Gear Workbench.

This is where you build things like assault rifles for your Tanzee, or a harness for your Foxpark to jump into and let you control like a flamethrower, as two examples of active, gear based Palworld partner skills.

There are some like Celaray where the Pal merely needs to be in your party and these trigger, as Celaray's Zephyr Glider ability triggers whenever you go to glide. Daedream's ability Dream Chaser triggers whenever its in your team and you do an attack as it does a follow up attack.

There are even a variety of mount skills, where you can ride your Pal, either on the ground, or in the sky, but they need the proper saddle built first.

Palworld Pals Passive Skills

Beyond their Partner Skills, Pals may have different passive skills.

These skills generally come with a rating beside them rated in up and down arrows, with a maximum of three either way for that skill. The rating is a general prognostic, but not something to take that will always be purely positive on up to two arrows up.

For example, the two arrow up skill Musclehead gives a 30% bonus to attack, but also a 50% penalty for work speed. The skill is good if you are battling with the Pal, or setting it to defend your base, but is obviously bad if you want them doing other work around the base.

Three Arrow Up skills are purely positive, and can give big boosts to abilities, while arrow down skills are always be purely negative. Passive skills effect a lot of things from damage by types of attacks dealt or taken, food used, work speed, and all sorts of other things.

On the extremes these skills can be very influential on how useful a Pal is in battle or at your base so you want to make sure you take them into account.

Palworld Pals Base Jobs and Sanity

Your Pals will do a lot of work around your base, with the base game set to allow you to have up to 15 of them working at a time. Passive Skills are important to note as to how they influence your Pal's working capabilities, but what jobs they are able/willing to do is the most important part, as is how to assign them roles.

To see this, you can either look at them in the Palbox management, or in the menu focusing on the Pal in the bottom right. There are 12 different types of‘jobs’ or roles pals can have levels in, with the differing levels impacting effectiveness they have at the job. The jobs are based on their species, and their elemental affinity, not by what moves they know.

Some things in camp can’t be done without someone who has the particular work suitability. For example, you need a Pal with Kindling (like Foxparks) to make use of the forge to turn ores into ingots, or someone with Watering for the Crusher to give it the water power it needs.

As they work on your base, your Pals will decrease in satiation, and sanity. Satiation is filled up by eating, something they can do themselves once you have a feed box set up. If a Pal is starving, it’s stats will decrease. How much a Pal eats is rated on a scale of 1 to 10 and can be seen in the bottom right of that Pal’s Stat menu, right under Work Suitability.

Pals also have a SAN stat, or mental stability. Like all of us, they lose some sanity when going to work, and regain it some by relaxing, having good food, or taking part in entertainment. As sanity decreases, a Pal will want more food, even if it’s not higher caliber, and a certain points it will start goofing off, or possibly even causing more problems. The Hot Springs, and making sure you have enough Pal beds are ways to manage this automatically, as is putting higher calibre food in the Feed Box.

As for assigning roles, if you give them no guidance, Pals will gravitate to jobs they can do. However, you can also use the lift command to pick them up, and toss them down near the job you want them to do, and it will assign them to it. That means even if there's nothing to do at that job, they'll wait until there is something there in between eating, bathing, and sleeping.

Improving Palworld Pals - Do Pals Evolve?

Unlike a certain Nintendo aligned franchise, Pals don’t change over time or become different types of Pals via evolution. That’s not to say Pals are static as you find them, merely that they improve in different ways.

Pals level up as they do jobs around your base, or when you gain experience if they are in your party. When they level up they can learn additional moves, and improve their stats and capabilities. It is possible for a Pal to outlevel you, though in that case, when it’s in your party the Level Sync will lower their level to match yours.

Pals can also improve their stats at Statues of Power, where you can spend Pal Souls to improve their Max HP, Attack, Defense, or Work Speed. A particular Pal’s improvements at a Statue of Power can be reset at an increasing cost, based on what level the ability is at, and this will also refund the Pal Souls spent on it.

Finally you can improve Pals with the Pal Essence Condenser. This Ancient Civilization Tech opens at open 14, and you’ll need Ancient Technology Points and Ancient Civilization Parts to unlock and build it.

Once you do, you can sacrifice some Pals of the same species to improve another Pal of the same species. This improves their attack, defense, HP, and their partner skill. It can be done up to four times it appears, as marked by the stars in the top left, and it takes exponentially more pals each time with the first requiring 4, and the second 16.

How to Teach Your Palworld Pals New Attacks

Pals learn new attacks as they level up, but that’s not the only way for them to get new attacks.

Throughout the game, there are fruit you can find that can teach your Pals a new attack. To do this you simply click on the fruit, and then on the Pal in your party.

If the Pal already has three attacks, you will then need to go to the Pal Stats page and select which attacks you want them to be using, though they won’t forget the moves you have it put in 'storage'.