Best Beginner Tips for Base Building in Palworld

Patrick_Yu · February 15

Starting your journey in Palworld's expansive open-world can be as daunting as it is exciting. Your first crucial task? Setting up a base. This isn't just about slapping together a few walls and a roof; it's about creating a strategic hub for survival, crafting, and coordinating with your Pals. Whether you're battling hostile creatures or braving the elements, a well-planned base is your key to thriving. In this guide, we'll dive into the nuts and bolts of base building for beginners, from picking the perfect spot to leveraging your Pals' strengths. Get ready to build not just a base, but a home in Palworld that's as formidable as it is functional.

1. Pick the right location

In Palworld, choosing the right location for your base is key to success in its expansive open world. Your base serves as a sanctuary for you and your Pals, a defense against enemies, and a hub for crafting and resource gathering. Before placing down your Pal Box, consider these critical factors for an ideal base location:

Choose a spacious flat terrain: To begin, you'll need to locate a spacious, flat area. Flat terrains are easier to build on, and you'll require ample space since some of the essential structures in the game can be quite large. Additionally, a flat and open terrain reduces pathing issues for your Pals, enabling them to navigate the area more efficiently. This ensures they can perform tasks or come to your aid quickly.
Seek ore deposits: Ore is a pivotal resource throughout the early and mid-game phases, crucial for crafting essential tools, weapons, and building materials. Securing a location with abundant ore deposits will streamline your progress, allowing for faster advancements.
Utilize natural defenses: In Palworld, base raids add unpredictability and challenge, occurring semi-randomly as players face off against wild Pals and human attackers aiming to destroy their base. Choose terrain that naturally limits the approaches of these foes, such as areas backed by cliffs or surrounded by water. These natural fortifications can significantly reduce the vulnerability of your base to surprise attacks, enabling you to focus more on exploration, resource gathering, and cultivation of your Pals.

2. Space out structures and minimize Pal travel between tasks

Spacing out your structures is crucial in Palworld, the current AI pathing for Pals is a bit wonky so it’s pretty common for Pals to get stuck in buildings, or even find themselves tumbling off cliffs or stranded atop trees. To circumvent these issues, ensure your buildings are well-spaced allowing Pals to move freely and efficiently throughout your base. This approach not only prevents Pals from becoming stuck but also decreases the likelihood of pathing errors—generally speaking, the farther your Pal has to travel, the higher the chance of an incident.

The best way to prevent the AI pathing glitches is to limit the distance your PAL travels in base, you can achieve this by:

Group similar workstations: Place workstations that require the same "work suitability" type—such as Berry Plantation, Mill, and Crusher for water-type Pals—near each other. This minimizes the distance Pals need to cover between tasks, enhancing operational efficiency.
Build feedboxes near workstations: Keeping feedboxes close to workstations ensures Pals have easy access to food, maintaining their productivity without unnecessary detours.
Build chests near workstations: This allows Pals or the player to quickly store crafting materials. This is especially helpful if the amount of acquired material causes the player to become over-encumbered.

3. Wood burns, but stone doesn’t

https://youtu.be/XTxSqUhRxb8?si=Aj1FAK7VZMSgvPMj&t=156

As your base expands and your level increases, the levels of raiding parties will escalate accordingly. These parties may include enemies capable of causing fire damage. In Palworld, fire poses a significant threat to wooden structures, as it spreads easily and can cause extensive damage. Although Water Pals are designed to extinguish fires, their success is not guaranteed. Players themselves can inadvertently start fires by actions such as hitting walls with a torch or misusing a Pal's ability near wooden constructions.

To grasp the extent of damage fire can inflict on wood, watch YouTuber Augiesaint's video. In it, an enemy Beegarde uses the "implode" ability inside his base, sparking a massive fire that completely destroys his wooden mansion.

For those eager to explore their architectural creativity and construct aesthetically pleasing homes within their bases, it's advisable to wait until stone structures become available at level 18. Stone is significantly more durable than wood and, importantly, is not flammable, providing a safer and more resilient building material for your creations.

4. Keep sanity up

Sanity (SAN) is a mechanic in Palworld that indicates the well-being of your Pals. A Pal with low sanity will show reluctance to work in your base, often slacking off or sleeping during the day. Prolonged low sanity can lead to the "Depression" debuff.

Several factors can decrease a Pal's sanity level:

Being forced to work (e.g., by a Monitoring Stand)
Hunger or starvation
Lack of a place to sleep

Pals gradually regain sanity when satisfied with their working conditions, which include:

Access to food (particularly food that boosts sanity)
A designated sleeping area (Fluffy Pal Beds or Large Pal Beds enhances HP and SAN restoration during sleep)
Reasonable workloads
Access to Hot Spring or High-Quality Hot Spring

5. Grapple hook when over-encumbered

https://youtu.be/o03Y4j3qxm0?si=qed_8v-OByEsbb7i&t=60

In Palworld, carrying items that exceed your weight capacity results in the "over-encumbered" debuff, which significantly slows down your movement speed. Common crafting materials such as Ore, Stone, and Wood can easily encumber your player. Moving materials from different parts of your base to your storage is essential, and similar to carrying groceries, sometimes you prefer making just one trip. The grappling hook allows you to bypass the encumbered debuff and easily transport yourself from one part of your base to another. The only drawback is waiting on the grappling hook's cooldown.

6. Pay attention to a Pal’s passive skills

Pals in Palworld possess passive skills, with each Pal having up to four skills or as few as none. These passive skills play a crucial role in determining whether a Pal is better suited for combat or base tasks. For instance, a Pal with the "Work Slave" passive skill gains a +30% boost to work speed at the expense of a 30% reduction in attack power, making it more apt for labor than battle. While Pals can exhibit a variety of trait combinations, finding one with ideal work or combat skills is rare—unless you engage in breeding Pals. If you're on the lookout for an efficient Pal for your base, consider searching for Pals with at least one of the following skills:

Artisan: +50% work speed
Serious: + 20% work speed
Lucky: +15% Atk, +15% work speed
Work Slave: + 30% work speed, - 30% Atk
Swift: +30% move speed (helps Pals move around base faster, especially for feeding/transporting).
Workaholic: 15% less sanity drain. (work longer without breaks/rest)
Diet lover: 15% less hunger drain (work longer without eating)

7. Capture a human merchant

While Palworld is renowned for its exotic creatures that inhabit the archipelago, they are not the only entities you can capture during your explorations. The Pal Spheres can also capture people. Although capturing humans is frowned upon, it is not explicitly prohibited. The likelihood of catching a human is quite low, making it a rare occurrence. You may expend several Pal Spheres in the attempt, so if you're intent on capturing a human, it's wise to come well-prepared. However, unlike Pals who have multiple attack and work suitability abilities, humans are only limited to one weak attack skill “Punch” and one level in the handiwork branch of work suitability.

So why catch a human? Because some humans are merchants.

Merchants form the cornerstone of the Palworld economy, offering a wide range of products from common to rare crafting materials, item schematics, and Pals. Trading items is a crucial aspect of their role, allowing players to buy and sell items, Pals, and additional resources. As players traverse the game's various biomes, they can find essential materials for crafting, building, and upgrading through these merchants.

There are four types of merchants in the game:

Wandering Merchant (Green)
Wandering Merchant (Red)
Pal Merchant (Blue)
Black Marketeer

Capturing merchants offers a strategic advantage, allowing you to summon them at your base for easy trading. This eliminates the need to find and track down merchants whenever you need specific materials for a base upgrade or to pawn off unwanted Pals or items.

8. Stack your farms

In Palworld, managing limited base space is a significant challenge, particularly when it comes to farming essential crops like Berries, Wheat, Tomatoes, and Lettuce. A practical solution to this issue is a stacking technique for farm plots, which conserves valuable base area by allowing vertical layering of crops. This method effectively triples the available farming space without expanding the base's footprint. It's a straightforward yet clever workaround that addresses the space constraints faced by players, making it a useful strategy for those looking to maintain efficient farms without sacrificing space for other important base components. To successfully stack your farms, you must:

Start with benches: Place one bench, build it, then stack and build another on top, establishing a vertical structure for elevated plantation placement.
Place the first plantation: Align a plantation with the top bench and jump to snap it in place when it turns blue. After building the plantation, delete the supporting bench to make the plantation float, exploiting game mechanics for space-efficient placement.
Add the second plantation: Duplicate the process for a second floating plantation, creating a tiered effect that maximizes vertical space and crop capacity within the same footprint.
Build the ground-level plantation: Add a third plantation at ground level beneath the floating ones, effectively tripling the usable farming area and streamlining the crop management process across multiple levels.

If you're still a bit confused, take a look at this video; it should help clear things up!