Palworld beginner tips and tricks

Plus, all of our Palworld guides in one place.

Image credit: Pocketpair

Guide by Marie Pritchard Guides Writer

Updated on Feb. 13, 2024

Palworld is an action-adventure monster-catching survival game that's currently in early access on Steam and Xbox Game Pass. You're, quite literally, dropped into a world teaming with dangerous but cute creatures that you can befriend, battle, and capture while you're figuring out how to survive the perils the environment throws at you.

The first few hours of Palworld can be quite daunting, especially as you have nothing but a few basic tools at your disposal and a world that's basically a big question mark. Nothing has been explored, all the Pals are new to you, and there are human enemies lurking in the shadows.

Fear not! We're here with our handy beginner tips and tricks for Palworld and we've listed all of our guides here in one place to help you out.

On this page:

Palworld beginner tips and tricks
All of our Palworld guides

Palworld beginner tips and tricks

Here's a list of our handy beginner tips and tricks for Palworld, including how to power up your Pals and why it's worth building more than one base.

Check and adjust world settings

When you first make your world (and before you enter it each time you log in), you can adjust the settings for the world to your liking. As long as you have selected 'Custom' in the difficulty settings, you can alter how much EXP you can gain, if you drop all of your items when you die, and many more small gameplay elements that can alter how the game works for you.

If this is your first time playing Palworld, we strongly recommend turning off the setting where you drop all of your items when you die.

palworld dungeon boss level twelve mau — We died here, but we didn't lose anything! | Image credit: Eurogamer/Pocketpair

Focus on levelling up

Your character level, base level and the level of the Pals in your team are all important factors in Palworld. The higher the level your base is, the more bases you can build across the world. The higher the level you and your Pal team are, the easier it will be for you to take on tougher, bigger, and more impressive enemies (including boss-level Pals like Jetragon).

Also, you should make sure that your level matches the level of your Pals otherwise it can be hard to command them in battle.

Essentially, increasing the level of all of these things will make your time in Palworld smoother and you will find there are more opportunities available to you.

palworld character and a happy arsox — Who's a good flame sheep? | Image credit: Eurogamer/Pocketpair

Build a base near rich resources

Speaking of bases, we highly recommend building a base when you find any extremely rich resource deposits. Not only will this make travelling to the rich resource much easier, it also means you can exploit the deposits without too much effort.

Coal, Ore, Stone and Sulphur are all useful but very heavy resources to lug back and forth to your base of operations. So, if you build a base near a large spawn of one of these materials, you'll find it much easier to collect them.

palworld character holding pickaxe facing coal lump in desert — That's a nice boulder, I like that boulder. | Image credit: Eurogamer/Pocketpair

Hoard resources and materials

While we're on the topic of resources, you should build multiple storage facilities at your base/bases to hoard all of the resources you collect. Even if it seems like a resource (such as a Pal Soul) isn't of much use to you at the moment you find it, it will become important later on.

Therefore, don't throw anything away unless you have to and hoard everything you find. The only exception is if the Travelling Merchant comes for a visit and is offering to buy things for a good price, then you can sell some.

palworld player facing multiple wood storage boxes — No, we don't have too many thank you. | Image credit: Eurogamer/Pocketpair

Collect multiple Pal types

There are a variety of Pal types to get in Palworld, including Fire-types, Water-types and Dark-types. Each type of pal comes with its own traits and power balance (this is unique to each Pal). It's important to capture many different types of Pal to be able to create a team that's suited to the type of enemy you're heading off to face.

For example, if you know you're heading off to fight strong Fire-types on Mount Obsidian then you'd make sure that you have a few powerful Water-type Pals in your team as this is their weakness.

Also, you get a big EXP bonus if you capture 10 of a single type of Pal and you can sell any you decide you no longer want. There's really no downside to this one.

palworld blazehowl noct in paldeck menu — COOL! | Image credit: Eurogamer/Pocketpair

Use Statues of Power

Let's talk about Statues of Power for a moment. You will usually find these in abandoned church buildings across the map and you can interact with them to upgrade your Pal's stats or your own. To upgrade Pal stats you will need Pal Souls (told you they'd come in handy). To upgrade your own stats, you will need to collect small glowing figures you'll find as you explore.

palworld player facing lifmunk statue — Steal a neon statue, what's the worst that could happen? | Image credit: Eurogamer/Pocketpair

When you reach level six you can unlock the recipe for a Statue of Power from your Technology tree and can build it at any of your bases.

To build a Statue of Power you will need:

x20 Stone
x10 Paldium Fragment

palworld player facing statue of power — The power... | Image credit: Eurogamer/Pocketpair

Create weather resistant outfits/armor

It's a big world to explore, and there are multiple different weather systems/environments you'll face. Some will present you with extreme heat, some with extreme cold and there are even a few that have both! This is why we recommend creating a heat resistant and a cold resistant outfit or armor piece as soon as you can. They will protect you as much as they can while you're exploring.

palworld character holding bow wearing tropical outfit in desert — Our Tropical Outfit helped us survive the desert. | Image credit: Eurogamer/Pocketpair

Unlock high-tier weapons

Weapons are what keeps you alive in Palworld. Plenty of wild Pals and people across the world are not happy that you're there interrupting their peace or well-laid plans. Either way, whether it's to beat Syndicate Thugs or weaken a Pal enough to catch it, you will need weapons.

Your basic weapons are alright for a while, but we highly recommend taking some time to unlock higher-tier weapon recipes in your Technology tree. The better your weapon is and the more variety of weapons you have to choose from, the easier it will be to survive the challenges that lay ahead.

palworld promo art tanzee holding rifle in snow — A Tanzee with a rifle, what could go wrong? | Image credit: Pocketpair

Unlock fast travel points

As we said earlier, the world you can explore in Palworld currently is huge and it takes a while to walk around it. As you venture to new places, you should come across fast travel points (eagle statues) that you can activate and use to skip around the map to any places you've previously discovered or back to your base.

Again, this is something we thoroughly advise you do each time you find a statue, otherwise you could spend ages heading to one part of the map only to be killed by a Vanywyrm that seemed to be having a bad day.

palworld Vanwyrm in paldex menu — Yes, looking at you. Thank you for that. | Image credit: Eurogamer/Pocketpair

Get a Mount

Last but not least on our tip list is our advice to get a mount as soon as you can! Fast travel points are great, and you should definitely unlock them, but do you really want to walk all around the map to find them? Of course not - there's Pals to be caught and a world to explore, you don't have time to... explore.

There are flying mounts, ground mounts, and swimming mounts in Palworld. Getting any kind of mount will help you traverse different types of terrain much faster than you can on foot, and you can even use a mount to attack enemies while you're riding them.

palworld player riding on nitewing — Onwards Nightwing, to Twilight Dunes! | Image credit: Eurogamer/Pocketpair

All of our Palworld guides

Here is a list of all of our Palworld guides, it includes many things you need to know when starting off and a few helpful tips for beating your first major boss!

Exploration