Base Building and Automation
An efficient Palworld base starts with a Palbox on flat ground near ore nodes, then matches every Pal to the Work Suitability icons it actually has, remembering that node types are hard-gated by level and ore needs Mining 2. Keep Sanity high with a bed per worker, a Feed Box stocked with SANResist food like Mozzarina Hamburger, and a Hot Spring. You no longer need a sacrificial raid base, because v0.7.0 added a separate Raid Area battlefield and v1.0 made repairs free.
Your base is the core of your progression. An efficient base automates resource gathering, crafting, and food production. Poor base design leads to stuck Pals, low production rates, and constant frustration.
Choosing a Base Location
The Palbox establishes your base limits. Place it in a wide, flat area. Uneven terrain, cliffs, and water features cause pathing errors for your Pals. A flat plain allows Pals to walk freely between workstations without getting stuck on geometry.
Look for locations with natural resources within the blue ring radius. Ore nodes are incredibly valuable. Finding a flat area with several Ore nodes allows your Pals to mine continuously while you explore.
When building restrictions are enabled in the server settings, v1.0.4 added areas where building is not allowed around the Field Boss Suzaku in the desert, the desert Main Mission cave, and some mission locations in Sakurajima. A second server setting in the same patch lets administrators cap the number of buildings each player can place in the world.
Work Suitability
Every Pal species has specific Work Suitability traits indicated by icons in their stats menu. Matching Pals to the right tasks is essential for automation.
| Work Type | Ideal For | Common Early Pal |
|---|---|---|
| Kindling | Cooking food, smelting ore | Foxparks |
| Watering | Growing crops, powering mills | Pengullet |
| Planting | Sowing seeds in plantations | Lifmunk |
| Mining | Gathering stone (Lv. 1) or ore (Lv. 2+) | Cattiva (stone only) |
| Handiwork | Crafting items at workbenches | Lamball |
That table covers 5 of the game's 12 suitabilities. Assign a mix of Pals to cover all necessary jobs.
Check the numbers next to the icons, because they are hard gates and not speed modifiers. Each node type demands a minimum level: Rock 1, Paldium Ore 1, Ore 2, Sulfur 2, Coal 3, Pure Quartz 3, Soralite 6. A Mining Lv 1 Pal cannot touch ore at all.
v1.0 raised the Work Suitability cap from 4 to 10, and every rank up now increases one of a Pal's suitability levels, with maximum rank raising all of them. Note that each species has its own ceiling, so this does not turn every early Pal into a late-game worker: Cattiva only climbs from Mining 1 to 3 at four stars, while Aegidron goes from 8 to 10.
Condensing is also no longer the only route. Starfruit 1 to 4, bought with Dog Coins, and Ripe Starfruit, bought with Bounty Tokens, rank Pals up directly, and Applied Technique items raise suitability on their own.
Ancient Bark carries a gathering gate of its own, separate from the Mining nodes above, and v1.0.4 set it to Work Suitability Lv. 1.
Avoid cluttering your base with massive structures early on. Keep workstations spaced apart. Crowded areas trap larger Pals and stop them from working.
Managing Pal Sanity (SAN)
Pals lose Sanity (SAN) as they work. The thresholds are worth knowing: 85 Resting, 65 Slacking off, 60 Idling, 50 Overeating or destroying the Feed Box, 40 Sick, 0 Rioting. SAN drops from being forced to work, from hunger, and from having no bed. One change worth noting: since v0.7 Pals no longer lose SAN from taking damage.
The ailments they develop are Sick, Sprain, Overfull, Ulcer, Fracture, Weakened and Depressed. Ulcer costs 10 Work Speed and 5 Movement Speed, and Medical Supplies cure it.
Build enough Straw Pal Beds for every worker and upgrade to Fluffy Pal Beds when you can. Then get the food right, because the usual advice on this is wrong.
Red Berries do not accelerate SAN drain. They are Nutrition 15 and SAN 0, so they are simply near-worthless and not harmful, and it is the resulting hunger that costs you sanity. Salad and Pizza do not slow SAN decay either. Salad is SAN 11 and Pizza SAN 23, both with +30 Work Speed, and neither carries the SANResist stat at all.
The foods that actually resist SAN decay carry SANResist 25: Pancake, Mozzarina Hamburger, Carbonara, Grilled Lamball, Stewed Galeclaw, Fried Chikipi and Fried Kelpsea. For an industrial Feed Box the best pick is the Mozzarina Hamburger, at +50 Work Speed and SANResist 25, or Dumud Chowder at +50 Work Speed.
Construct a Hot Spring, which Pals use automatically when they need to recover, at +0.50 SAN per second. Since v1.0 they stay in it until SAN is fully recovered instead of hopping out early. Upgrades exist in the High Quality and Japanese-Style Hot Springs, and v1.0 added more SAN infrastructure worth building: the Clinic and Ancient Clinic, where Medicine Production suitability reduces SAN depletion and suppresses illness, and the High-Quality and Ancient Monitoring Stands.
Automating Production Lines
Set up continuous production tasks. Assign recipes at the cooking pot or workbench and leave the required materials. Pals with Handiwork or Kindling suitability will automatically complete the tasks while you are away.
Use chests near production areas. Place a wooden chest right next to your logging site. Pals will gather the wood and instantly deposit it, reducing travel time and increasing overall efficiency.
v1.0.4 fixed chest access permissions not being correctly applied to material reference and consumption when crafting at a base.
Oil and Power After v1.0.3
The patch cut the building costs of the Crude Oil Extractor, the High-Pressure Crude Oil Extractor and the Large Power Generator, and raised the crude oil production speed of both extractors. It also widened one mission requirement: the base mission that asks you to build a Crude Oil Extractor now accepts the High-Pressure version, so you no longer have to put down the older one just to tick the objective.
Returned Materials in v1.0.4
Canceling work at a production facility now puts the materials back in your inventory. When you cancel construction or dismantle a building with the Do not automatically pick up items over the weight limit option enabled, only the returned materials that exceed the weight limit drop at your feet.
Fixing Pal Pathing Issues
Large Pals do clip into structures and get stuck, and it does cost you SAN. But the specific architectural rules that circulate, three wall heights of doorway clearance, stairs two units wide, and foundations matching their stairs, are not documented anywhere, and there is no material-dependent pathing node system. Build material governs cost and durability, not pathfinding.
What is documented is simpler:
- Space facilities out so Pals do not have to squeeze through tight corners.
- Build on flat ground.
- If a Pal is stuck, pick it up and throw it at its workstation, or re-assign it through the Palbox.
v1.0 also improved this directly, adding countermeasures for raiding enemies getting stuck and fixing cases where base Pals could not resume work or clipped through the ground.
One point where current guidance has moved against this guide: the modern recommendation is to build up and not out, using multiple floors instead of spreading everything across a wide footprint.
Ranch Pickup Problems
Transport Pals ignoring Ranch output is a real, player-reported annoyance, but the explanation usually given for it is not. Transport level sets how many items a Pal carries per trip, and since v1.0 it also sets pickup radius. There is no teleporting, and no "conflicting pathing zone".
| Transport Level | Items Per Trip |
|---|---|
| Lv 1 | 2 |
| Lv 2 | 5 |
| Lv 3 | 10 |
| Lv 4 | 20 |
| Lv 5 | 40 |
| Lv 10 | 500 |
Wumpo and Wumpo Botan are Transporting Lv 6, not Lv 4, against a natural species ceiling of 8. The 10 in the table above is the hard cap, which condensation and Applied Technique books reach on any suitability. Wumpo is still a good pick, though for a different reason than usually given: its partner skill grants every other base Pal +1 Transporting. Wumpo Botan's partner skill is Ground damage reduction and does nothing for your base.
The documented fix for the Ranch itself is spacing it out and keeping chests clear of its opening.
One genuine Ranch bug did get fixed: v1.0.3 corrected Alpha Surfent producing no Leather when assigned to a Ranch.
Pal Expeditions and Research
To reduce manual grinding for basic resources, construct a Pal Expedition Station and send boxed Pals on timed missions.
Every destination carries a minimum recommended Firepower value, and sending a team under it cuts the rewards the run pays out. Overshooting the minimum increases the quantity of items you get back, so stacking Firepower past the requirement is worth doing. v0.6.4 is where that changed. Before it, a team over the minimum shortened the run. Since it, the surplus goes into the item count, and shortening a run is the Pal Labor Research Laboratory's job. Requirements climb from 25,000 Firepower at Verdant Hollow to 851,000 at the World Tree Subterranean City Ruins, the steepest of the nine normal destinations.
Xenolord Slab Fragments do sit on the late-game expedition reward tables, as an ordinary line on them. Which destinations carry the fragment, and at what rate, is unsettled and covered in Raid Bosses.
Building the Pal Labor Research Laboratory also unlocks permanent passive productivity buffs for your bases.
Raid Bases Are No Longer Necessary
This advice has been overtaken by two updates and is worth unlearning.
v0.7.0 added a separate raid battlefield. You can now choose to fight a raid boss in a Raid Area, which deploys you and your Pals to their own instance, so your base is never in the blast radius.
Structure loss was never permanent and is now trivial. v1.0 removed the Repair Kit entirely, and Handiwork Pals repair damaged structures for free.
If you do choose to fight at your base, the current approach is the opposite of stripping it bare: add defenses. Budget for feeding them, though. The Mounted Machine Gun still consumes Rifle Ammo, and the Pal crewing it reloads from a storage container placed nearby, so keep one stocked beside every emplacement.
On tanks, Astegon (125 Defense), Knocklem (135) and Mimog (130) were the right answer before v1.0 and are no longer the best. Panthalus and Astralym sit at 200, with Paladius at 145, Aegidron at 140 and Tetroise Primo at 140. Mimog is a particularly poor base Pal regardless, at 60 Health with only Gathering Lv 1 and Transporting Lv 2.
The claim that bosses run advanced aggro routines targeting active base workers is undocumented. The only recorded targeting quirk was a since-fixed bug where the boss warp-attacked the Palbox if you left its range.
If you run a dedicated server and want enemy camps back near your bases, v1.0.3 added the server setting bAllowEnemyCampSpawnNearBaseCamp, which disables the suppression of enemy camp spawns near player base camps. Pocketpair's own server guide lists it as controlling "whether to allow enemy bases to spawn near player bases".
The setting goes in PalWorldSettings.ini, at steamapps\common\PalServer\Pal\Saved\Config\WindowsServer\PalWorldSettings.ini on Windows or steamapps/common/PalServer/Pal/Saved/Config/LinuxServer/PalWorldSettings.ini on Linux. Start the server once before you go looking, because neither directory exists until it has run. For a current default set to work from, copy steamapps\common\PalServer\DefaultPalWorldSettings.ini onto that path and re-apply your own edits. Editing DefaultPalWorldSettings.ini where it sits changes nothing, since the server only reads the copy under Pal\Saved\Config.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where is the best place to put your base in Palworld?
Pick a wide, flat area, because uneven terrain, cliffs, and water features cause pathing errors for your Pals. Look for ore nodes inside the blue ring radius so your workers mine continuously while you explore.
Why do my Pals keep getting stuck in my base?
Tight builds and uneven ground. Space facilities out so Pals are not squeezing through corners, and build on the flat. If one is already stuck, pick it up and throw it at its workstation or re-assign it through the Palbox. The specific rules about doorway clearance, stair width and matching materials are not documented, and build material affects cost and durability, not pathing.
How do you stop Pals from losing Sanity in Palworld?
Beds for every worker, a Feed Box with the right food, and a Hot Spring, which they now stay in until fully recovered. On food, note that Salad and Pizza carry no SANResist at all and Red Berries are simply worthless and not harmful. Use Mozzarina Hamburger for +50 Work Speed and SANResist 25. Since v1.0 the Clinic and Monitoring Stands also reduce SAN depletion.
Why are my transport Pals ignoring Ranch items?
It is a real annoyance but not a pathing-zone problem, and no Pal teleports items. Transport level sets items carried per trip, 2 at Lv 1 up to 500 at Lv 10, plus pickup radius since v1.0. Space the Ranch out and keep chests clear of its opening. Wumpo is worth using, at Transporting Lv 6, because its partner skill gives every other base Pal +1 Transporting.
How do you protect your base from raid bosses?
You mostly do not need to any more. Since v0.7.0 you can fight a raid boss in a separate Raid Area instead of at your base, and v1.0 removed the Repair Kit so Handiwork Pals repair damage for free. If you do fight at home, add Mounted Machine Guns and keep a storage container of Rifle Ammo beside them so the crewing Pal can reload, and field genuinely tanky Pals like Panthalus or Astralym at 200 Defense instead of the older picks.
See Getting Started if you need help with the initial setup.
What to Read Next
- Technology and Progression. Unlocking the structures you need.
- Breeding and Passives. Breeding Pals with better work passives.
- Endgame and Farming. Optimal base locations and automation tiers.
- Raid Bosses. Building an altar without wrecking your layout.
- Tips and Tricks. Suitability gates, the sanity food myths, and free raid repairs.