Base Building Tips and Tricks in Palworld

You can start building your base at Player Level 2, when you unlock Palbox from the Technology tree.

• You can construct additional bases (Palboxes) once you reach Base Level 10 and 15.

You can deconstruct your base (Palbox) whenever you'd like and move to a new location, though most of the buildings will stay in the old spot and will have to be deconstruct manually prior or thereafter. Prior is preferable, because once you deconstruct your Palbox, you lose the Fast Travel point it provides.

#1 Pick the Right Location

Location of your base matters a lot in Palworld for few reasons:

1. Defensive capabilities, terrain creating natural walls and/or choke-points.
2. Pals getting stuck less via pathfinding in flat, open terrain.
3. Your base is a Fast Travel point.

My second base location, plateau near the Tower of the Rayne Syndicate, the first Tower Boss.

I kinda went against my third point about your base being a Fast Travel point with my second base and wasted it to an extend, but I really loved this spot from the moment I beat Rayne and took a look around from atop her tower. The area has only a single point of entry thanks to the surrounding terrain. I guess technically there is a path from the mountains, but I have not been attacked from there yet in dozen of raids. And funnily enough, half the raids spawn on the cliff to the left under the tower and the enemy just drops down to the river :D Not something I planned for, but welcome consequence of the location.

The main reason why I picked this spot is the open flat terrain here though. The area you see on the picture is larger than the circle border of the base, so there are no obstacles in the way anywhere outside the few rock/ore nodes. I've found that not having any natural resources like trees or stones in my base is preferable because Pals won't get stuck or bug out because of them. I eventually positioned Palbox in the center of the area so the circle does not touch any trees and I mined out the stone/ore nodes and built something on top of their spawn points to keep them from respawning.

To go back to my Fast Travel argument, once you can build your 2nd or 3rd base, you will most likely use them for ore and coal mining in appropriate areas (I did) unless your main base has those resources, but you could also keep one base "floating" and just build the Paldeck anywhere in the world whenever you need to go back home to unload your inventory or to restock/repair etc. since you can literally create your own Fast Travel point on the spot and return back to it once you took care of business, deconstruct it and continue adventuring. This is something I have realized only after dozens of hours already spent playing, and am still not using this "feature" actively now because the natural Fast Travel points are plentiful enough, but I thought some of you might like this little idea :)

#2 Wood Is Your Enemy

Wood burns in Palworld, which means if your wooden base catches on fire, it can get destroyed. Any structure, wooden or not, can get destroyed, but wooden ones burn down unless put out by your water Pals. And almost all Raids will eventually have fire enemies in them, some en masse.

First hand experience :D

You don't have a choice but to use wood from the start, but as soon as you get to Metal Chests and Stone Structures, I highly recommend switching to them.

Wooden Walls having 20.000 durability is probably a typo in the code, it would make sense if they were supposed to be only 2.000 looking at rest of the values. And if the higher durability is to take their flammability into consideration, I would expect the rest of the Wooden Set to follow suit, which it doesn't, but who knows.

Even so, I would not recommend building your ultimate base out of wood, however aesthetically pleasing it might be.

#3 Spread Your Structures

This needs to be kept in mind again due to the horrible Pal pathfinding. You need to spread your structures around to leave room all around them for Pals to not get stuck, or refuse to work in them altogether. They might still get stuck, especially at the Logging Site, but placing structures far enough apart will cut down on this issue a lot.

Pal stuck on a Logging Site, after a while I was surprised when this didn't happen upon my return. But better structure placement in my 2nd base fixed this problem for me.

Another factor is height. Try building everything, at least that has to do with Pals interaction, on the ground level and not under a roof. If you put a workbench, Feed Box or a Hot Spring in your magnificent palace that is several stories tall, Pals might either never reach them or they can get stuck in the room(s) and/or on the roof. This is tied to not only the pathfinding issue, but the size of Pals and their spawn once you teleport into your base as well.

Only thing I have not yet had a problem with under the roof is Pal beds, I guess if the ceiling is high enough, and they are on the ground level as seen in the picture below.

I am experimenting with different types of beds but it seems that Pals just lie randomly in whatever they want, small Pals in big beds and big Pals in small beds, lol.

#4 Chests Are Your Friends

Place a chest near your production buildings, it will help you and your Pals.

Having chest next to the Logging Site makes for a very short trip carrying wood to a container. And helps to have one nearby in multiple places around the base if you need to quickly get rid of something. Especially if you deconstruct a lot by being a perfectionist like me :D

Pals transport wood and ore from Logging Sites and Stone Pits, so if you place a chest next to them, they won't have to take a long trip and potentially get stuck somewhere along the way.

Pals also transport products from plantations into the nearest Feed Box, so keep that in mind when placing them for the same reason.

From any other production structure it will be you who needs to pick up and carry the products, so it might be beneficial to you to create a chest near most of them so you don't have to spend a lot of time running all around your base and back to your single storage point. This will also help in the early game where chests do not have many inventory slots, so you need to make multiple of them anyway. And because Palworld has one of the best quality of life features in base building games - allowing you to build/craft with materials stored in your chests - you don't have to care where exactly are the materials stored in your base in the end.

Hot Tip: Grappling Gun is your best friend in this game. Seriously! It allows you to move even while over-encumbered, so you can move around your base, or wherever else you need, even if you are carrying stuff waaaaaaay over your carry weight limit. I am using three Grappling Guns switching between them to cut down on cooldowns when I need to transport a large amount of materials. Cannot imagine what I would do without them <3

#5 Keep Your Pals Happy

This one should be a nobrainer, but in a larger base it might be required to have multiple Feed Boxes to cut down on Pals' traveling times and potential pathfinding issues as well as more than one Hot Spring to let more Pals recover sanity faster. If your Pals are not kept fed or if their sanity is too low, they will refuse to do any tasks and they can get sick which results in them getting a debuff that will cut down on their stats and work speed. Do not underestimate this, otherwise your production might slow down or stop completely.

One Pal's Hot Springs is another Pal's ...

I've found that a single Berry Plantation can easily feed even 15 Pal base, but keep in mind that if you are sporting multiple Feed Boxes, you will need to refill them manually, because Pals carry products from plantations only to the closes one.

From my observation, Pals do not seem to eat from Cooler Box or Refrigerator, but you generally don't have to worry about food in Feed Box spoiling, because whenever a Pal takes something to eat, the counter on the respective food product resets, and not only that but when the timer runs out, only a single item from the stack gets removed, so for example 1 Berry, you do not lose entire stack of thousand Berries!

Hot Tip: I've found out that whenever you sort your inventory, or inventory in a container, food products will also get their shelf-life reset. This can be a useful way to prolong the expiration date on your foods while adventuring.

#6 Build Within the Blue Circle

While you can build outside your base limits denoted by the blue circle spanning from the Palbox it is not recommended for several reasons.

1. Unless you changed this in your server or single-player settings, buildings outside the circle deteriorate with time and eventually break down completely.
2. Pals only work within the circle, so they won't use any buildings that are placed outside of it, even if only by an inch, do make sure any buildings you want your Pals to use are inside of the circle completely!

Example of bad placement - Pals won't put materials in the storage container, but also anything in it is not considered 'in base' so it won't count for crafting purposes.

#7 Problems With Placing Structures? Try This!

If you have problems placing structures around and getting 'Can't build here' message, try building from different angle - the best seems to be from above - or in a different order. I will explain what I mean on few examples.

Placing Stairs

If you can't place stairs the way you want to, try getting on top of a foundation or roof and position yourself looking down, this usually does the trick for most things!

You can click on the images to view in full resolution.

Placing Roofs

Roofs are very finicky with their placement, you can use a very simple trick to make things easy for yourself - start from the ground level, the next level will suddenly have no problems with clipping. You can deconstruct the "supports" after. If you are at higher than one floor up, create "support" flat roofs to create a starting point similar to the ground level and repeat this technique.

Roofs are easier to place in tandem.

Placing Triangular Walls

With certain combination of structures, like Triangular Walls and Stairs, it seems you need to follow a specific order of things - place Triangular Walls first and then the Stairs, not the other way around. Luckily, you can place Roofs first or second, it does not matter in that case.

Order of operations sometimes matters, sadly.

That is it from me. Those are the things I have learnt mostly by playing the game, I hope they will help you. Do you have any other useful tips or tricks for base building? Feel free to share them in the comments below!