# Palworld beginner guide: your first hours

Palworld drops you on a beach with nothing and explains almost none of it. This walks through the first hour in order, then covers the two decisions that quietly shape the next twenty: where the base goes and what your status points buy. Two pieces of advice you will read everywhere are now wrong after the 1.0 release, and both are flagged below.

*Last updated 2026-07-25. Canonical page: https://vaultalts.com/palworld/getting-started*

## The first thirty minutes, in order

None of this costs technology points, so there is nothing to plan. Just work through it.

1. **Punch trees and pick up stone.** Wood and Stone come from bare hands and from the ground. You need a small pile of both before anything else is possible.
2. **Build the Primitive Workbench, then a Stone Axe and Stone Pickaxe.** These are the first entries in the technology list and they cost zero points. The axe and pickaxe multiply your gathering rate immediately, so building them before you gather in bulk saves real time.
3. **Take every Red Berry you walk past.** Hunger ticks constantly from the start and berries are the only food you will have for a while. Never walk past a bush with room in your bag.
4. **Mine the pale blue stones.** Those are Paldium Fragments, and they gate the two things you actually need: the Palbox and Pal Spheres. This is the real reason to explore early rather than to sightsee.
5. **Place the Palbox.** It costs one technology point and is built from eight Wood, three Stone and one Paldium Fragment. Placing it defines your base, so read the next section before you commit to a spot.
6. **Craft Pal Spheres and catch the easy Pals around you.** Lamball, Cattiva, Chikipi and Lifmunk are all level one to twenty in the wild and all work at a base. Catching is also your fastest early experience, so this is not a detour.
7. **Assign your catches to the Palbox and let them work.** Drop them at the base and they start hauling and crafting without further instruction. From here your wood and stone accumulate while you are away.

> **Unlock every Great Eagle Statue you pass.** Each fast travel point you activate for the first time grants one technology point on top of the ones you earn from levelling, so detouring to a statue pays for itself.

## Where to put your first base

You can move a base later, but rebuilding is tedious enough that most players simply live with a bad first choice. Four things matter, and flatness matters more than any of them.

- Flat ground, and more of it than you think you need. Almost every later structure needs a clear footprint, and a base wedged into a slope runs out of buildable space long before you run out of things to build.
- Trees and a stone outcrop inside the boundary, so Lumbering and Mining Pals produce without walking.
- A Paldium deposit nearby, because spheres keep consuming it for a long time.
- Berry bushes within the boundary, which buys you time before you need a real food chain.

Base levels also grant you more room over time. In 1.0 the maximum base level is 35, up from 30. Each level from 1 to 30 raises the number of Pals that can work at that base by exactly one, and it holds at 30 for levels 31 to 35. Extra base slots arrive at base level 8, 15 and 25, giving four bases in total, which is as many as base level grants.

## How to spend status points

Levelling gives you status points, and this is where most beginner guides get a detail flatly wrong. There are five stats you can put points into, not six. Defense is displayed with the others but cannot receive status points at all; it comes from armour, accessories and Pal passives instead. The game's own dedicated server settings corroborate this, exposing toggles for exactly five stats and none for Defense.

*What one status point buys*
| Stat | Per point | Worth it? |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Weight | +50 | First priority. Removes constant friction while hauling and is large against a base of roughly 300. |
| Health | +100 | Second. Straightforward survivability and the numbers are big. |
| Stamina | +10 | Situational. Helps gliding and sprinting between objectives. |
| Work Speed | +50 | Skip. Your Pals do nearly all base labour. |
| Attack | +2 | Skip. Forty nine points move Attack from 100 to 198, while weapon tier and your Pals decide your real damage. |

Weight first, then Health, is the consensus and the reasoning holds up: Weight is the only stat that removes a cost you pay on every single trip. Attack and Work Speed are the two most commonly regretted investments.

> **One nuance the 1.0 release added.** Being over your carry limit is less punishing than it was. The changelog states you can now jump while exceeding carrying capacity, up to 1.25 times the maximum, and that movement penalties while overburdened were reduced. That slightly weakens the case for pouring everything into Weight, though it does not overturn it. Note the wiki page on Weight still says jumping is disabled when overweight, which is a concrete example of pre 1.0 content that has not caught up.

## Two pieces of common advice that 1.0 made wrong

Both of these are repeated in a very large number of guides, and following either now wastes your time.

1. Catch ten of every species. The capture bonus completes after five captures of a species in 1.0, reduced from twelve. So the widely copied figure of ten never described either the old value or the new one. Five is the number, and 1.0 added a Paldeck filter that shows which species still have an incomplete bonus.
2. There is a consecutive catch or ten in a row streak bonus. There is not, and according to the fact check there never was. If a guide promises a reward for a catching streak, treat the rest of that page with suspicion.

## Frequently asked questions

### How many stats can you actually put points into in Palworld?

Five: Health, Stamina, Attack, Work Speed and Weight. Defense is shown alongside them but cannot be raised with status points, only through armour, accessories and Pal passive skills.

### What should you put status points into first in Palworld?

Weight, then Health. Weight gives +50 per point against a base of roughly 300 and removes encumbrance friction on every gathering trip. Attack, at +2 per point, and Work Speed are the weakest choices because your Pals supply most of your damage and nearly all of your base labour.

### How many Pals do you need to catch for the capture bonus?

Five of the same species. The 1.0 release reduced it from twelve. The commonly repeated advice to catch ten of everything is wrong and always was.

### What is the maximum base level in Palworld 1.0?

Base level 35, raised from 30. Each level from 1 to 30 adds one to the working Pal cap, which holds at 30 afterwards. Extra base slots come at base levels 8, 15 and 25, for four bases in total.

## Sources

- [Pocketpair's official Palworld 1.0 release changelog (Steam)](https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1623730)
- [The Palworld Wiki (palworld.wiki.gg)](https://palworld.wiki.gg)
- [Game8 Palworld 1.0 coverage](https://game8.co/games/Palworld)
- [paldb.cc datamined database](https://paldb.cc/en/)