While Palworld is no longer seeing the millions of players it had at its peak, Pocketpair seems eager and ready to add new content the game—which is fine by us. These are the biggest ways we want to see Palworld updated so we can keep coming back to the fantastical world of the Palpagos Islands.
Must-see updates for Palworld
Palworld is an early-access game, filled with bugs and unintended errors—so these suggested updates go far beyond resolving its growing pains, like disconnect issues and general bugfixes.
1) Basebuilding overhaul
As I watch in horror while my Reptyro gets stuck in a tree for the millionth time, I find myself hoping for a basebuilding patch. Making a base anywhere in Palworld is an exercise in patience and battling the user interface. An excellent mining spot for Coal or Sulfur could be too close to a cliff or have trees spawning under your Pals, causing them to path strangely and get stuck. Making something as simple as a staircase requires a quantum physics degree, as you need to make a ceiling the stairs can snap to and hope they align correctly. The wide, blue circle around a Palbox is stiff and unchanging, and you barely have any influence on what goes on within it.
A basebuilding update is almost required for Palworld. The janky building system is the first and most important thing for Pocketpair to fix. But, having more control over what goes on near your base would be appreciated, too. Maybe there could be a Palbox upgrade that prevents certain resources spawning nearby, so your Pals can focus on Ore instead of Stone. Maybe you could change the shape of the base to more correctly fit within a clearing or dodge a cliff. This would be a big change for Palworld, but such a critical part of the game is due an upgrade.
2) Priorities for Pals in the base
Speaking of bases, Pals aren’t very good at automating them. Currently, Pals tend to go where the wind carries them, sometimes abandoning their posts to help with Handiwork or crop-growing processes—even if their Work Suitability for those tasks are very low. Sometimes, you really don’t want your Petallia to focus on Medicine when she has Planting to do, but she’ll almost always go to the Medicine bench instead.
For this update, I picture a wheel that comes up when interacting with a Palbox or with a Pal in your base. It shows all of the Pal’s Work Suitabilities, and you can order them from “High Priority” to “Ignore.” That way, you can stop a Mossanda Lux from chopping down trees instead of generating electricity, if they’re your main source of power. Alternatively, the wheel could be attached to specific stations in your base, making the Pal stay dedicated to its work unless something specific happens.
No matter how Pocketpair does it, any method would be better than the current one—chucking a Pal at a single workstation and hoping for the best.
3) Better rewards for clearing the Towers
There are five Towers in Palworld, each representing the boss of a human enemy faction scattered across the Palpagos Islands. These towers serve as the baseline of the game’s progression—conquering each of them is your overarching goal. But once you do, nothing really changes. You get a big chunk of XP and can fast travel to each of them, but that’s about it.
The system is a bit undercooked, and there are quite a few ways players should be rewarded for conquering these towers. One option is to make the enemy faction no longer hostile—you took out their boss, after all. Maybe they have hardlocked technologies that require their defeat to unlock, like important saddles or environmental protection.
But, a more interesting option is to have each boss give the player a unique Key Item that fits into the boss’s personality and role in the region. For example, killing Zoe & Grizzbolt could give the player a 10 percent discount at select stores, since the Syndicate likely have ties to a lot of the shadier merchants across the Palpagos Islands. Maybe defeating Marcus & Shadowbeak could make it so you no longer trespass while exploring Wildlife Sanctuaries. This would give you reasons to take out the Towers, beyond farming XP or for story purposes.
4) Easier Pal customization
Breeding is currently the easiest way to give a Pal’s best traits to a Pal of your choice. While breeding isn’t the most arduous process in the world, I’d still like a way to give my Pals more viable Passive Skills in a vacuum. I got very attached to my Jetragon, but knowing it would be worse than its children over a few generations made me not want to invest in it.
This system of raising a Pal would utilize the otherwise narrow Pal Essence Condenser Ancient Technology. Instead of just being a method to boost a Partner Skill, maybe you could crush Pals with a specific Passive Skill to give that skill to a new Pal. This method would allow you to sacrifice low-level Pals with a good skill and transfer them to a high-level one, instead of having to breed the stats and pray for lucky rolls. Or, maybe a new Ancient Technology could be introduced that mind-controls Pals and changes how they behave.
5) Upgradable Pal Gear
Palworld is full of Pals that are quickly outgunned. Lifmunk, for instance, can pull out a Submachine gun to help out in fights. But, once you get higher-level Pals, your Lifmunk’s damage isn’t worth all that much.
Don’t get me wrong, this genre is full of low-level creatures that are outclassed by stronger ones. But, Palworld is one of the few which doesn’t utilize any evolution mechanic to really buff up these Pals. You’re reliant on the Pal Essence Condenser for that, and it only does so much. I’m not sure how much I want to catch 116 Daedream to make the strongest support weapon around, only to wonder if it’s even worth bringing along compared to something like a Frostallion.
I’d love to see an update around evolving saddles and Pal gear. These upgrades could be specifically for Pals whose Pal Gear is Technology level 25 or lower, with the goal of improving them to be viable in the late-game. Something like “Lifmunk’s Gold-Studded Submachine Gun” or “Pengullet’s Crash Safety Helmet” that adjust the Pal’s stats and active skill to closer match endgame Pals. These little guys are somebody’s favorite, after all.
6) Improved world mapping
As much as I love exploring the Palpagos Islands, I hate finding things and then forgetting about it after a long time away from the game. Merchants and Black Marketeers are huge headaches to track down after finding them once, requiring personalized map markers if you want to find them again reliably. And don’t get me started on how many Lifmunk Effigies I’ve missed flying around the world on a Suzaku.
This update would hopefully add endgame items like compasses, phones, or a radio, with the singular goal of making mapping the world a bit easier. These items might warn you when a Lifmunk Effigy is nearby or tell you the locations of all Merchants while it’s active. It could be added in an update that scatters new items around the world, like the feathers of a legendary Pal that you’re tasked to explore and collect.
7) The endgame update
As more people take out the final Towers and ride a Jetragon into the sunset, Palworld’s endgame remains pretty barebones. This is completely acceptable—the game’s still in early access—but there should be reasons to come back. Many of the reasons to return can be looped into the above updates—maybe to create the perfect Pal team with perfect passives, you need to farm endgame Pals. Or, maybe there will be raids that let you upgrade low-powered Pals into forms worth bringing to said raids. Even cosmetic items to help make the perfect base would be enough to keep many players coming back.
Realistically, this is one of those updates that is handled by the roadmap. Pocketpair has already announced its plans to make endgame raids, PvP, and additional islands for Palworld players. But, as friend groups melt away from Palworld, it’s getting more and more important to think about what the future of this game looks like.
