Anyway, Palworld is one of those combined with the punch line of every joke anyone has ever told about the stuff that should logically be possible in a Pokémon game, except you're not allowed to because it's a Nintendo IP. The Mostly Uninhabited Land you're dropped into at the beginning with nothing but the mysterious ability to get lumber from trees with your bare fists is crawling with strange, colorful, Legally Distinct creatures called Pals. Which you can catch in strange, colorful, Legally Distinct spherical tech objects* and compel to do your bidding.

Unlike in a Pokémon setting, that bidding is not confined to fighting other people's Pals. You can have them just murder the other people directly if you want! It saves so much time and effort. Mostly, though, when they're not helping you fight bosses, they just hang around your base being automation tools.

Or, if Pal-assisted NPC murder is not your speed, you can always throw a pokéball Pal sphere at the NPC and make him your newest Pal. That is a thing that happens.

This game is dumb and janky in all the best ways. Snark aside, it's really surprisingly polished for the state of completion it's at, but the stuff it's still doing wrong is mostly hilarious (except for its occasional habit of losing saves; certain holomems haven't thought that one was very funny). I've also heard second-hand (someone quoting a developer interview I haven't seen myself) that the Early Access release was a blind hail-Mary pass--that they dropped it in EA on the day they ran out of money, figuring that either they'd sell enough licenses that they could keep going, or it wouldn't and they'd call it a day.

What happened instead was that someone thought to send codes to a few streamers and vtubers a couple-three days before the drop and it blew up, selling a gajillion copies on the first day.

It's safe to say that the game was not ready to succeed on that scale. The multiplayer server performance I've seen on stream, in particular, suggests this in a pretty loud voice. :)

Most of my favorite holos are massively into this game right now, (although Calli is about to abandon it for a month or so while Persona 3 Reload, which came out today in Japan, consumes her soul). In particular, Koseki Bijou and Kaela Kovalskia seem to be in an unofficial race to see who can get to the level cap faster, which Kaela is almost certainly going to win simply because Biboo has to eat and sleep and Kaela, evidently, does not. :)

--G.
* "The Pals are stored in the balls." - Gawr Gura
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

-Build your base on as flat of terrain as you can find. This is because your Pals are incredibly stupid and have a very hard time finding their way up or down any terrain to do their jobs. If possible, cover almost all of your base with foundations, but not all of it, because . . .

-You want to build your base so that one or more Ore spawns (big rusty iron lumps) are within its zone. Your Pals will automatically harvest anything that spawns inside your base (as long as they have the right proficiency), and Ore is the biggest bottleneck. You can build farm plots for Wood and Stone, but not Ore, so having a natural spawn to exploit is important.

-Did I mention your Pals are stupid? Be ready to go back to your base regularly to rescue Pals off of terrain features and any buildings you've built before they starve themselves into KO.

Overall, the game is jank and the AI is bad, but the crafting and base-building is very nice (deconstructing structures and workbenches refunds 100% of the materials used, which is nice coming from other open-world-survival games), and above all the game is fun, which is a good part of why it has exploded in popularity.

"This is probably a stupid question, but . . ."

I am in the latter camp personally, but I also feel that the central conceit rather outstays its welcome by about twenty minutes in and that the Pals themselves - the monster ones - are really boring to look at. Oh well. Perhaps I'm just being a curmudgeonly old battleaxe before my time again. =]

---
"She's old, she's lame, she's barren too, // "She's not worth feed or hay, // "But I'll give her this," - he blew smoke at me - // "She was something in her day." -- Garnet Rogers, Small Victory

FiMFiction.net: we might accept blatant porn involving the cast of My Little Pony but as God is my witness we have standards.

I'm 31 now and when I joined thus community I was still in secondary school. I'm feeling old so now you get to do so as well. =]

I've found the AI to actually be mostly decent for pals in base, some occasional rescuing needed but I mostly chose decent spots. One tip I will give instead is to try and find a cul-de-sac or plateau or something, don't pick the wide open crossroads. You want to try and funnel attackers in to better terrain for them to get AoE'd up by, as midgame raids can start getting a little mean with what they send and if you're leveling up reasonably quickly, your base Pals aren't going to keep up while the Raid enemy levels may choose to pick on your character level instead.

Anyway, the game itself is -shockingly- fun and playable and well designed as they dropped it. They most assuredly got lucky that this blew up but this really is something good as is, and they're already patching and continuing to fix bugs.

Some of the Pals are kind of cute- I naturally gravitate towards the grass-type ones, just like in Pokemon- but I think it's mostly coasting off of stuff like Hololive popularity and the luster will wear off pretty quickly once people realize it's not actually a very good game.

...!
Stoke Mandeville, Esq & The
Victorian Ballsmiths
"Nobody Want Verdigris-
Covered Balls!"

One very nice thing in Palworld is even if chunks of your base get destroyed, you can pick up the materials used to build it, up to 100% it seems, so all you really lose is building time. This is especially nice if you're like Kaela and put a badly-aimed rocket into your own base and blow half of it up, you can recover quickly.

No clip, but here's a screenshot.

"This is probably a stupid question, but . . ."