Palworld is as much a base building and survival game as it is a monster collector and battler. This means you'll be spending a lot of your time gathering resources, building bases and supply chains, and crafting better gear so you can face the increasing challenges the world has to offer.

In Palworld you can build a maximum of 3 bases but at the start you'll only be able to build 1. You can't move a base but you can destroy and rebuild one. As you might imagine, this process is pretty time and resource intensive.

So for your first 10-15 hours you'll mostly just have one base to support your adventures. Picking a good base location that can serve you in early game and through late game will save you a lot of wasted time and effort.

In this post I'll share 3 essential tips for choosing your first base location so that you won't regret it later.

Choose a large wide open space

Early game you won't need that much space as you'll largely be gathering and crafting with simple materials. But by mid / late game crafting high level gear will require increasingly complex materials and supply chains to support them. This means lots of space to put lots of workstations for your Pals.

The first tips is to pick a wide open space for placing your base. This may seem trivial but this is the number one issue I've seen with people placing bases.

• The base space allocation is larger than you probably think. Base space (where you can build) is defined by a circular area with your Palbox at its center. You'll be able to see this boundary as a blue line once you place the Palbox. This is much larger than you probably think, so be sure to place it in the middle of the large area.
• Any static land features will block building. Features that are built in to the game like cliffs, water, or old ruins will prevent you from building things there. Depending on where you build, this can block a significant amount of your available space thus decreasing the amount you can build in your base.
• Moving bases is a tedious chore. You cannot just move a base. You have to destroy the base and then rebuild in a new location. By mid game, you'll need most / all the space to build all the production buildings for your high level gear. So build a first base that can scale up to mid / late game.

My first base includes a lot of unusable land. Don't do this!

For my first base I chose an open spot near the initial spawn point. It looked pretty nice with what I though was a lot of space, access to water, and a natural cliff for "defenses". It does look nice but later I realized a good 30% of my base space was unusable due to water features.

By midgame this base was at capacity and couldn't support the supply chains needed for the gear I needed so I had to build a different one.

Don't do what I did - pick a better spot and save yourself some trouble.

Avoid non-flat land

This is a complimentary tip to the first but worth an explicit call out.

Non-flat, hilly land isn't a hard, obvious blocker like native land features. You can sometimes build on them (though sometimes not).

The problem is that depending on the slope and whether the building spawns in the hill or floating in the air, the game can get a little buggy causing your Pals or the resources they produce to get stuck, lost, or inaccessible. This only happens sometimes so not quite as important as choosing open land but it's enough of an annoyance that you should avoid.

Avoid the hilly areas near the starting location

A common location I see people breaking this rule is placing your base a bit further down the path from the starting location where the boss Mammorest lives. This seems like an okay place because it's pretty wide open (if you avoid the water features) but is actually quite hilly. This means placing things like ranches or farms where resources often drop on the ground can be risky.

There's plenty of places where the land is wide open and flat so just choose one of those.

Ensure you have access to resource nodes

In Palworld natural resources like trees, stones, and iron deposits will respawn periodically (~every 1-2 days). Because you'll be gathering increasing amounts of this to build your base and fuel your adventures, it's beneficial to choose a location that has ready access to many of these.

In early game you'll mostly be relying on these nodes to gather your resources manually so having quick access is crucial. By mid / late game you'll be able to build wood and stone farms that will provide unlimited access to these resources but Pals mine kind of slow so you'll still benefit from quick manual access when you need an extra 20-50 to complete a schematic.

For your first early game base, focus on having access to wood and stone and try to have at least one iron deposit.

By mid / late game you'll want to have way more iron but by that time you'll be able to build a second base that you can use to focus on that so worry about that later.

Where should you build your first Palworld base?

It's really up to you. This is your game so play it how you want. With the ability to place 3 bases it's okay to make some suboptimal choices in the beginning.

This is a good place to build your first base.

But if you're looking for a recommendation near the starting area, I'd recommend this spot at coordinates (133, -446) just below the first boss tower.

• Wide open area - not maximal but good enough
• Pretty flat
• Easy to get to from starting area (just a little jog down the path)
• Access to resource nodes stone nodes x9, trees x7 (wood), iron x2 (up hill). Bonus berries x11.

If I were to start a new game, this is where I'd build my first base.

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