Palworld: How to Level Up Fast in Early to Late Game

Despite what many initially thought, Palworld has more in common with ARK Survival Evolved than we were led to believe. But that’s not an entirely bad thing. It did work out, after all. You spend your days creating the perfect resource processing base and then using everything you create to challenge the game’s most challenging Pals and bosses. That’s the end game. But how do we get there? By leveling up, of course. So, how does one level up in the most effective way possible? Let’s find out.

In this guide, I’ll tell you how you to quickly level up your character in both the early game and late game. This involves playing the game as intended by the developers. It will not include glitched methods that may or may not be patched out soon.

And don’t worry, these tricks and tips will be useful for you from the start of the game all the way to level 50 and beyond.

How to Level Up Fast in Palworld

To level up fast in Palworld, you need to catch a metric ton of Pals. But we’re not talking about filling multiple boxes full of Chikipi. (That you can do on your off time.) It’s all about catching ten of each unique Pal in the game. You see, you get a significant EXP Bonus for the capture of the first 10 Pals of the same Pal. It doesn’t matter if you are in level 5 or level 45, the bonus scales with your level, and each capture grants you a sizable chunk of progression.

This is the method we’re going to use for as long as needed. To do this, you’ll need specific Pals in the early game and the right tech for maximum efficiency. Here are the steps to level up faster – starting from level 1.

How to Level Up Fast Early Game

To level up fast during early-game in Palworld, the following pieces of advice will be useful to you from levels 1 to 15:

The first thing you should do once you have your feet set is to catch a Tombat. This Pal only appears at night and is found in the starter areas of the map. The reason why you want to catch this Pal is for its Ultrasonic Sensor ability. When you use the ability, the relative positions of nearby Pals will show up on your compass. This ability cuts down the search time by a lot when you’re looking to complete your ten captures. This is also what we’ll use to locate the next important Pal for the early game grind.

The second thing you need to do is to capture Vixys. You don’t need to know what they do at the moment. All you need to think about right now is establishing a base of operations and reaching level 5 as quickly as possible.

Once you reach level 5, you’ll want to unlock the Ranch. This is a resource-gathering place where you can assign certain Pals that have a certain passive ability. In the case of the Vixys, they will dig up Pal Spheres for you to use in the very early game. From my experience, 3 Vixys are enough for your farming needs.

Congratulations, you now have a near-infinite source of Pal Spheres that you can return to at any time.

We are just getting started, however. The next thing you’ll need to do is to push inland a little more until you find Direhowls. They will serve as your trusted mount for as long as you need them. Be careful when facing these Pals. At this point, Direhowls might be a little too much for you. They usually hover at around level 10 and hunt in packs. Your spear might not be enough to take them down. But if you can whittle down a lone straggler, you might be able to catch it, provided you have enough Pal Spheres.

It doesn’t matter if you can catch a Direhowl right now. Your main objective should be to keep catching starter area Pals until you reach level 9. At level 9, the Direhowl mount is unlocked and you’ll be able to ride around the island to catch even more Pals.

At this point, you should be well over level 10. This is where things start to heat up for your efforts. From atop your mount, use low-damage attacks to weaken Pals before attempting a capture. You’ll then want to catch the remaining Pal sets until all starter Pals are logged into Paldeck. So, turn on a podcast or something and just grind your higher and higher until you reach level 13. Don’t forget to start building your base into something that resembles a proper ARK base.

When you have captured all the Pals in the nearby area, start going into dungeons and collect the following nighttime Pals:

Congratulations, you have enough to hold you over until the mid-game. We are about to start planning our mining base to carry us beyond level 15.

How to Level Up Fast Mid Game

The Pal Spheres you have been using have been useful up until this point. The problem is around levels 13-15 you’ll start to notice that the effectiveness is starting to trail off. To level up fast mid-game in Palworld, we’ll need to step up our Sphere game if we want to consistently catch Pals levels 16 to 27.

Note: You can still use Pal Spheres to capture level 15-20 Pals but be prepared to use up nearly a dozen spheres for each attempt.

The first thing you’ll want to do is to put away your Vixys. They’ve done more than enough for you. And you can always bring them out to stretch their legs from time to time.

The next thing you need to do is to look for as many Lifmunk statues as possible to increase your capture odds. You have no idea how needed they are for later levels. At level 35 and above, the capture rates might as well be impossible. And since Pocketpair fixed the issue that made the odds worse, you can freely offer your statues in exchange for better capture odds.

Use this map provided by the fine folks at Palworld Database to help you narrow down the locations of all 431 statues on the map. And don’t forget to continue filling up those boxes along the way. That should still be your priority for fast leveling.

For this next step, you need to start producing Mega Spheres. These are upgraded Pal Spheres (barely) that unlock at level 14. To be more effective, you’ll want to have a lot of Mega Spheres. However, they require Ingots to produce.

The Paldium Fragment, Wood, and Stone you can get from pretty much anywhere. Ingots, on the other hand, are a refined resource and require a Primitive Furnace to create.

You already have access to the Primitive Furnace starting from level 10. Don’t worry about not getting a headstart. You didn’t have an actual use for Ore until now. It takes 2 pieces of Ore to create an Ingot. The Furnace requires a Fire Pal to stoke the flames and that’s what purifies the metal. I advise assigning a Foxparks to handle the furnace at the beginning. You’ll get more powerful Pals down the line to cut production time. But for right now, you need some Pal to keep the fires hot.

At some point, you’ll be able to establish more than one base on the map. That becomes possible once you’ve reached level 10 on the Pal Box. Keep expanding your exploration range and capture any Pals on top of your Direhowl.

At some point, you’ll want to consider looking for a mining base using your second Pal Box. You’ll want to look for hilltops that have Ore clusters to spare. The picture above is taken from the side of a mountain Southwest of the Small Settlement. The best locations are flat areas like this where even the Pals’ buggy pathfinding can’t mess up.

It’s going to take some time to get your mines going at optimum production but stick with it and you’ll never have to worry about running out of Ore.

Now that you have a mining base, it’s time to get some Pals to work on it. The best ones for level 20 trainers are going to be Digtoises and Dumuds for mining. These pals can be found in the desert biome at the center of the map. That’s also the place where you can find Anubis, arguably the best base helper in the game.

Don’t worry, you don’t have to find the level 47 boss in the desert just yet. You can breed an Anubis yourself early on in the game with the right Pals.

Keep exploring and building up your bases. More importantly, you should be able to go to the level 20 regions and start capturing 10 of each Pal in that region. All you’re doing now is leveling up to level 27 and then incorporating the Giga Spheres into your game plan.

For this one, Cement is going to be an issue. The problem lies with the fact that Cement needs Stone, Bones, and Pal Fluids. You can quickly gather Pal Fluids from captured water-type Pals. That isn’t the case for Bones, however. Bones come from specific Pals. You don’t come by them often if you’re not actively looking for them.

One of the ways I got around this was by purchasing Bones from the merchant at the Small Settlement. It’s an affordable way of getting your hands on Bones without spending your time farming the wide map. If you’re hurting for coins, you can always assign 2-3 Maus to a Ranch and let them dig up coins for you.

Keep doing this until you reach level 36.

How to Level Up Fast Late Game

Here we are at the hell that is level 35 and above. I’m going to be brutally honest with you. The difficulty spike from mid-game to here is so severe that you will be stuck for long periods farming back lost resources from the ridiculously powerful Pals at the edges of the map. No matter where you decide to go, it’s going to be one temperature extreme to another.

Thankfully, there are still level 20 Pals for you to capture but those will be few and far between once you hit level 40 or so. You will also find that the enemies are far stronger than anything you’ve faced before. If you aren’t armed to the teeth, you will have a horrible time in the late-game regions. To level up fast late-game in Palworld, arm yourself with the best weapons for your level and produce as many bullets as needed. You’ll need them for the bullet sponge enemy you’ll encounter on the regular.

By now, you’ll have gained access to Ultra Spheres at level 35. These are supposed to be the best Spheres in the game. But they feel more like a must-have for anything above level 35. You’ll notice very soon how ineffective your lower-tier Spheres have become. Even with a sliver of health left on the Pals, the odds are so dreadfully low for anything less than the best Spheres.

At this point, you should have factories churning out high-end materials with a few places in mind to get the Coal for the Refined Ingots. You should know the drill by now. Keep making Giga Spheres. Lots of Giga Spheres. And then, go forth and look for more challenges until you eventually reach Level 50. There are going be a ton of things to do still even after defeating all the tower bosses and after capturing your own Jetdragon. But that’s going to be left to your want and need to get every bit of value from this game.

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And that’s how you level up quickly in Palworld the proper way. I’m not going to ignore other factors like server settings and ‘AFK farms’. But if I wanted to do that, I might as well not go into Adventure mode. Truth is, you are meant to stay in this world for a very long time, grinding your butt off. What we’re doing is just streamlining the process to get there in a somewhat efficient manner. Which allows you to goof off and do other things like building extravagant castles and running science labs for Pal breeding experiments. This game truly takes the best parts of ARK Survival Evolved and monster catching games.