New Palworld patch stops other players stealing your best pals and makes pal breeding easier

Palworld, the survival game filled with legally distinct Pokémon and numerous Glock-19s, has received its first major patch. Straight off the production line are fixes to crashes, as well as enemy pals getting stuck in walls. And if you've been plagued by other players stealing your flock, then worry no longer, as pal spheres chucked at your low-HP pals won't capture them anymore. Breeding also becomes easier, with the removal of some annoying flourishes. There's a lot more and it gets progressively sillier.

In the patch notes, there's not a lot to go on with the fixes to crashes, except the "certain conditions" needed for those crashes to happen have been squashed. And those enemy pals getting stuck in walls? That was thanks to terrain caging them after charge attacks. As for capturing other players' pals, that would happen when a "pal/base pal had HP 30% or less" and they'd be ripe for a pal sphere. Nope, that's no longer a thing, so you can't have other players stealing your best chickens and penguins.

What will come as a relief to many is changes to pal breeding. Any pals "manually assigned" to a breeding farm will "not become hungry and their manual assignments will not be removed", meaning they won't slowly starve because they're too busy 'cracking on'.

Elsewhere, there are lots of changes to pals being massive idiots. Pals won't get stuck in your base as often and they won't just drop stuff on the spot because they'd gotten stuck. They won't decide to swing axes into thin air, because the tree they'd chopped had already been cut down. They won't be on the verge of death because of "unexplained falling damage". They won't just… randomly float (boo). And they can now climb stairs to farms built on a second floor.

In Katharine's early access review, she thinks that Palworld is undeniably compulsive as a checklist ticker. As of this patch, it's a lot easier to tick those checks.