There are almost 20,000 Palworld breeding combos, and now players want to breed Pals with humans

Palworld isn't just about capturing non-copyright-infringing Poke-fied wildlife, slaughtering the poor creatures and/or setting them to work in terrible gun factories. There's also the frightful question of Pal breeding. Every Pal in the game can be bred with every other Pal to produce a Pal subspecies with a chance of inheriting traits from its parents.

This is conducted via the celebrated Biblical method of constructing a breeding farm (unlocked at level 19) and placing a cake (unlocked at level 15) in a chest linked to that farm. This will cause Pals in the farm to lay an egg, which you can ferry to an incubator (unlocked at level 7), so as to generate a new Pal - possibly a unique fusion - according to a hidden power level.

I'm pretty sure this goes against the grain of my GSCE science lessons, mind you. I distinctly remember my old biology teacher Mr Perchinwood telling me that I had to be at least level 20 to bake a sex-cake. But the times they change, and we shouldn't let technicalities get in the way of hot Pal-on-Pal action, even if it's presented entirely in the form of menus.

One question the Palworld breeding stuff left me with is how many Pal breeding combinations there are, because breeding feels like it's going to be pretty crucial once developers Pocketpair introduce PvP arena multiplayer. The answer is 19,044, as I've learned from this handy calculator created by Reddit user blahable, which is fast-becoming the most-read Google document on the internet. Thankfully/sadly - delete one as per desire for a new Spore game - there doesn't appear to be any real unpredictability to breeding. You won't end up with something redolent of the closing scenes of The Fly if you accidentally splice the wrong Relaxaurus with a Pyrin.

Naturally, players have many opinions about how they'd like the breeding system to evolve. Some of these deserve a fair hearing, like making it a little harder to breed certain tougher Pals like Anubis, because this spoils the thrill of encountering them later. Others should probably be resisted at all costs. Breeding Pals with captured humans, for instance.

The Discourse can always get darker.