How to breed Pals in Palworld

All of the Pals in Palworld can breed with each other, which means there are thousands of combinations in the game that will spit out different Pals depending on who you set up. Breeding in Palworld isn’t super complex, but you’ll need to be mindful of what you’re breeding in order to get the results you want.

There are also some subspecies of Pals that you can almost only get from breeding.

To start breeding in Palworld, you’ll need a breeding farm, some cake, and two Pals. Below, we detail how Palworld breeding works and how to unlock breeding, and list some breeding combos that result in subspecies.

How breeding works in Palworld

After building a breeding farm (see below), place one female and one male Pal in the farm, along with at least one cake in the chest that’s attached to the farm. For each cake in the chest, the two Pals will produce one egg. Any cake placed into the farm chest will not go bad (the way food usually does), so you can make tons of cake and leave it in there.

Any Pals you breed have a change to pass down their passive skills. So if your Pal has the “work slave” skill, there’s a chance their child will, too. It’s not guaranteed, but this is a good way to breed particularly powerful Pals. You can see our example below, where our Menasting child adopted traits from its parents (Elizabee and Helzephyr) while also hatching with its own trait, “conceited,” that came from neither of the two parents.

Graphic: Julia Lee/Polygon | Source images: Pocketpair

The Pal that comes out of the egg is not random, but from an in-game formula that takes a hidden power level value assigned to each Pal. While I won’t get into the details here, you can see more explanation on the Palworld Wiki, but just know that it essentially makes it so you can’t breed two early-game Pals and get an end-game Pal.

You can also hatch Alpha Pals (bigger Pals with beefier stats) from eggs, meaning that if you want a specific Alpha that isn’t a world boss, breeding one is your best bet. You have a 5% chance to get an Alpha, though, so it is reliant on a bit of luck.

Once the Pals are all done breeding, they’ll produce an egg that you can stick into an egg incubator.

How to unlock the breeding farm in Palworld

Once you hit level 19, you’ll be able to unlock the breeding farm from your technology tree. It takes 100 wood, 20 stone, and 50 fiber to build one.

Note that the breeding farm is quite big, so if you didn’t build your base on a flat area, you may have a hard time finding a spot for it.

How to make cake in Palworld

You’ll need to make flour, so make sure you make a mill, which unlocks at level 15. Build one of these with 50 wood and 50 stone. Insert any wheat you farmed using your wheat plantation (another level 15 unlock that you have to build to upgrade your base) to make flour.

At level 17, you’ll unlock a cooking pot, which can be built using 20 wood, 15 ingots, and 3 flame organs. You need this to make cake, since it can’t be made over the beginner campfire.

Once you have all of that, you can make a cake in your cooking pot using five flour, eight red berries, seven milk, eight eggs, and two honey.

You can get honey from catching or killing Cinnamoths, but we recommend catching a Beegarde or two and putting them in a ranch at your base, since they’ll constantly produce honey for you. The earliest place we were able to spot a Beegarde was north of the Lake Center fast travel point, marked below:

Graphic: Julia Lee/Polygon | Source images: Pocketpair

There are significantly more Beegarde if you keep traveling north towards the second boss tower (in that snowy area on the above map), but they will be higher leveled, so be careful.

Palworld breeding combos

There are so many breeding combinations in this game that if we listed them all out, I think the spreadsheet would crash the page. So rather than us doing that, we’ll refer to you this great breeding calculator made by blahable on Reddit. This has all the information you’d ever want, whether you’re trying to calculate how to make a specific Pal or you’re trying to figure out what two Pals would make.

However, if you’re just looking for a list of the combinations to get Pal subspecies, we got you:

For more Palworld guides, we’ve got you covered. If you’re just starting out, we’ve got a beginner’s guide, a list of all Pals, and a type chart. We also have explainers on eggs, and a rundown of how multiplayer works.

On the hunt for resources? Check out our guides on how to get ore, coal, polymer, leather, sulfur, wheat seeds, pure quartz, Ancient Technology Points, and ancient civilization parts. For advanced players, consult our lists of all tower boss locations, all passive skills, all flying mounts, and the best base locations.