In case you haven't heard yet, Palworld is the monster-taming survival adventure that has taken gaming by storm. The game has been surrounded by controversy while still managing to reach insane sales goals in just a few days, and you can play it on Xbox Game Pass right now. Whether you're just getting started in Palworld or you're a seasoned tamer who has caught all of your Pals the hard way, you've probably stumbled across the Breeding Farm in the game's tech tree. But do you know how to make the most of this vital building?
The Breeding Farm allows players to take Pals currently in their possession and breed them (with the power of cake) to produce eggs. At first glance that seems obvious. Breed a Cattiva with a Cattiva to get another Cattiva. The question is, why would you want to do this if you've already caught that Pal? Breeding Pals can give you a chance to create Fusion Pals, unique creatures that can be a little harder to find in the wild. It can also allow you to select traits and attributes for your Pals so that you can create the best possible variant for your party.
Unlocking the necessary technology
Before you can get started with breeding Pals, you need the necessary technology. Similar to Ark: Survival Evolved, Palworld utilizes Tech points to unlock new equipment, storage solutions, weapons, and workstations. While some basic tech is automatically unlocked, others require reaching certain levels, finding special schematics, or catching special Pals.
There are quite a few pieces required to breed your own eggs, including the necessary ingredients to bake cakes. You will need to at least reach level 17 to unlock everything you require. You can collect Pals and resources, complete dungeons, and level up your base until you have enough technology points to unlock the following items:
- Breeding Farm
- Egg Incubator
- Cook pot
- Mill
- Wheat plantation
Surprisingly, the first item of tech you will probably be able to unlock is the egg incubator itself. The egg incubator is under the special purple column of "Ancient Technology", and it will require purple Ancient Tech points to unlock it. It becomes available at Level 7, and only requires one Ancient Tech, so it is low cost to get started with.
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Breeding Pals requires cake to feed them, and baking cake requires flour. Flour is crafted by crushing wheat grown in wheat plantations in the mill. The wheat plantation and mill are both unlocked at level 15 and cost two tech points each. We've put together a handy guide on how to get wheat and flour in Palworld to further explain this tech.
Once you've acquired all the necessary cake ingredients, we'll need to be able to place them in the cooking pot. Cooking pots are unlocked at tech level 17 and require two tech points to unlock.
The breeding farm is likely to be the last technology for breeding that you will unlock, and it becomes available at level 19. It also requires two tech points.
How to use the breeding farm
Once you've successfully unlocked and built all the necessary tech and workstations across your base, you'll be ready to get your Pals down to business. The breeding farm is fairly straightforward. Add the two Pals you want to breed to your base's Palbox. Lift the pals one by one, and throw them at the farm to assign them to work. The farm requires one male and one female to work.
And cake. They also need cake.
How to bake cakes for the breeding farm in Palworld
Thankfully, you don't need any extra recipes to unlock the ability to bake cakes in Palworld. The recipe is available for the cooking pot automatically once you unlock the breeding farm. It can also be made in the electric kitchen, but not the campfire. Cakes require the following ingredients:
- 5 flour
- 8 red berries
- 7 milk
- 8 egg
- 2 honey
Most players will have red berries aplenty, but if you are running short on them, you can grow large quantities using the Berry Plantation technology similar to the Wheat Plantation we covered earlier. Milk is harvested from Mozzarina pals assigned to the Ranch, though you can also purchase it from wandering merchants.
Eggs can be farmed with Chikipis in the ranch or dropped from wild Chikipis. They also spawn randomly throughout the world. Honey can be a little harder to acquire, as it is only dropped by the Beegarde. If you have been lucky enough to capture a Beegarde, you can assign it to the ranch to produce honey for you.
Once you've gathered the ingredients, you can select the cake recipe from the cooking pot menu. Cakes have a workload cost of 2000, so you're going to be working on one for a good little while. Enlisting the help of a pal with a high kindling level can help speed up the process.
Finished cakes are perishable, though they do have a 20-minute timer. Placing cakes in the cooling box or a fridge can slow the rate of ruin, and putting the cake in the breeding farm's box stops it entirely. There's also currently a glitch where the timers on perishable items can be reset by pressing the "sort" button in the inventory screen, but you didn't hear that from me.
Palworld breeding pairs
The pal types that you assign to the breeding farm can be mixed and matched for various results, and doing so will even lead to hatching some epic Pals that can change the game dramatically for your guild. There are 138 pals at the time of writing this, leading to an insane number of combinations of parent crosses and resulting offspring. Some pals, like the legendary Jetragon, can not be produced with crossbreeding.
Some useful breeding pairs that can unlock rare pals early are in the table below:
Unfortunately, there are some differences between the Xbox and Steam versions of Palworld (among other differences) and that includes the results for certain breeding pairs. While I have found not every pairing results in the intended offspring, the results are correct more often than not. There's certainly room for improvement, however. For more breeding pair combinations, there is an excellent breeding calculator from Palworld.gg.
How to use the egg incubator
You don't have to wait until you can breed Pals to hatch them from eggs. You may have found some sitting in nests around the Islands, especially if you're using a flying mount to explore. Those eggs can be taken back to your base and placed in an egg incubator to hatch. Hatching eggs counts toward the bonus XP you earn for catching pals and toward unlocking the Xbox or PC achievements for catching 90 pals.
Whether your eggs have come from the Islands or the breeding farm, you're going to need to figure out how to hatch them.
Palworld eggs can be found in a standard size along with large or huge variants, and the outside of the egg depicts the type of Pal it will hatch. Yellow eggs with zigzagging black stripes will hatch electric-type pals, while dark purple eggs with pink swirls will hatch dark-type pals. Horizontal two-toned pink stripes denote the common egg type, which hatch neutral pals. Dark blue "damp" eggs have water-type pals inside, and "scorching" eggs will have fire types. Similarly, light blue "frozen" eggs with white snowflakes will hatch ice-types.
Clicking on an egg incubator opens a menu where you can place one egg at a time to incubate. All egg types and sizes will fit in the egg incubator, though large and huge eggs will have longer incubation periods. When an egg is placed in the incubator, it will display a status that is affected by the temperature around the egg incubator. The egg may be "very comfortable", "a little warm/cold", or "very warm/cold".
The temperature of the egg while it is in the incubator can increase or decrease the speed at which the egg will hatch. Items like campfires, heaters, and coolers can be placed around the eggs and then kindled or cooled by Pals to improve hatching speeds. You may want to build incubators for cold and warm temperatures into separate buildings with their respective tech.
If you are like me and tend to be on the impatient side, you can adjust your game's incubation period in the world settings. I like instant gratification, personally, and it does not negatively impact achievements.
Benefits of breeding pals
As I mentioned earlier, breeding your own pals can come with the benefit of giving you access to pals that might otherwise require being at a higher level or committing a criminal act to obtain. In other cases it can let you create some really crosses like the Suzaku Aqua or the legendary Frostallion Noct. There's another benefit to breeding, however, and that is passive skill selection.
Passive skills are traits that can be attributed to pals that can improve their performance or worsen it in some cases. Skills like Workaholic can make a pal more useful at the base as its sanity drops slower, while Ferocious can give your pal a 20 percent boost in attack. Meanwhile, negative skills like Slacker can slow work speed and Pacifist can significantly lower attack.
Breeding allows you to more actively and carefully choose your pal's passive skills. Avoid breeding pals with negative traits and focus on creating ultimate pals with positive traits. Every single trait can be passed on except for the Alpha indicator which denotes a pal that was captured as a world mini-boss, so it's very possible to breed powerful legendaries and exceptionally skilled base pals. It just takes a whole lot of cake.
