Palworld is a survival adventure game and no survival game would be complete without its own set of hunger mechanics. Palworld comes with an impressive roster of food items, some of which might traumatise the faint-hearted among you. The game doesn't hold back in letting you know exactly what you're eating when you learn how to cook in Palworld.
While you can consume food raw in Palworld, it's not as healthy or efficient as cooked food and will take more to be effective. Therefore it's important to know how to cook in Palworld. So let's look at how to cook in Palworld and what happens if you ignore food and go hungry.
While you're here check out some of our other guides revealing how to craft a glider and how to increase capture chances.
Palworld cooking explained
Before you can start cooking in Palworld you need to set up a campfire and a Palbox. Without a Palbox you can't build a fire. So here's what you need to do:
- Unlock and place down a Palbox after unlocking it from the technology menu.
- Unlock the campfire and collect 10 wood by hitting the nearby trees.
- Build the campfire in your Palbox's vicinity.
- Find some berries or collect meat by killing herbivore Pals nearby.
- Interact with the campfire and pick the meal you want to cook.
- Wait for the cooking animation to finish or let a Pal cook for you.
Note that a lot of the food you cook is perishable and will have an expiry timer after which it will turn bad. This is why it's important to set up an automated source of food generation or eventually craft the Cooler Box at level 13 to keep food fresh when you're at a high enough level.
Eventually, you can upgrade the campfire and get a cooking pot by reaching level 17. This will unlock even more advanced cooking recipes for you to mess around with.
How to use food in Palworld
While the primary purpose of food is to keep you and your Pals fed, there are many ways to go about this.
- Select food from your inventory and choose yourself or a party member to feed.
- Assign food from your inventory to the food pouch so your party will automatically eat.
- Create a food box and store food in there so the Pals in your base can automatically eat. Pair it with a berry farm for automation.
- Store food in the Chiller so it doesn't go bad. Be sure to assign a worker who can refrigerate the food.
What does hunger do in Palworld?
If you ignore all the hunger warnings, forget to pack food or just run out of it during a crucial moment in combat you might be in for a bad time. Hunger won't kill you but it'll bring you very close.
When you or your Pal's hunger drops to a certain point, you get the Starving status, which rapidly depletes your HP until it's at 1. You won't naturally regain any HP while you're Starving.
The best way to keep your team fed is to invest in the Small Food Pouch when you get Ancient Technology Points. Stock it up with a large pile of berries or meat and your team won't go hungry for a long while.
That's all you need to know about starvation and how to cook food in Palworld. For more useful base operation guides be sure to learn how to build the bed indoors and all Pal jobs explained.