Palworld is a survival game, and there's nothing more vital to survival than food and water. Water is apparently covered automatically in Palworld, but you'll need to find sources of food to keep your player alive - and, later on, your Pals. One of your first priorities, therefore, is finding and cooking yourself some grub.
This guide will teach you how to cook food for yourself in Palworld. Later technological developments allow you to enlist your Pals in this process, but for now we'll stick with the absolute basics of finding food and cooking a meal for yourself.
Setting up a Campfire
The first step, before you go hunting for food, is to set up a Campfire for yourself. You'll need this most basic of heat sources to cook food, and while it isn't an absolute necessity - there are some basic food you can forage and eat without cooking - you'll want the Campfire for creatnig more complicated dishes.
Crafting a campfire requires two things:
- Unlocking the Campfire Technology, in the Technology menu (center button on controllers, T key on keyboards). It's a level 2 Technology, so you'll need to build your character up to level 2, then spend a Technology Point on Campfire.
- Ten pieces of Wood. You can find Wood sitting around on the ground, or by felling trees with an Axe or your hands.
Open the Build menu (up button on controllers, B on keyboards) and scroll over to the Food submenu to find the Campfire. Lay it down and build it up. After a few moments you'll have a nice, roaring fire.
Finding Food
You can't cook meals without food items. There are two ways to do this early in Palworld:
- Forage for plants. Early in Palworld you'll be looking for Red Berries, which grow on distinct bushes. You'll usually find a bunch of Red Berries clustered together. You may need to poke around a bit to find a bunch of bushes, but they're not that rare.
- Defeat Pals. Most Pals will drop some sort of edible item when defeated, such as Chikipip Poultry from Chikipis. Get out in the world and kill some Pals with your fists or a weapon. The Pals in the early area are not that difficult to defeat with just your hands.
Head over to your Campfire and interact with it (X button / F key). This opens up a menu of recipes that you can prepare via the Campfire. Later, more advanced sources of heat allow you to prepare more recipes, but this will do for now.
Once you've selected your recipe you'll need to allocate how much of the food item you want to prepare. Choose the amount - you can prepare as any as 999 portions, though that's unlikely - then click 'Start production', in the bottom-right corner of the menu. At this point you'll add the food to the Campfire.
Done? Not quite. If you leave the food there it will eventually cook, but if you want to expedite the process you'll want to hold down the X button / F key for a bit. This means you take an active role in the cooking, which finishes in a flash. You can then grab the food off of the Campire (X button / F key) and stick it in your inventory, for later eating. Enjoy!
Spoilage
Before we leave, it's important to discuss one last topic: Food spoilage. If you look closely at the food items in your inventory you'll notice a smaller timer attached to each piece of food. When this tmer runs out - and it's always ticking downward - one piece of that food will disappear from your inventory. Wait too long and every piece of that food will vanish. Cooked food tends to last longer, so this is yet another reason to cook everything you find.
Cooking with Pals
Eventually you'll get tired of cooking things on your own. This is where Pals come in. If you have an active Campfire you can set food on it and, with the right Pals deployed, get them to do the cooking for you. The earliest Fire Pal you'll find that can handle cooking is the Foxparks, which are easily spotted at a distance if you wait until night to look around. That said, anything with the Kindling Work Specialty can also cook food for you. As soon as you go to create a recipe the Pal will jump in and handle the work.