Palworld’s explosive popularity took everyone by surprise, but things aren’t all sunshine and roses. While players everywhere are building, catching, and gunning their way to success across the Palpagos Islands, anyone who’s played more than a few hours knows how frustrating it can be getting your Pals to do actually do their jobs.
In a Jan. 26 Reddit thread, players lamented about how Pals in Palworld rarely seem to stick to their assigned tasks—if you can even get them to start working at all. In the post, the OP says this is “easily the worst part of the game” and pleads with developer Pocketpal for a “UI for assigning Pals,” with footage showing their Anubis stubbornly refusing to work at the assembly line.
The only way to manually assign Pals to specific jobs is to pick them up, carry them over to a work station, and lob them at it. Talk about OSHA violations. The system sounds serviceable in theory (if a bit draconic), but in practice, it just isn’t responsive enough. Pals usually don’t recognize which work station you’re assigning them to, and either think you’re trying to give them a different task, or stand there awkwardly idling before deciding on a task themselves. It’s far too challenging to make your Pals do the work that needs doing.
In the comments, players aired their frustrations and wholeheartedly agreed with the OP. “Best is when they do the job for a min and run away to hit a fucking tree,” one user said, and I couldn’t agree more. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve tried to get my Incineram to heat my furnace, only for him to wander off and start mining rocks, lighting torches, or eating berries. Cheeky bastard.
Other users banded together to suggest solutions for Pocketpair. At the time of writing, the top comment suggests we should be able to “manage assignments from the podium thing,” referring to the Monitoring Stand. Its description says “You can command your Pals to work on various things inside a base,” and I built one expecting it to do exactly that, but it only lets you overwork your Pals like a ruthless dictator. That might be fun, but it isn’t very effective.
The Redditors agreed it’s likely just a placeholder, and with any luck, Pocketpair is working on a UI that lets us easily assign tasks to our Pals from the Monitoring Stand. As it stands, this is probably the biggest quality-of-life feature players are requesting for Palworld, and although it wasn’t specifically mentioned on the Palworld roadmap, we’re desperately hoping it’ll come soon.
