Palbonds
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A mod that allows you to pet, feed, and play with wild Pals to earn their trust. Each Pal has its own personality; once they trust you enough, they will follow you, fight by your side, and eventually join your team of their own accord
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Description
Ever wanted to just... pet a wild Pal?
Not knock it out first. Not throw a sphere at it. Just walk up to the little
guy, scratch its head, give it a berry, and see what happens.
Now you can, and that's the whole mod!
How it goes?
You find a Pal. You pet it. It's suspicious. You feed it something. It's less
suspicious. You keep at it, and at some point it decides you're alright and
starts trailing after you.
Then it follows you around. It fights for you when something jumps you. And if
you keep it happy long enough, it joins your party on its own - no sphere, no
fight, it just decides it's going with you.
Yes, you can have a whole army. No, that is not always a good idea. Six
Pals swinging at the same Chikipi is exactly as chaotic as it sounds, and if
they clip each other in the process, that's between them and you.
Every wild Pal has a personality now
There's a tag above their head telling you who you're dealing with before you
walk over:
- Normal - whatever its species normally does
- Curious - stops and looks at you as you come closer
- Timid - too shy, runs and hides
- Aloof - will probably ignore you
- Grumpy - all posturing, until you look like easy prey
- Hostile - will hunt you down
- Feral - chaos incarnate, peace was never an option
Some Pals are simply not going to be your friend today, and that's fine. Find
another one.
Tags bother you? F9 turns them off.
They remember what you do
Hit a Pal that trusts you and it flinches. Do it again and that's it - it's
done with you. It won't follow you, won't let you feed it, won't come back. And
it might decide it has something to say about it.
Wander too far and leave one behind, and it gives up on you too. Less dramatic,
but you still lost it.
Controls
- 4 - the usual radial menu. Pet and feed, except now it works on wild Pals too
- F8 - play animation (experimental interaction)
- F9 - hide/show the personality tags
- F10 - on/off the passive follower friendship gain (so you can hoard minions)
F8, F9 and F10 can be changed in the settings file.
Settings
PalBonds comes with a settings file, created the first time you launch the game with the mod. It lets you change:
- how many points petting, playing and feeding give (including each food rarity and Kinship Peaches)
- how fast your followers warm up to you on their own
- how much trust a Pal gets when it joins you
- how often each personality appears
- the keys for Play, tags and passive bonding
- the language of the tags and messages (it follows your game's language by default)
Where to find it: in the same UE4SS Mods folder you dropped PalBonds into, open shared/PalBonds_settings.lua.
Close the game, open the file with Notepad, change a number, save, and start the game again. Every setting has a short explanation above it, and if anything goes wrong, just delete the file and a fresh one is made.
An in-game settings screen is planned for a future update.
Requirements
UE4SS Experimental (Palworld) - install it first, and it must be the September 2026 build or newer.
Installation
Unzip and drop the whole PalBonds folder into the Mods folder of your UE4SS:
- UE4SS installed by hand: Palworld/Pal/Binaries/Win64/ue4ss/Mods/
- UE4SS from the Steam Workshop: Palworld/Mods/NativeMods/UE4SS/Mods/
The folder includes enabled.txt, so it loads on its own. If it doesn't, add the
line PalBonds : 1 to mods.txt in that same Mods folder.
Prefer Steam? The same mod is on the Workshop, where UE4SS installs automatically.
A few things
- Bonding takes a while. That's the point. Interactions do most of the work,
but a Pal walking with you slowly warms up to you anyway. - Don't leave a bonded Pal behind. Distance costs you trust.
- High-level Pals take longer. Low-level ones come around fast, but bosses may be harder to befriend.
- A Pal that joins you this way shows up already fond of you, so free extra trust points.
- Food rarity matters, the better the food the more friendship it will give, and Kinship Peaches are your best bet to tame them.
- This mod will allow you to befriend pals you wouldn't usually capture, keep that in mind.
- Only tested in Singleplayer.
- Built with AI-assisted development - not a secret, and the GitHub repo has the full notes if you're curious how any of this works.
- Tags and messages appear in your game's language, in every language Palworld offers.
Known Issues
- A bonded wild Pal (50%+ friendship bar) may despawn if it moves too far from its spawn location - the game unloads wild Pals along with the area they came from. It's recommended to complete the bond before travelling to a different area.
Bugs, ideas, complaints
Drop a comment. It's a young mod and I'd rather hear about it.
Source is on GitHub under MIT if you want to poke at it or build on it:
The repo also has the full development notes - a lot of digging into how
Palworld's following, AI presets and friendship system actually work under the
hood. Might save another modder some time.
Unofficial fan mod. Palworld belongs to Pocketpair, Inc.
The Palbonds Team
