Your Five Party Slots In Palworld 1.0 Are Precious, Stop Wasting Them on Mounts
Trying to build the perfect five-Pal team out of a Palbox with hundreds of options isn't fun, it's a logistics problem.
Load up one Pal to fly, one to swim, one to run, and a Galeclaw purely for gliding, and you've spent four of your five slots on getting around instead of getting anything done. That leaves exactly one seat for combat, which is a rough way to walk into a boss fight or a raid. I spent longer than I'd like to admit manually swapping Pals in and out of my active roster every time my plans changed from mining to fighting to just crossing a river. Turns out I was doing it the hard way the entire time.
The Button Everyone Seems to Miss
Open your Palbox and look right below your active party. There's a Party Presets button sitting there, and a lot of people apparently scroll right past it.
Instead of forcing your five slots to be a jack-of-all-trades squad that has to cover every situation at once, you save entire loadouts and swap between them instantly. Build the team, save it, drop them back in the box, build the next one. Heading out to strip-mine the desert looks nothing like gearing up for a boss, so stop pretending your party needs to handle both at the same time.
A few presets worth stealing outright:
Oil Rig Runners: One Jetragon plus four Gobfins running Vanguard and Stronghold passives. The Jetragon is fast enough to dodge the anti-air lasers, while the Gobfins sit in their spheres and stack serious attack buffs straight onto you.
Boss Melters: Two Knocklem and three Dumuds. Cycle the Knocklem partner skills while the Dumuds passively push your ground attack damage into ridiculous territory. You're mostly just watching numbers go up at that point.
Ocean Salvage: Neptilius and four Jellroy, a team built entirely for farming open water without eating into the roster you actually fight with.
Dark Horse: One Frostallion Noct and four Hoocrates. The owls stack a serious damage multiplier onto whichever Dark type you're leading with.
If you want to go further down this road, the hidden features and best secrets scattered through the recent updates are worth a look, but presets are the one that actually changed how I play.
Flying Is Great, Which Is Kind of the Problem
It's worth asking whether you need a flying mount parked in your party at all times, and I say that as someone who used to never leave home without one.
Flying flattens exploration. You hold forward, sail over everything interesting on the ground, and miss half of what the map is actually doing. Ground yourself for a stretch and Palpagos feels big again in a way it stops feeling once you're airborne full time. Dropping the flier also frees up a slot for something that actually pulls weight in a fight, or a utility Pal like Teafant for quick healing between engagements.
Grappling and Climbing Without a Dragon
If giving up mobility entirely isn't an option, pair a grappling hook with a fully condensed Galeclaw. It handles better than most dedicated fliers and lets you shoot while gliding, so you're not sacrificing combat to get somewhere.
For something sillier and genuinely more fun, breed a Tarantriss with passives like Swift and Eternal Engine. Stack in the newer jump-boosting passives on top of that (worth checking my rundown of every new passive in 1.0 if you're not sure which ones actually stack well) and you can scale cliffs and clear canyons faster than climbing gear would ever manage. It's the closest this game gets to web-slinging.
Stop Splitting Your Mounts By Terrain
If you're not willing to give up mobility perks but you're also tired of burning three slots on land, sea, and air separately, the fix is simple. Find Pals that already do two of those jobs.
Elphidran Aqua swims well and can take to the air the second you need to clear a gap, so it covers water and sky without a second thought. Shadowbeak runs fast on the ground and doubles as a legitimate flying mount, which covers the other two.
And if you want to look good doing it, Chillet is the pick. It's fast on land and just as capable in the water, though it's worth knowing it doesn't regenerate stamina while sitting on the surface the way dedicated fliers do, so don't plan a long ocean crossing around it without a backup plan. What you get in exchange is one Pal covering two traversal roles while also adding Dragon damage to your attacks while mounted, which makes it one of the better flex picks for basically any combat setup you're running.
Five slots isn't a lot of room. Presets and multi-role Pals are the difference between constantly rebuilding your party and actually spending your time out in the world doing something with it.
