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Almost inevitably, a player inPalworldwill eventually stumble upon a bounty target. These tough human opponents can be nasty if you’re unprepared (and quite surprising if you played before they were added), but the tokens you get for defeating them allow you to purchase some otherwise pretty rare and useful items.
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This guide will explore the basics of how this mechanic works and how best to engage with it, while ignoring any ethical questions about the hunting and killing (or capturing) of humans for personal gain!
Finding Bounties
Like with Alpha Pals, you will likely stumble upon fugitives with bounties on their heads even if you don’t necessarily look for them. Because they’re marked on your map in the same way as Alpha Pals, all you typically need to do is explore and/or chat with friends andmembers of your guildto quickly find at least a few targets around your level. Palworld also has Bounty Intel Dealers scattered around, including dealers at major NPC settlements, who will give you (often quite strange) lore about nearby targets and hints as to their location. Despite what their names might imply, this intel is free.
Generally speaking, if you find an NPC human target that has a boss health bar when you engage them, then you’ve found a Bounty Target. They’ll have a purple aura around them and will often be strangely tall. On your map, the target will have an icon at their location ringed in purple. You can hover over that icon to see their name and level. Like Alpha Pals, the icon will be checked out if you’ve defeated or captured the target before.
Fighting Your Target
Once you’ve discovered a Bounty Target, you will need to either kill or capture them to get your rewards. Depending on the level disparity between you and the target, as well as your difficulty settings, these fights can range from trivially easy to virtually impossible. As a rule, you’ll only be able to take a few hits from targets at your level and will want armor, a good shield, and a full team of healthy Pals to maximize your chances of victory. Many Bounty Targets will have guns which can rapidly fire bullets your way such that close-range fights will turn deadly fast, as dodging many shots at once isn’t easy with so little time to react.
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Overall, targets will be comparable in difficulty to Alpha Pals, putting up what can be a significant fight if you want to target fugitives at or above your current level. If you’re struggling to defeat a particular target, it’s worth reviewingthe best pals for combatand choosing something well-suited to that target’s particularities. Because the primary reason to hunt targets is just to farm the tokens you gain upon defeating them, there’s also little harm in ignoring a tough target and returning later when you’re at a higher level.
Getting Tokens
The main immediate reward of defeating bounties, whether killing them or capturing them (the reward is the same either way, with a caveat discussed at the end of this section), is a currency called Successful Bounty Tokens. An Epic Rarity item in the Other Materials Category, these tokens (at least at present) exist solely to purchase rewards from Vigilante Bounty Officers in NPC settlements, which will be discussed more in the next section.
While you’re able to farm tokens from easy targets repeatedly by waiting for them to respawn, this isn’t going to be efficient. Tougher targets drop more tokens at once and the priciest items you can buy with these tokens cost 70 tokens each. With that said, even getting just a few tokens can be relatively lucrative at the levels where weak targets are still a threat, as you can also exchange small amounts of these tokens for money or a couple of other useful items.
At present, butchering captured targets produces additional tokens, meaning it is technically more efficient when farming Bounty Tokens to catch humans (netting the initial token reward) and then butcher them (getting more tokens). Thisseemsintentional, although it does produce quite a moral quandary.
The Rewards of Bounty Hunting
At present, Successful Bounty Tokens can be exchanged for six items through any Vigilante Bounty Officer:
This makes Bounty Hunting a fairly reliable way to farm Ancient Manuscripts, which you can then use to begin projects at a Pal Labor Research Laboratory (unlockable at Level 20). This also makes Bounty Hunting a relatively decent way to obtain Gold and Tech Points, although it’s notably not a very passive way of doing so.
Beyond the obvious reward opportunities, Bounty Targets share many similarities with Alpha Pals. They’re designed as boss enemies, some significantly more difficult than others, who spawn at a single location (and who eventually respawn if defeated or captured). If you’re willing to put aside the implications of collecting interesting humans for observation or to use as workers, one may want to try catching targets rather than killing them. Doing so will net you a powerful human “ally” that you may use for most of the same purposes a typical Pal could serve. For those interested, ensure you’reusing a suitable sphere, as humans tend to be relatively hard to catch even without boss-level stats.
