Where to build a base
This page does not tell you the best spot, and that is deliberate — what makes a spot good is ore, water and flat ground, and none of those are in Palworld's data files. What is in them is every spawn placement in the game, which answers the question underneath: where are the Pals you can actually catch, and how strong are they.
Spawn level by map area
Every field spawn placement on the main island — 6,903 of them — dropped into an 8×8 grid. Colour is the median level of what spawns there; the number is how many placements sit in that square. Blue is safe, red will kill you.
Big number: median spawn level. Small number: placements in that square.
Where a first base makes sense
2 squares combine a median spawn level of 12 or under with at least a hundred placements — plenty of Pals, none of which will one-shot you while you are building. The densest of them holds 615 placements at a median level of 9. Cross-reference with the full spawn map to see exactly which Pals those are.
How many bases, and how big
The limits people argue about are just settings. BaseCampMaxNumInGuild ships at 4 — that is the real “how many bases can I have”. The 128 in BaseCampMaxNum is a server-wide ceiling that gets mistaken for a personal one constantly. Both are on the server settings page.
How many Pals a base holds is not fixed either — it climbs with base level:
| Base level | Pals it holds |
|---|---|
| 1 | 1 |
| 2 | 2 |
| 3 | 3 |
| 4 | 4 |
| 5 | 5 |
| 6 | 6 |
| 7 | 7 |
| 8 | 8 |
| 9 | 9 |
| 10 | 10 |
| 11 | 11 |
| 12 | 12 |
| 13 | 13 |
| 14 | 14 |
| 15 | 15 |
| 16 | 16 |
| 17 | 17 |
| 18 | 18 |
| 19 | 19 |
| 20 | 20 |
| 21 | 21 |
| 22 | 22 |
| 23 | 23 |
| 24 | 24 |
| 25 | 25 |
| 26 | 26 |
| 27 | 27 |
| 28 | 28 |
| 29 | 29 |
| 30 | 30 |
Only the levels where the number changes are shown. The default server cap on workers is separate again — BaseCampWorkerMaxNum, which ships at 15 and is the usual cause of base lag when people raise it.
What to actually look for
The criteria that matter are well known and we can only measure some of them, so here they are with that marked plainly. Flat ground decides whether your Pals can path at all, and it is the one that ruins otherwise perfect spots — not measurable from the files. Ore nodes are the reason most recommended locations get recommended — also not in the files. Nearby spawn levels decide whether you can catch workers locally or will be hauling them across the map — measurable, and mapped above.
Why there is no top-ten list here
Because we would have to make it up. Palworld ships foliage and node placement tables only for the Battle Royale map — the main island’s ore and stone are not in anything we extract, and ore is the single biggest factor in whether a base site is any good. A ranked list of “best base locations” built without it would be opinion formatted to look like data, which is the one thing this site does not do.
The grid above is derived rather than stated: the placements and their level ranges are the game’s, the gridding and the medians are ours.
Extracted from Palworld’s game files on (build 4797106687).