When a Pal stops working, watch what it does before replacing it. A Pal eating, walking toward an unreachable station, waiting for an ingredient, and repeatedly choosing another job need different fixes. A better passive or a higher suitability level will not explain all four.
The checklist below is our recommended diagnostic order. Start with one affected Pal and one unfinished task. Keep the rest of the base as it is until you can describe the failure clearly.
Start with the visible symptom
| What you observe | Check first | A useful controlled test |
|---|---|---|
| Pal stands idle beside an unfinished task | Required suitability, enabled jobs and available ingredients | Give one healthy, suitable worker one ready task |
| Pal repeatedly walks away to another job | Work permissions and competing tasks | Temporarily narrow its permitted jobs |
| Pal approaches but never reaches the work position | Equipment spacing and the approach route | Try an equivalent station on open ground |
| Work stops after a short productive period | Hunger, SAN, rest and electricity | Watch the entire interruption, not just the idle machine |
| Finished items pile up | Transport workload and available storage | Collect one output manually, then follow the next item |
| Most of the base fails together | Shared food, power, recent layout changes or session problems | Check one common dependency before replacing workers |
Write down a sentence such as “the watering Pal reaches this farm but leaves before work starts.” That is easier to test than “the base is broken.”
Check suitability and job permissions
The Monitoring Stand allows individual work categories to be enabled or prohibited. Current community data lists its unlock at Technology level 7, with 30 Wood and 10 Stone for construction.
Our first assignment check is simple: inspect the job the station needs, inspect the Pal's actual suitability, then inspect whether that kind of work is enabled. Do this before breeding a replacement. A multi-skilled worker can be useful, but it also makes competing assignments harder to notice.
For your test, choose a task with ingredients already available and space for its output. Keep the worker's job list narrow enough that you can tell whether it accepts the task. Once it works, reintroduce other jobs one at a time. This turns an apparently random problem into a comparison.
Patch v1.0.4 added suitability explanations to the Pal status and Palpedia interfaces and lowered Ancient Bark's gathering requirement to level 1. Read the current requirement instead of relying on an older specialist recommendation.
Use the base-worker guide when you have established that the job is correctly configured and truly needs a stronger worker.
Test access with an ordinary station
Before redesigning your base, choose one inexpensive station as a control. Put it on open ground with a clear approach and queue a small task. Compare the same Pal there and at the troublesome station.
If the simple station works, inspect the original layout. Look at the space where the Pal must stand, turns beside nearby buildings, stairs, changes in floor height, and the route from its last task. The player fitting through a gap is not a useful guarantee that the assigned Pal can navigate it.
Our layout recommendation is to leave an obvious main route through production and keep the working sides of stations facing it. Place decorative objects after the functional layout is reliable. When a particular corner fails repeatedly, move one obstruction or station and repeat the same test.
A recall and redeployment can help you determine whether the problem is temporary. If the worker fails again in the same place, record that pattern. Repeatedly redeploying it restores activity without necessarily resolving the cause.
Separate low SAN from an illness
Base work and hunger reduce sanity; quality food and hot springs help recovery. That explains why a stocked, accessible feeding and rest area is part of production infrastructure.
Watch a troubled worker reach the Feed Box and rest area. Having those buildings somewhere in the base is not the same as confirming that this Pal can use them. Inspect the food it actually eats and compare its condition after a normal work period.
An illness needs its own treatment check. Use Low Grade Medical Supplies for Sick, Sprain and Overfull; Medical Supplies for Ulcer and Fracture; and High Grade Medical Supplies for Weakened and Depressed.
Our recommendation is to treat the displayed condition, then investigate why it developed. Repeated medication becomes a maintenance loop if the same worker returns to inaccessible food or an unsustainable workload. Reduce the pressure while testing, and restore a faster work setting only after the ordinary routine remains stable.
For food production planning, use the cooking guide. Reserve expensive breeding ingredients for the project they were intended to support rather than using them as an automatic answer to every feeding problem.
Follow the whole production chain
Pick one missing item and work backward from its destination. Is it already inside a machine? Is the preceding task finished? Is a recipe waiting for ingredients? Is the necessary worker busy elsewhere? Inspect each step before changing rates.
For electric machinery, compare the charge trend while the task is active and while other production is quiet. If several machines stop together, shared power is a better first suspect than several unrelated bad workers. The crude oil and electricity guide gives a more detailed load check.
For transport, use a small batch and a nearby storage destination as your comparison. Watch whether the worker picks up the item, where it goes, and whether it becomes distracted. A shorter route that works provides evidence for a layout change; simply adding another transporter does not tell you why the first one failed.
Check patch-specific failures before rebuilding
Pocketpair fixed base logging on respawned trees in v1.0.4. If logging is your specific symptom, confirm the game and server version before treating the affected tree as proof of a broken layout.
If a problem only happens in multiplayer, compare what the host and another player see. Record the affected station, Pal, task and game version before restarting. That description is useful if you need to report a repeatable issue; “everyone is idle sometimes” is much harder to investigate.
Avoid rebuilding the whole base during the first troubleshooting session. Use the base-location guide to evaluate a move only when the simpler tests point to the site itself.
Keep the fix small enough to remember
Save the successful change in the Adventure Planner: “moved furnace entrance away from stairs,” “enabled watering,” or “treated condition and shortened food route.” Then run your ordinary workload again.
A stable base should let you leave for a useful expedition without needing to repeat the same rescue on return. Once the specific failure is resolved, use the Palworld hub to choose an upgrade that increases output instead of concealing an interruption.