PalBonds - The Befriending Mod

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 screen.

Settings

Press ESC and open PalBonds. Everything changes while you play - no restart needed.

• language
• friendship points: what petting, playing and each food give, including both Kinship Peaches, the passive gain from followers, and the bonus when a Pal joins
• how often each personality appears, and whether Pals of that personality can be befriended at all
• the abandonment and betrayal triggers, and whether passive gain or tags starts on
• accessibility: friendship bar colour, personality tag colour and tag size
• keybinds - click a row, change the hotkeys

Your choices are saved to shared/PalBonds_settings.lua next to the mod, so they survive updates and can be copied between installs or handed to a server. You can still edit that file directly if you prefer; delete it and a fresh one is made.

Requirements

UE4SS - it's listed as required, so Steam grabs it for you.

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 it starts with extra trust.
• 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: https://github.com/DragonKaiser55555/palbonds

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.