Palia Tips and Tricks for Beginners

Palia is a very enjoyable cozy life sim MMO game developed by Singularity 6. It's currently in open beta and more and more people are picking it up. To welcome these new players and help them get familiar with the game, I have prepared a Palia guide.

Clear your house plot

When you first begin Palia, you will lack many basic resources. Your house plot will help you regarding this since it has many trees and rocks. You will collect all your most basic resources from your house plot. You even have a pond to fish in. 

Eat food to gain focus

Palia's "energy" system is a little different to other life sim games. When you eat food you gain focus points. Having focus points allows you to get extra experience from using your skills. By eating food, you are essentially gaining skill levels much faster than not eating. Your character will start the game with a focus bonus of 25%. This means if you have focus points, when you use a skill you will gain 25% bonus experience on top of normal experience. It is possible to upgrade your focus bonus and focus bar which I will talk about next.

Use Renown at Phoenix and Dragon Shrines for focus upgrades

Renown is a form of currency you earn by doing quests, chatting with villagers and giving gifts. Renown is capped at 1000 so if you get close to it, make sure to use up your renown points. You will see yourself collecting many renown points in early game as there are so many quests to complete. But once you are late game, your renown gain will substantially decrease. While it is possible to buy writs with renown points to expand your buildable area in your house plot, it's a much better strategy to spend your renown points at the Phoenix and Dragon Shrines in early game and then buy writs once your focus upgrades are complete.

At the Phoenix Shrine, you can spend 100 renown to increase your focus bonus. You can upgrade this up to 100% which means you earn double experience from using a skill. Between 25% and 50%, you get 5% focus bonus upgrade per 100 renown. Between 50% and 75% this will decrease to 2.5% and between 75% and 100% you will only get 1% per upgrade.

At the Dragon Shrine you can spend 100 renown to increase your focus meter. Your character will begin the game with 200 max focus. The first increase is free, which will increase it to 300. You get 50 increase per 100 renown until your max focus is 500. Once it's 500, you will get 25 per upgrade and then at 750 you will get 10 per upgrade. These shrines are not missable. There is a quest in early game that will take you to both of these shrines.

Don't forget to repair your tools

Having to repair tools is probably the most stressful part about Palia. All tools have durability and you must repair them. If a tool gets broken, it will downgrade to its previous tier which will require you to recraft its upgrade. Tools can be repaired in exchange for gold at Sifuu's blacksmith. Once you reach level 4 in mining, you will unlock the repair station. You can craft repair kits to repair your tools in your house plot.

Always use worm when fishing

Fishing with worms will always give you fish that can be sold for a lot more than the worm's worth. In early game you can start fishing with a regular worm which can be bought at Zeki's general store for 10 gold. When you reach fishing level 4, you can unlock the regular worm farm. You can put food and produce in it to generate regular worms and fertilizer. Once you reach fishing level 7, you will unlock the glow worm farm. Glow worms will allow you to catch the most valuable fish.

Always cook food before selling

Make a campfire as soon as you can. You will gather many meat, mushrooms and fish during your adventure. Instead of selling these, always cook them at the campfire first. This will help you level up your cooking skill but it will also give you a chance to get a star quality meal which sells for more than normal. As you level up your cooking you will unlock more complicated recipes that will require these ingredients but until then always use the campfire.

Take advantage of crops that give multiple harvest

Tomatoes, blueberries and apples give multiple harvest. While blueberries and apples are late game crops, you can buy tomatoes from the moment you start the game. You can find tomato seeds at Zeki's general store. Plant them for lots of tomato harvests so you won't have to rebuy seeds after every single harvest. Once you get level 2 gardening, you will unlock the seed collector which will process your crops into multiple seeds so you won't have to buy seeds again. For example 1 potato can give 4 seeds! Money is scarce in this game and everything is very expensive, so doing this will greatly help your budget.

Pay attention to crop bonuses

Gardening in Palia can be a very complicated process. There are only a few crops in the game but they all come with different bonuses. Some crops provide nearby crops with water retention, some give weed prevention, some give harvest boost... To keep up with this complicated process, take advantage of the garden planner to effectively plan out your garden.

You can stack fertilizer

You can stack one type of fertilizer per square up to 99 times. Every day a crop uses 1 fertilizer but if you stack them up you won't have to use fertilizer on your crops every single day.

Give gifts to villagers everyday

A lot of story and quest progression is locked behind friendships. Each villager has a quest at friendship levels 3 and 4. To reach the end of the story questline in beta, you need to have level 4 friendship with a villager. Each villager will have up to 4 weekly requests from you. 2 of them will be for liked gifts while the other 2 for loved gifts. You can talk to the villagers to learn what they request that week. You can also talk to each villager once per in-game day for friendship gain. However you can only gift each villager only once per real life day.

Buy crafting licenses to increase the number of crafters you can place

At the start of the game you can only place 5 crafters on your house plot. To place additional crafters, you need to go to the Town Hall to buy crafting licenses. Each crafting license allows you to place one additional crafter. The maximum number of crafters you can place per plot is 31. The price of crafting licenses increase after each purchase.

Don't spend money at Tish's furniture store in early game

Everything Tish sells at her store can be crafted once you have enough furniture skill and the materials. Flow wood and palium ore can be hard to find in early game so once you get good income you might opt for buying the furniture that requires these rare materials rather than farming and crafting them yourself but this shouldn't be done in early game. There is much more important things you need to spend your money on such as inventory upgrades, chest upgrades, skill recipes, additional soil, crafting licenses so you should save up for those first. Then you can buy as many furniture as you want.

You can reset store inventory by server hopping

Once you have accumulated enough money and you want to seriously invest in decorating your home, you will start to visit Zeki's black market and Tish's furniture store frequently. Very few items are sold at these store but if you don't like the current selection, you can quit and restart the game to reset the inventory until you find the furniture you want to purchase.

Loot can be shared

As long as you get a hit in, all resources can be shared. You don't have to be in the same group either. And resources won't get split. If a large iron node has 7 iron in it and 3 players mine it together, each player will get 7 iron.

You can use fish, bugs and food as decoration if they are star quality

As long as they are star quality; you can use fish, bugs and food as decoration. 

In placement mode press Z to remove grids

If you don't want your decorations to lock in a grid, you can disable this in placement mode (default key Ctrl) by pressing Z. This will remove grids and prevent your decorations from locking in a place. Therefore you can have more freedom while decorating.

You can use wallpapers on the exterior of the house

Don't limit yourself by using wallpapers in the rooms only, you can use them on the exterior of the house too!

Don't sell your stone

You will come across many stone rocks in the beginning. It'll be easy to have a big surplus of stone and you may feel tempted to sell some of it. If you are truly short on cash and this is your only way, by all means go ahead. But I strongly suggest holding off on it since house expansions and high level furniture require a lot of stone bricks. 

Lock the items you don't want crafters to use

When you make a recipe, crafters will pull items from your storage chests. If you want to hold on to a specific ingredient and you don't want it to be used for a recipe, place it in a lockbox. The lockbox blueprint can be bought at Tish's furniture store.

You can upgrade your storage chests

You will quickly find yourself running out of storage even in the early game. You can only place 8 storage chests. Chests themselves can be upgraded to copper and then iron. Copper storage chest upgrade costs 25k whereas the iron storage chest upgrade costs 100k making it one of the most expensive things in the game. Storage chest upgrades can be purchased at Tish's furniture store.

You can chop the broken signpost outside of your house plot

This might be obvious to some people but it wasn't to me. Someone had to tell me for me to know that it was doable. 

You can date multiple villagers

Palia doesn't punish you for wanting to date everyone. Once you have enough romance points with a villager, they will give you their pins. You can equip these pins to get a romance boost with their owners. Once you wear a pin, other villagers will also be informed of who you are dating. However you can only equip 2 pins at a time, which doesn't really limit how many villagers you can actually date simultaneously.  

Press K to enable photo mode

You can take beautiful screenshots by bringing up the photo mode.The default key is "K". It has its limitations but it still allows you to hide the UI while taking screenshots.

Just enjoy the game

Palia is a very casual game. You are not restrained by time. You don't have to min/max. You won't be punished for being out at night. You won't be limited by energy or stamina bars. You can play at a slow pace. Your crops won't die if you forget to water them or remove the weeds, they just stop growing. You can take a break and pick up from where you left off easily. The game won't punish you for not having the most efficient day. So just enjoy the game at your own pace.