Pal Breeding Guide: Combos, Mechanics, and Mutations

Breeding is how you get Pals you can't find in the wild, and how you stack good passives on the Pals you already use. This guide covers how the 1.0.5 game picks a child, the setup you need, and how to plan a line of parents. When you want the answer for one Pal, the breeding calculator and every Pal page in the Palpedia list its parent pairs, easiest first.

Setting up a Breeding Farm

The Breeding Farm unlocks at level 19. It costs Wooden Board (10), Stone (20), and Fiber (50). Build it at a base, then assign one male and one female Pal to it. Pals in your party don't count; they have to be working at the base.

The farm has a chest. Put Cake in it. The pair eats one Cake per egg, and the eggs appear next to the farm. When the Cake runs out, breeding stops, so a steady Cake supply is the real bottleneck.

Gender decides whether a pair can breed, and almost never what it makes. A male Depresso with a female Lifmunk makes the same child as a female Depresso with a male Lifmunk. The one exception in 1.0.5 is Katress + Wixen: the same pair hatches either Katress Ignis or Wixen Noct, depending on which parent is male.

How the game picks the child

Every Pal has a hidden breeding power. In 1.0.5 it runs from 20 for the rarest Pals to 3,100 for the most common, so lower means rarer.

To find the child:

1. Add both parents' breeding power.
2. Add 1, divide by 2, and round down.
3. The child is the Pal whose breeding power is closest to that number.

Two examples from the 1.0.5 table:

• Depresso (3,000) + Lifmunk (3,020): 3,000 + 3,020 + 1 is 6,021. Half of that, rounded down, is 3,010. Sparkit sits at exactly 3,010, so the egg hatches a Sparkit.
• Direhowl (2,680) + Tanzee (2,900): the target is 2,790, which is Fuddler exactly.

Ties happen. Lamball (3,050) + Cattiva (2,760) targets 2,905. Tanzee (2,900) and Daedream (2,910) are both 5 away, and the game picks Daedream. That's why our calculator reads the game's own breeding table instead of redoing the math.

Two parents of the same species always make that species. Two Lamballs make a Lamball.

Fixed recipes

Some Pals ignore the formula. These are fixed recipes: one exact pair of other Pals makes the Pal, and no other pair does. Most are subspecies:

• Kitsun + Nyafia make Kitsun Noct.
• Incineram + Maraith make Incineram Noct.
• Mau + Pengullet make Mau Cryst.
• Caprity + Tarantriss make Caprity Noct.
• Vanwyrm + Foxcicle make Vanwyrm Cryst.

A few Pals can't be made from any other pair at all. In the 1.0.5 table, Grizzbolt, Orserk, and Faleris only come from two parents of their own kind, so you need to catch a male and a female first.

Planning a breeding line

Rare Pals usually take more than one step. Work backwards from the Pal you want:

1. Open it in the Palpedia and go to How to breed.
2. The pairs there are ranked by how early you can catch both parents in the wild. Start at the top.
3. If you don't own a parent yet, open that parent's page and repeat.

The calculator's Chained Path mode runs the same search for you. Pick a Pal you own and the one you want, and it finds the shortest chain of pairs between them.

Each Pal page also lists what that Pal breeds into, rarest first. It's a quick way to see what a spare Pal is good for before you release it.

Passing down passives

A child can carry up to four passives, drawn from both parents. PalCalc, an open-source breeding planner that reads the game files, models the odds like this:

• How many of the parents' passives the child gets: 1 at 40%, 2 at 30%, 3 at 20%, 4 at 10%.
• Extra random passives on top: none at 40%, 1 at 30%, 2 at 20%, 3 at 10%.

Two habits follow from that. Keep unwanted passives off both parents, because each one in the pool dilutes the odds of the ones you want. And build good sets over several generations: breed two Pals that each carry one passive you want, keep the child that got both, and use it as the next parent.

HP, Attack, and Defense potentials

Each Pal also has hidden HP, Attack, and Defense potentials, often called IVs. A child takes some of them from its parents and rolls the rest. In PalCalc's model the child inherits one of the three from its parents 50% of the time, two of them 33% of the time, and all three 17% of the time. High-potential parents raise the floor, but plan on hatching a few eggs to get all three.

Breeding for base jobs

Breeding changes passives and potentials, not work suitability. A Pal's jobs and their levels come with its species, and condensing a Pal is how you raise them. To get a better miner, breed a species that already mines well, then breed work-speed passives onto it. The Work Suitability page ranks every Pal by job.

Mutations and better Cake

Version 1.0 added mutated eggs. They're rare, and they hatch with higher stats and a unique passive. Two late Cakes are worth unlocking:

• Vegetable Cake is an upgraded Breeding Farm Cake from Technology 47.
• Extravagant Vegetable Cake from Technology 60 is the one to use when you're chasing mutations.

Hatching the eggs

Put eggs in an Egg Incubator, which unlocks at level 10. Each egg has a comfortable temperature and hatches slower outside it. The Electric Egg Incubator from level 36 keeps the temperature right on its own, and the Large Incubator from Technology 48 holds ten eggs at once.

When you know which Pal you're after, open the breeding calculator and start from its easiest pair.