How to hatch eggs in Palworld | PC Gamer

Pilfer eggs and incubate them for a source of extra Pals.

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.

January 22, 2024: We added information about how to speed up slow egg incubations.

Hatching Pal eggs in Palworld is a great way to add new creatures to your ever-growing roster. While you can always battle Pals out in the world and snag them with a Pal Sphere, hatching eggs is a much easier way of getting higher-rarity Pals early on, since you won't have to risk getting into a fight with them.

If you do decide to go the combat route, you'll need a squad of the best Pals to back you up. A Palworld mount can also help in combat, or if you want a fast way to explore the map to look for eggs. Either way, here's how to hatch the Pal eggs you find around the map, and build the Egg Incubator you need to do it.

To construct the Egg Incubator you'll need to research it in the Technology Tab, and that requires Ancient Technology Points. You can get these by defeating the Syndicate Tower bosses, so you should take down that first boss of Zoe and Grizzbolt at the Rayne Syndicate Tower as soon as possible. Once you've acquired the points, unlock the Egg Incubator on the right hand column of the Technology menu.

Here's what it costs to build:

All of this is pretty easy to acquire except the Ancient Civilization Parts. Sadly, you'll have to beat another boss to get these, namely, one of the Alpha Pals you can find roaming the world. After you've squirrelled together the necessary materials, you can finally build an Egg Incubator in your base.

Best Pals: What to catch early Palworld roadmap: The early access plan Palworld mods: Best tweaks to install Palworld multiplayer: How to co-op Palworld dedicated server: Full-time Pals Palworld breeding guide: Get started with cake and eggs

The second thing you'll need to hatch eggs is… well, an egg. Not just any egg mind you, so don't go whacking a Chikipee egg in there just to see what happens. No, you need Pal eggs, which you can find while out exploring the open world. These eggs are easy to recognise due to their large size and patterned exteriors. Common eggs are striped with pink and white, while Uncommon Eggs seem to be coloured and named for the type of Pal they'll hatch.

For example, the Large Verdant Egg pictured above—coloured shades of green—hatched a Dinossom, which is an uncommon Grass-type Pal. To hatch a new Pal, simply select the Egg Incubator, place the egg you want inside, and then sit back and wait.

Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.

The amount of time it takes to hatch an egg depends on both its rarity and how hot it is, so you're always better off hatching eggs during the day, though with some rarer ones it might take a whole day and night before they're ready. Once the timer has run out, head over to the Incubator and hold F to hatch your new Pal.

As mentioned above, egg hatch times depends on a number of factors:

While you can't do anything about rarity, you can do something about those other two. First off, the difficulty you select in custom settings changes egg incubation time. The higher the difficulty the longer eggs will take to hatch, so bear that in mind when creating future worlds.

The other thing you can do is alter the temperature around the egg. If you walk up to an active Egg Incubator, it'll list the status of the egg as either being too hot or too cold, in which case you should build either a heater or a cooler to give it the ideal environment.

A cooler will require a cooling Pal to operate it like Pengullet, while a heater requires a kindling Pal like Foxparks. Changing the temperature around the egg will make for more ideal hatching conditions and reduce the timer. It's also worth noting that it's harder to reach ideal conditions for rarer eggs, so you'll need a Pal with a higher level of kindling or cooling like Arsox or Sweepa.

Sean's first PC games were Full Throttle and Total Annihilation and his taste has stayed much the same since. When not scouring games for secrets or bashing his head against puzzles, you'll find him revisiting old Total War campaigns, agonizing over his Destiny 2 fit, or still trying to finish the Horus Heresy. Sean has also written for EDGE, Eurogamer, PCGamesN, Wireframe, EGMNOW, and Inverse.

Over a million players have flooded back into GTA Online to check out a new Call of Duty-like zombie mode

Y2K beat em up Star Wars: Episode 1 - Jedi Power Battles is back for some inexplicable reason

Legendary game designer Jordan Weisman's next project is an open world deck-building pirate romance tactical RPG