Palworld Gameplay Speedrun 100 Percent Completion

How to actually finish a Palworld 100 Percent Speedrun without losing your mind

A 100 percent completion run in Palworld isn't about beating the story fast. It is about hunting down every single thing the game considers "done": every Pal species, every tech recipe, every dungeon boss, all 35 quests in the main story, the side contracts, the secret bosses like the Ancient Tech Core enemies, and the various world bosses scattered across the map. The community recognized split for this approach about six months after launch, and the times have tightened from roughly eight hours down to around four to five now that people know the routes. I ran through this several times while testing strategies for a few different leaderboards, and the biggest problem nobody warns you about is the Pal Pal box system and how it interacts with the capture requirement. You might think grabbing every Pal means just opening your box and checking them off. That is wrong. The game tracks which species you have personally caught or tamed, not which ones are stored in your Pal Box. This means your six slots per box matter way more than they seem at first, and if you fill all of them with common Pals early, you will spend two extra hours reorganizing your inventory instead of speedrunning.

Palworld Gameplay Speedrun 100 Percent Completion — the route

The most consistent route starts at the beginning of the game and pushes toward the late-game Pals and bosses in a fixed order. You get three starter Pals immediately and should keep the one with the fastest catch rate in your active party at all times. Do not switch it out unless you absolutely have to. The game gives you a fishing rod and a basic net within the first thirty minutes, and using the net on low HP Pals works better than the Pal Ball for certain species that have weird capture mechanics, specifically the Flying and Water types that get a small bonus resistance to the standard capture item. The second hour is where most runs die. You need to hit the early tech unlocks in this exact sequence: the Pal Box, then the breeding structure, then the sowing machine. The sowing machine is critical because some of the rarer Pals only appear after you have unlocked agriculture, and you cannot skip that tree. I wasted nearly twenty minutes on my third attempt trying to find a specific Pal that only spawns after planting crops, which seemed completely arbitrary until I realized the spawn table changes based on which buildings you have constructed. From there you push through the story quests in the order they are offered. The game does not force a strict sequence on most of them, but the speedrun route relies on doing the "First Step" quest before the "Gather and Prepare" quest because the latter gives you access to a fast travel point that appears later. Missing that order adds about four minutes of running back across the map that you cannot recover.

The Pals most people forget to catch

There are about three Pals in the 100 percent category that runners consistently miss on their first attempts. The first is the Eikthyrdeer variant that only appears during specific weather conditions in the late game area near the volcano biome. The second is a Pal that spawns exclusively when you defeat the Ice King boss without killing it quickly, which means you have to intentionally stall that fight. The third is even more obscure: a Pal tied to the secret Ancient Tech Core boss, and if you defeat that boss without having built the required structure first, it simply will not appear in your Pal data. I spent an entire evening chasing one of these after my run was disqualified because my completion tracker showed a missing entry. The workaround was building the Ancient Tech Core structure in the wrong biome, which forced the game to reset the spawn conditions. Once I rebuilt it in the correct zone near the ice fields, the Pal appeared within five minutes of the next boss trigger. It is worth noting that some of these Pals also require specific gender combinations during breeding if you are using the breed mechanic to fulfill the capture requirement, which some runners use as a shortcut instead of hunting every wild spawn.

Shortcuts and what they actually cost you

There are a few common shortcuts people try. The most popular one involves using the breeding system to mass produce a high level Pal with specific skills, which can make later boss fights significantly faster. This works, but it takes time in real world clock and can slow your overall run if you do not optimize the breeding pairs. The second shortcut is skipping certain side quests and relying on the story progression to unlock the Pals those quests grant. This fails if the Pal in question has a separate capture requirement tied to the quest completion flag, which several of the rarer Pals do. The third common approach is using the fast travel network as much as possible. The game opens fast travel points fairly early, and you should prioritize hitting all the major hubs in the first two hours. Missing a fast travel point costs you about three to five minutes per run across the whole route. I found that mapping out the fast travel sequence and treating it like a mini speedrun within the larger run saves roughly twelve minutes compared to just running everywhere on foot.

Pacing and the common failure points

The run breaks down most often between hours two and three, which is where the mid-game boss fights and the Pal hunting for species found in multiple biomes overlap. The specific bottleneck is the Grizzbolt and Shadowbeard fight, which both require different elemental strategies. If you do not have the right Pal type ready before engaging either of them, you will lose significant time. I recommend having at least two elemental counters prepared before starting this section, preferably one Fire and one Ice, since those two types cover the most ground in the mid-game content. The final hour is dominated by the late game Pal captures and the remaining story quests. Some of these Pals have extremely low capture rates even with a full health bar, which means you need to use items like the Royal Milk or the special Berries that increase capture chances. I usually carry a stack of ten to fifteen of these into the late game section because running back to your base to restock is slower than just carrying them from the start.

What this run cannot do for you

The 100 percent speedrun route does not work well on New Game Plus because the Pal data carries over differently in some versions, and the spawn tables change slightly, which means your practiced route may not apply. It also struggles with any run that uses co-op mode, since the game calculates 100 percent completion differently when multiple players are involved. The fastest times are consistently solo runs with no modifiers. There is no verified any% shortcut that gets under four hours, and anything claiming to be faster is likely using an unverified exploit that the community may disallow. The current verified records hover around four hours and fifteen minutes for a fully legitimate 100 percent completion run. If you are trying to hit sub four hours, you will need to optimize every single Pal catch and make sure your breeding pairs are set up before you enter the late game areas. The route itself is documented in the Palworld speedrun community on forums and on the leaderboards page, where you can find the exact split times for each major section. I would recommend running through the splits at least twice before attempting a full recorded run, since the Pal spawning patterns can vary slightly depending on how many Pals you already have in your active party. Those small variations add up fast when you are working with tight timing windows.