This is the story of Murder Chicken.
I have been playing a lot of Palworld. My son loves watching me play which I’m not sure whether that’s a good thing or not. But that isn’t this story.
In Palworld, there is a faction I call the “MiBs” (Men in Black). They are some of the few humans and they attack on sight. They make camps around the map and keep random “pals” in a cage! Defeating the enemies and freeing the pal gets you a free pal.
So early in my game – the first camp I cleared – had this guy. A “Tocotoco” pal. Now, these little buggers have a skill in the low levels where they blow themselves up. So he kept getting incapacitated. Making him nigh-useless and terrible at helping me against multiple enemies since pathfinding… the game is early access and pathfinding in games is always hard.
Another element of Palworld is your base. Your pals can work at your base. Cutting down trees. Growing fruit. Cooking, building, and carrying stuff to the correct(well any) containers. But not all pals can do all things. Only some can cut trees. Only water dudes can water crops. I don’t think this bird can do anything in the base. It isn’t even chicken enough to give me eggs like the chicken!
So in these early days I needed the pals who could provide specific services in my base. At this point in the game, I needed this little googly-eyed chicken to fill out my party. But I also needed him to last through a single fight.
Then I found a tree. It glowed. And had weird looking fruit. Being the loot-goblin I am, I collected them. They were “skill fruit.” Teach new and different skills to your pal! I had three fruit and a stupid bird I needed to stop blowing itself up. I taught it these three random skills.
Skills in Palworld have a stat saying how much “power” it hits for. I’m sure there’s a calculation of level+/*power, but I don’t know exactly.
My little elephant-healer thing had a skill “hydro jet” which hit for 30 and was “pretty effective” against the level 1-3 monsters I fought.
Implode (the blow himself up skill) was at 230 and pretty much always hit for 99999 or something stupid. Once.
I added three new skills:
- Dragon Cannon (30)
- Seed Mine (65)
- Sand Tornado (80)
Now, I didn’t realize at the time. I figured it out very quickly. In our next fight…. my bird slaughtered them all. I very quickly began calling him my “Murder Chicken.” And then eventually renamed him. I’ve given him more fruits since then, and now his weakest attack is the 65 seed mine. He has several power-70 and power-80 skills in his bank but I don’t keep them as active skills (you only get to set 3) because they are not as useful.
And this is how the dumbest looking bird is always in my party and pretty much guaranteed to be my active pal in a fight.
Dream by Day 