Work Priority in Palworld 1.0: Why Your Pals Ignore the Mine
You build an Ore Mining Site, assign a Pal with Mining Lv3, and it spends the entire day carrying berries instead. Nothing is broken and the Pal is not confused — Palworld runs a fixed work priority order, and Mining sits near the very bottom of it. Once you know the order, most "my base Pals are stupid" problems turn out to be predictable and fixable. Here is the full ranking and what to do about it.
The Full Priority Order
Lower number means higher priority. A Pal capable of two jobs will always do the lower-numbered one first.
| Priority | Work |
|---|---|
| 1 | Defense |
| 2 | Aid (reviving) and Extinguish (fires) |
| 3 | Construction |
| 4 | Dedicated work |
| 5 | Grazing (Ranch) |
| 6 | Generating Electricity |
| 7 | Repair |
| 8 | Refinement (Smelting) and Kindling |
| 9 | Cooking |
| 10 – 12 | Harvest, Transport, Planting, Watering |
| 12 – 13 | Medicine Production, Handiwork |
| 14 | Mining |
| 15 | Lumbering |
| 19 | Cooling |
Mining is 14th and Lumbering is 15th out of nineteen. They are the two jobs players most want automated, and the game runs them almost last.
Cooling is dead last at 19 — worth knowing if you have built a Refrigerated Crusher or rely on Cooling Pals for food preservation.
What This Actually Explains
Read the order and a series of familiar frustrations resolve themselves.
"My miner never mines." If that Pal also has Transporting, Handiwork or Planting, it will do all of those first. Mining only happens when nothing higher-priority is outstanding — and on a busy base, something always is.
"My base stops working when I build something." Construction sits at priority 3, above almost all production. Placing a large structure pulls your entire workforce off the production lines until it is finished. That is intended behaviour, not a bug.
"Nobody is cooking." Cooking is 9, below Grazing, Electricity, Repair and Smelting. A Kindling Pal that could be cooking will run the furnace first, because Kindling and Smelting are both priority 8.
"My Ranch Pal wandered off." Unlikely — Grazing is priority 5, unusually high. Ranch output is one of the more reliable things on a base.
"A raid destroyed everything while my Pals stood there." They did not stand there — Defense is priority 1, above everything. If they failed, it was capability rather than willingness.
The design logic is consistent: emergencies first (defense, revival, fire), then construction, then things that decay or need tending, then bulk extraction last. It is a reasonable order for a base you are watching. It is the wrong order for a base you want mining while you sleep.
How to Actually Get Mining Done
Since you cannot reorder the list, you work around it:
1. Assign single-suitability Pals to low-priority jobs. This is the whole answer in one line. A Pal whose only suitability is Mining has nothing higher-priority to be distracted by, so it mines. A four-job generalist like Mossanda — Lumbering Lv4, Transporting Lv4, Planting Lv3, Handiwork Lv2 — is a bad miner precisely because it is versatile: Transporting (10–12) and Planting (10–12) both outrank Lumbering (15).
2. Split bases by function. Put extraction on a base with no plantations, no cooking pot and no assembly lines, so there is nothing higher-priority to pull workers away. A dedicated mining base with three single-job Mining Pals will out-produce a mixed base with eight.
3. Stop building while you want production. Construction at priority 3 halts the line. Batch your building into one session rather than dripping structures in.
4. Overstaff the bottom of the list — up to your worker cap. Since Mining and Lumbering get whatever time is left over, more bodies means more leftover time. This also spreads the SAN drain of -0.15 per second that every extraction site imposes, which is the highest bracket in the game.
That cap is set by your base level, and it is easy to forget: worker capacity equals base level, rising one per level to a maximum of 30 workers at base level 30. A base at level 10 holds ten Pals — so if four are on plantations and two on furnaces, your mining crew is four no matter how many top-rated Mining Pals you own. If the bottom of the priority list is starving, check your worker count before blaming the roster.
5. Use a second base for cooling. At priority 19, Cooling will effectively never happen on a busy base.
One partial exception worth knowing: certain Pals' Partner Skills raise the work suitability of every Pal at the base by up to one level. That does not change the priority order, but it does mean marginal workers finish tasks faster, which frees time for the bottom of the list.
Priority Versus Suitability Level
These are separate systems and mixing them up leads to bad roster decisions.
| What it controls | |
|---|---|
| Work Priority | Which job gets done first — fixed by the game, identical for every Pal |
| Work Suitability level | How fast that job gets done, and whether the Pal can do it at all |
A Mining Lv1 Pal with no other suitabilities will out-mine a Mining Lv4 Pal that also has three other jobs, because the second one keeps getting pulled away. Suitability level is throughput; priority decides whether the Pal ever reaches the task.
That reframes what a "good base Pal" is. Eikthyrdeer Terra is the top-rated logger in the game and Celesdir Noct the best of the 1.0 additions — but either matters most on a base where nothing outranks Lumbering to distract it. A high rating on a busy mixed base is largely wasted.
Conversely, a high-priority job like Generating Electricity (6) is a good fit for a multi-suitability Pal, because it will get done regardless. Put your generalists where priority is high and your specialists where priority is low.
Practical tips
- Lower number = higher priority. Defense 1, Mining 14, Lumbering 15, Cooling 19.
- Assign single-job Pals to mining and lumbering. Versatility is a liability at the bottom of the list.
- Your worker cap equals your base level (max 30 at base level 30). Overstaffing has a hard ceiling.
- Construction (3) halts production. Batch your building.
- Cooling at 19 barely happens on a busy base — give it its own.
- Priority is fixed and identical for all Pals — you cannot reorder it, only staff around it.
- Generalists to high-priority jobs, specialists to low-priority ones.
Running your own Palworld 1.0 server
Work priority is only a problem because there is never idle time on a busy base — and the fix, more hours of Pal labour, is exactly what a persistent world provides. On a dedicated Palworld 1.0 server your extraction sites keep grinding through the bottom of the priority list overnight, when nothing is being built and nobody is cooking. Full crossplay lets a group run separate function-split bases, and one-click backups and automatic updates protect a layout you have tuned.
Conclusion
Palworld assigns every job a fixed priority from 1 to 19, and lower is more urgent: Defense 1, Aid and Extinguish 2, Construction 3, Grazing 5, Electricity 6, Repair 7, Smelting and Kindling 8, Cooking 9, the harvest-and-transport group 10–12, Handiwork and Medicine 12–13, Mining 14, Lumbering 15 and Cooling 19. The order is identical for every Pal and cannot be changed, which means the two jobs you most want automated are the two the game runs last. The fix is structural: give low-priority work to single-suitability specialists, split extraction onto its own base, batch your construction, and overstaff the bottom of the list. A Mining Lv1 Pal that does nothing else will out-produce a Mining Lv4 generalist every time.
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