Expeditions are Palworld's idle farming system: you send a squad of Pals into an expedition site, wait out a timer, and collect a crate of loot scaled by how strong the squad was. They are also one of the most optimizable systems in the game — reward payouts run from a sliver of the loot table all the way to a hard 10× multiplier, and the difference is entirely in which Pals you send and how they are built. This guide covers every expedition site and its requirements, the exact firepower and reward-rate formulas from the game files, the strongest Pals to send, and how to hit the reward cap.

How expeditions work

Expedition sites are fixed entrances scattered across every region (the game internally files them under dungeons). Interact with one, pick up to 100 Pals, and confirm — the Pals leave for the site's fixed duration and come back with loot. Three numbers on the launch screen decide everything:

• Recommended firepower — the squad's summed firepower is compared against this to set the reward rate. Below it, rewards scale down linearly; above it, they scale up along a curve to a 10× cap.
• Element requirement — most sites demand a headcount of a specific element (e.g. 20 Ice Pals). This is a count, not a strength check: any 20 Pals of the element satisfy it, no matter how weak.
• Duration — fixed per site, from 30 minutes to 2 hours. Overpowering a site does not shorten it; the duration function in the game files takes no input from team strength, and in-game tests at 100× the recommended firepower confirm the timer doesn't move.

Pals on an expedition are unavailable until they return, so the ideal expedition roster is one you weren't using anyway — and as you'll see below, breeding leftovers are genuinely perfect for the job.

Every expedition site and its requirements

Eighteen sites: nine standard, nine hard-mode. Each standard site unlocks by defeating a tower boss; hard-mode variants require the same tower boss on Hard difficulty, and most only appear after the Feybreak tower is cleared. Full drop tables for every site are on the expeditions page.

Standard expeditions

Hard-mode expeditions

Notice no expedition ever requires Electric Pals, and only the two World Tree sites accept "any" Pals for their headcount. Every hard-mode site shares the same 1,600,000 recommended firepower except The World Tree's Forbidden Area at 2,100,000.

The firepower formula — what actually counts

A Pal's expedition firepower comes straight from BP_CharacterTeamMissionFunctions in the game files:

firepower = ( ⌊HP / 5⌋ + Ranged Attack + Defense ) × (1 + condensation stars)²

The implications are bigger than the formula looks:

• Condensation is everything. The star term is squared: a 4-star Pal's stat total is multiplied by 25 (on top of the +20% stats condensation already grants). A fully-built 4-star Pal has roughly 30× the firepower of the same Pal uncondensed. No other investment comes close.
• Passive skills are ignored. The calculation reads base stats only — a Legend/Vanguard-perfect Pal and a zero-passive breeding reject are identical here. Send the rejects; in fact, condensing four spare copies into a fifth is precisely what your breeding overflow is for.
• Melee attack is ignored — only the ranged (shot) attack stat counts.
• Souls are the second-biggest lever. Rank-20 Pal Souls on HP, Attack and Defense are roughly +60% firepower. Expeditions themselves are a top source of Large Pal Soul and Giant Pal Soul , so the system feeds itself.
• Levels matter, IVs and trust are polish. A level-60 Pal has about three-quarters of its level-80 firepower. Perfect 100 IVs add ~28% over 0 IVs; max trust (rank 10) adds a few percent by mixing each species' hidden friendship stats into its base stats.

For scale: an uninvested level-80 Pal is worth ~3,000–5,000 firepower. The same species at level 80 with 4-star condensation, maxed souls, good IVs and full trust lands between ~150,000 (the weakest species in the game) and ~273,000 (the strongest). Even a fully-built Chikipi beats fifty uninvested legendaries.

The reward-rate curve and the 10× cap

The game divides your squad's total firepower by the site's recommended firepower and turns that ratio into a reward multiplier. Below 1× the recommended value it is simply linear — send half the firepower, get half the loot. Above it, rewards keep growing along a curve shipped in the game files (C_CharacterTeamMission_TimeRateByStrengthRate), up to a hard cap of 10× at 10× the recommended firepower. The curve is sub-linear in the middle — overshooting the recommendation pays off, but at a discount until you approach the cap:

On top of this, five Lab research nodes (Logging Operations 2 and Mining Operations 2 tiers) grant a combined +35% expedition rewards, applied multiplicatively — a capped run with full research reads 1,348% in game. Since the multiplier applies to every run forever, these nodes are among the most valuable in the Lab.

Because duration never changes, the only correct strategy is: always send enough firepower to cap the site, if you can spare it. On early sites that's trivial — Verdant Hollow's cap is 250,000 firepower, i.e. one or two fully-built endgame Pals. The World Tree's Forbidden Area caps at 21,000,000, which needs the full 100-Pal squad averaging 210,000 each — essentially a Palbox of maxed top-tier species. That is the true endgame of the expedition system.

The best expedition Pals

Ranked by firepower at full investment (level 80, 4-star condensation, 100 IVs, rank-20 souls, max trust), computed with the exact in-game formula. Base stats — not passives — are all that separates species, so the list is stable no matter how your copies rolled:

#	Pal	Elements	Max firepower
1	Astralym		273,375
2	Panthalus	water	236,025
3	Frostallion Noct	dark	206,450
4	Frostallion	ice	203,100
5	Paladius	neutral	202,475
6	Necromus	dark	202,475
7	Shaolong	dragon / water	201,550
8	Bastigor	ice	200,450
9	Shadowbeak	dark	198,100
10	Neptilius	water	197,650

Two standouts: Astralym is nearly 16% ahead of everything else thanks to an enormous HP pool, and Panthalus holds a comfortable second. But note how flat the rest of the field is — ranks 3 through 10 sit within ~4% of each other, and even the median species maxes out around 176,000. Which Pal you condense matters far less than that you condense it. Build whatever you have spare copies of first.

Meeting element requirements

Element quotas are pure headcount, so you have two valid approaches: pad the squad with 20 throwaway Pals of the element (they still add their small firepower), or — better long-term — build your condensed carries from each required element so the quota fills itself. The strongest species per required element, same fully-invested model as above:

Element	Required by	Best picks
Neutral	Rayne Syndicate Smuggling Warehouse	Paladius 202,475 Hartalis 197,200 Selyne 192,350
Grass	Secret Realm of the Forest, Free Pal Alliance Illicit Trading Post	Silvance 195,950 Dandilord 195,800 Ophydia 194,600
Fire	Blazing Cavern, Eternal Pyre's Forbidden Market	Eidrolon Ignis 194,450 Jormuntide Ignis 193,500 Blazamut Ryu 193,125
Ground	Hidden Sanctum of the Desert, PIDF Illegal Factory	Aegidron 195,775 Moldron Cryst 191,850 Anubis 191,000
Ice	Astral Frost Cavern, PAL Genetic Research Laboratory	Frostallion 203,100 Bastigor 200,450 Moldron Cryst 191,850
Water	Celestial Sakura Cavern, Moonflower's Secret Hideout	Panthalus 236,025 Shaolong 201,550 Neptilius 197,650
Dark	Dark Cave of Feybreak, Ancient Feybreak Ruins	Frostallion Noct 206,450 Necromus 202,475 Shadowbeak 198,100
Dragon	Sunreach Isle, Sunreach Dragon Husk	Shaolong 201,550 Jetragon 197,100 Aegidron 195,775

Dual-element Pals double-dip: Shaolong counts for both Water and Dragon quotas, Aegidron for Ground and Dragon, Moldron Cryst for Ice and Ground. A bench built around dual-types covers every site with fewer builds.

Optimization checklist

1. Research first. Unlock the five Logging 2 / Mining 2 Lab nodes with expedition reward bonuses — a permanent +35% on every run.
2. Condense a dedicated expedition crew. Every 4-star Pal is worth ~30 uncondensed copies of itself. Passives don't matter, so this is the one place your breeding rejects outperform their pedigree — feed spare copies into stars, not the wild.
3. Soul them up. +60% firepower at rank 20 across the three stats, funded by the Pal Souls expeditions drop anyway. Prioritize your highest-firepower carries.
4. Feed them Kinship Peaches. Kinship Peach from hard-mode runs raises trust, which quietly adds firepower — another self-feeding loop.
5. Always cap what you can cap. The timer is fixed, so anything less than the best multiplier you can field is loot left on the table. One maxed carry caps every Easy/Normal site by itself.
6. Send everything. Up to 100 Pals fit, and every warm body adds firepower toward the cap. Idle Palbox Pals earn nothing; the same Pals on an expedition earn relics.

What to farm where

• Pal Souls — Moonflower's Secret Hideout (hard Sakurajima) is the standout: 7–11 Large Pal Soul and 5–10 Giant Pal Soul per run before the multiplier.
• EXP books — every site drops Ancient Pal Manuscript , scaling from 5–7 at Verdant Hollow to 25–30 in every hard mode.
• Ancient tech materials — Ancient Civilization Parts from every standard site, and Ancient Civilization Core from Astral Frost Cavern onward; The World Tree's Forbidden Area drops 9–11 Parts plus 6–9 Cores in a single slot.
• Ancient Relics and Radiant Gems — exclusive to the two World Tree sites, which roll multiple relic and gem slots per run (up to Glistening Ancient Relic grade). A capped Forbidden Area run is the densest relic income in the game — see the Ancient Relics guide for what to do with them.
• Trust food — every hard-mode site guarantees a Kinship Peach (the Free Pal Alliance Illicit Trading Post gives 1–3).
• Oddities — Dog Coin from The World Tree's Forbidden Area, Paloxite from the standard World Tree site, top-grade spheres like Ancient Sphere from every hard mode, and region ores (Chromite, Soralite, Coralum Ore, Crude Oil) matched to each site's home region.

Full slot-by-slot drop tables for all eighteen sites — including the Bellanoir, Xenolord, Hartalis and Blazamut Ryu slab fragments — are on the expeditions page.