Palworld Base Raids Guide: Every Raid Group, Timer, and Reward

Every so often Palworld flashes a red "Raid" banner and sends a mob of humans or wild Pals marching on your base. Almost everything about that moment is written in the game's data tables: the exact timers and probabilities behind the attack, which faction shows up in each biome, every wave's composition and levels, the gold the Negotiator demands to call it off, and the rewards for standing your ground. This guide walks through all of it — the wild and NPC raids, the level 80 PIDF squad that comes for counterfeiters, and how to defend against every one of them.

How raids trigger: the exact timers

The invasion system is driven by a handful of constants in the game's settings blueprint, and they answer most of the questions players argue about:

• Raids cannot happen before player level 6. The files gate the whole system behind InvadeOccurablePlayerLevel = 6, which is why your first days are always quiet.
• The game checks for a raid every 2 minutes and starts one at an 80% probability when the check passes — but a fresh raid can never begin within 60 minutes of the previous one. In practice that means roughly one raid per hour of play at a raidable base.
• You get warned before it starts. A raid is declared about 5 minutes ahead of the attack — that is the "Someone is plotting a raid against your base…" message, the countdown on the map, and the window in which the Negotiator can appear.
• Attackers spawn 50–150 meters from your Palbox and march in on foot. If you ignore them, they give up and walk away after 5 minutes — the "The enemy has left…" log line.
• Water is a hard wall. The pathfinder rejects any approach that would cross more than 10 meters of water in one stretch, or 20 meters in total. This is the data behind the classic advice that island and cliff-top bases never see ground raids: the march simply cannot path to you, so the group despawns. Only one raid can run at a time across your guild's bases, too — the game logs "Another raid is already commencing at another guild base" and skips.
• Raids are optional. The "Enable Raid Events" world setting turns the whole system off — if you have never seen a raid, check that setting and your base's terrain before assuming anything is broken.

Raid difficulty: the five grade tiers

Internally every raid group is filed under an "invade grade" band. The grade is derived from your level with a −3 offset in the files, so the bands translate roughly to the player levels below. Each tier fixes the group's composition, enemy levels, wave count, and the XP paid for wiping it — the same five-tier ladder in every biome:

Note the asymmetry: NPC raids cap out at three waves, but wild Pal herds keep growing — a tier 5 monster raid is five waves deep. Each wave is defined as its own marching group, so a big raid arrives in stages rather than as one blob.

Enemy levels inside a tier are fixed per biome and do not scale with you beyond the tier selection — which is why raids feel dangerous exactly once per tier and trivial just before you cross into the next band. The biome tables below list the real numbers.

The Negotiator: paying a raid off

Sometimes the raid warning comes with a visitor. The Negotiator is a special NPC in the visitor table who spawns alongside a raid declaration and offers to make the problem disappear: "This place is just hours away from being hit by some real nasty types. But if you pay up, I can sort it out for you… Fair deal, right? Cheaper than bloodshed, anyway."

The price is not flavor text — it is a data table (DT_PalInvaderCancelCost, wired into the invader manager) with one row per invade grade:

Given that a tier 5 raid pays a Training Crystal and 200–300 Dog Coins for winning, paying 40,000 gold to skip it is almost never worth it — the Negotiator is an out for when a raid lands at the worst possible moment, not an economy play.

Rewards for repelling a raid

Beating a raid pays out from a dedicated reward table. Interestingly, all 76 reward rows in it collapse into just five payouts — the reward depends only on the raid's tier, never on who attacked. Every item below is a guaranteed 100% drop:

The tier 5 payout is the sleeper here: 200–300 Dog Coins per raid is one of the best repeatable Dog Coin sources in the game, and the stacks of Training Manuals at every tier make raids a respectable XP battery for benched Pals. High-level bases should want to get raided.

Who attacks you, biome by biome

The attacker roster depends on which of eight biomes your base sits in — each biome has its own NPC faction and its own wild Pal herds, split into the five tiers above. NPC and monster raids are equally weighted, so over time you see both. One important quirk the tables make obvious: each faction's levels are fixed per biome, and the later factions do not bother with low-level squads. Grassland Syndicate patrols start at level 10, but Feybreak warriors are level 50 and Sunreach's Azure Covenant enforcers are level 60 even in the tier 1 raid — building early in an endgame biome means eating endgame raids.

Biome assignment comes from trigger volumes baked into the world, not from a clean data table, so the "where" notes below are practical rather than exhaustive. If your raids look wrong for your surroundings, you are probably sitting on a biome boundary.

Grassland — Rayne Syndicate

The grassy plains most players build their first base on — the starting plateau and the low meadows around it.

Yes, the infamous nine-Lovander wave is real — it is wave 2 of the grassland's tier 5 herd, straight from the data table.

Forest — Free Pal Alliance

The wooded regions of the main islands.

The forest herds bring an Elizabee with a growing Beegarde escort — up to nine at tier 5. Beegarde self-destruct when hurt, so keep them away from your buildings and do not let base Pals melee them.

Volcano — Brothers of the Eternal Pyre

Mount Obsidian and the scorched southwest.

Desert — Rayne Syndicate

The northeastern deserts. Same Syndicate raid tiers as the grassland, but the wild herds are desert species.

Snow — PAL Genetic Research Unit

The snowfields and frozen peaks in the north.

From tier 3 the snow herds include a Xenogard-led Xenovader pack — the only place the invasion tables use the alien species outside their Feybreak home turf.

Sakurajima — Moonflowers

Sakurajima Island.

Feybreak — Feybreak warband

Feybreak Island.

Sky Islands — Azure Covenant

The Sunreach sky islands added in v1.0.

The Azure Covenant runs the strangest raids in the game: every tier is the same single enforcer type, just more of them at higher levels — up to a dozen level 70 riflewomen. The "Test of the Covenant" names suggest they are less an attack than an exam.

The PIDF raid: Counterfeit Investigations

One raid group plays by different rules. "Counterfeit Investigations" is a PIDF strike team defined for every biome, valid at every grade from 1 to 80 — and each of its wave rows carries a build-object condition the normal groups never use: it can only trigger against a base that has built the Gold Coin Assembly Line . Mint your own gold and the island's police force starts treating your base as a counterfeiting operation.

It is also weighted at 100 versus 1.0 for every ordinary group, so once you build the mint, the PIDF dominates the raid lottery — and the squad does not scale down. All three waves arrive at level 80, most of them with a combat Pal at their side, regardless of your own level:

Repelling it pays the full tier 5 reward — the Training Crystal , 200–300 Dog Coins and bait — plus 106,470 XP, every time, even if you are level 20. For an endgame guild that is a farm; for anyone else it is a very good reason to put the mint in a side base you do not care about, or on an island the water-path rule protects.

Defending your base

• Terrain beats turrets. Raiders spawn 50–150 m out and must walk in, and the pathfinder gives up over 10 m of continuous water (20 m total). A base on an island, a mesa, or behind a moat never meets a ground raid at all — the attackers spawn, fail to path, and leave. You still get the raid rewards screen only if you actually fight, so pure safety costs you the Dog Coin income.
• Ring the approach, not the base. Wooden , stone and metal defensive walls funnel the march into a killbox; a Sandbag gives you a firing position over it.
• Man the emplacements. The Mounted Crossbow , Mounted Machine Gun and Mounted Missile Launcher are player-operated; the Ancient Turret fires on its own and is the backbone of an AFK-proof perimeter.
• Ring the bell. The Alarm Bell switches every base Pal between "attack invaders" and "keep working" — flip it when the declaration appears, not when the shooting starts. Pals with strong combat stats make the difference; our Pal Builder can tell you what your defenders actually hit for.
• Mind the collateral. Raiders attack structures as well as Pals, and the rocket, missile and grenade-launcher troops of the tier 4–5 squads chew through wooden buildings. Stone up before the level 42 squads start arriving, and repair through the Alarm Bell's work mode afterwards.

One last distinction. The summonable raid bosses — Bellanoir, Blazamut Ryu, Xenolord, Moon Lord, and Hartalis — are not part of the invasion system at all: you invite them to your base yourself with a slab at a Summoning Altar, and they play by entirely different rules, from guaranteed Ultra slab drops to a victory egg with a 10% Alpha chance. They have a guide of their own: the raid bosses guide.