Every Alpha Pal in Palworld pays a bounty. The first time you defeat — or catch — one, a Bounty Token bearing its name lands in your key items — and although the game never tells you this, 99 of the 102 tokens each carry a hidden, permanent buff that boosts one element's attack damage for every Pal in your party. Collect them all and your Pals quietly gain +153% attack damage spread across all nine elements. This guide decodes the exact buff on every token straight from the game files, lists every boss with its level and location, and covers the three special tokens that unlock the World Tree's Sealed Sanctum.

Not what you were looking for? The Successful Bounty Token — the currency from hunting wanted criminals — is a different item entirely; see our bounty hunting guide for that one.

How bounty tokens work

Beat a boss-grade Pal for the first time — a capture counts just as well as a kill — and its bounty token goes straight into the Key Items tab of your inventory, with no repeat rewards for later encounters. Tokens are key items: they can't be sold, dropped, or traded, and they never leave your inventory again. Each one's description reads the same way — "Proof of defeating [Chillet, Dancer on the Steppe]. Simply possessing it permanently increases the stats of the Pals in your team." — and that vague second sentence is all the game ever says about what a token does.

The reward is tied to the species' boss form, not to one spot on the map. Species that appear both as a map alpha and as a dungeon boss pay the same token either way — whichever version you beat first completes that bounty. Only actual boss encounters count: wild Pals, base raids, and caught Alphas hatched from mutated eggs award nothing.

The hidden buff, decoded

Under the hood, every regular bounty token is wired to a hidden passive skill that is flagged invisible — it never appears on a stat screen, a buff bar, or the token's own description. The game files spell out exactly what each one does: a permanent +1%, +2%, or +3% attack damage for a single element, applied to the Pals in your party. The buff is always active anywhere in the world, it applies to every Pal you bring along, and because tokens can never be lost, it is effectively a permanent account upgrade for that save. Your own weapons don't benefit — the effect targets your Pals only.

Fully cleared, the bounty board is worth a party-wide +153% attack, split like this:

The boost an individual token grants loosely tracks how hard its boss is — most low-level alphas pay +1%, while legendaries like Jetragon pay +3% — but the correlation is loose enough to produce real outliers. The single cheapest +3% in the game is Foxparks Cryst, a level 15 alpha anyone can beat in the first hours.

Every bounty token by element

All 99 buff-granting tokens, grouped by the element they boost and sorted by buff size. "Alpha Pal" means a marked boss on the world map; World Tree bosses require the endgame area added in Palworld's 1.0 release. Click any Pal for its full page, including exact spawn locations.

Neutral — 8 tokens, +12% total

Fire — 11 tokens, +20% total

Water — 7 tokens, +12% total

Grass — 14 tokens, +22% total

Electric — 11 tokens, +14% total

Ground — 12 tokens, +16% total

Ice — 11 tokens, +22% total

Dragon — 8 tokens, +15% total

Dark — 17 tokens, +20% total

The three World Tree keys

Three items in the bounty token family grant no buff at all — because they aren't trophies, they're keys. Each one is the first-defeat reward of a level 78 boss inside the World Tree, and together they "remove the barrier of the Sealed Sanctum located in the deepest part of the World Tree", where Astralym waits at level 80:

The "Highly Modified Pals" key comes from the World Tree's boss rush arena, fronted by a modified Grizzbolt — the rest of its rotating roster of souped-up tower Pals awards nothing extra.

Which tokens to hunt first

• Foxparks Cryst (Lv 15) — +3% Ice. The best value on the entire board: a starting-area alpha with the biggest buff in the game. Grab it the moment you can win the fight.
• Every low-level alpha on your travels. Chillet, Sweepa, and Gumoss are level 11; Dumud, Foxcicle, Penking, and Arsox are under 16. Each one is a permanent +1% you'll never have to think about again, and first defeats also pay a chunk of bonus XP and Ancient Technology Points.
• Match your attacker's element. Building around a Fire attacker? The Fire board totals +20%, and just three bosses — Suzaku (Lv 45), Blazamut (Lv 52), and Whalaska Ignis (Lv 74) — cover +9% of it. Ice and Grass have the biggest full-collection totals at +22%.
• The legendaries. Jetragon and Frostallion each pay +3%, and Paladius pays +3% Neutral — fights you'll want to win anyway for the catch.
• The World Tree sweep. The endgame area holds eight buff tokens (including Aegidron's +3% Dragon) plus all three Sealed Sanctum keys — one deliberate circuit finishes the collection.

Bosses that don't pay a bounty

Not every first victory mints a token. The game files leave the reward field empty for:

• Tower bosses. Zoe & Grizzbolt, Marcus & Faleris, Saya & Selyne, and every other tower pair award Ancient Technology Points, never a token — Grizzbolt's token comes from its level 30 alpha spawn instead.
• Raid bosses. Bellanoir, Xenolord, and the other summoned raids in all their variants.
• The two unbreedable world bosses. Panthalus (Lv 70) and Astralym (Lv 80) — the Sealed Sanctum's final boss guards the keys' reward itself and still pays nothing for the win.
• Necromus . The strangest omission: the legendary pair spawns together at the level 60 desert arena, but only Paladius has a bounty on its head — Necromus fights right beside it and pays nothing for the win.
• Ordinary dungeon bosses. Plenty of dungeon-boss species (think low-level Melpaca or Fuack alphas) have no token item at all — the 102 tokens above are the complete list of bosses that pay.

Oddities from the game files

• A hidden alpha with no map marker. Pierdon Cryst's token comes from a level 69 field boss spawner in the Sunreach sky islands that the in-game map simply never shows — the spawner exists in the wild-spawner table but has no entry in the boss-marker table. If you're missing exactly one token, it's probably this one.
• Eight subspecies bosses share their base form's token. Petallia Ignis, Smokie Cryst, Univolt Cryst, Beakon Cryst, Sibelyx Primo, Knocklem Ignis, Nitemary Botan, and Starryon Primo all point their first-defeat reward at the base Pal's token — so a lucky variant encounter still completes the regular bounty, and no token exists for the variant itself.
• Penking's typo. Every token description brackets its boss title — "[Chillet, Dancer on the Steppe]" — except Penking's, which is missing its opening bracket in the English game files.
• A quest tracks your hunt. The journal quest "Request from a Veteran Hunter" ("Defeat {TargetNumber} bosses") is wired to the same first-defeat counter that hands out the tokens.
• Rarity is just for show. Token rarity colors only roughly follow the buff: Frostallion Noct's legendary-rarity token pays a humble +1% Dark, while Caprity Noct's common-rarity token pays +2% Grass.