What the Egg Incubator Does

The Egg Incubator turns a Pal Egg into a pal. Place an egg in it, leave it alone, and it hatches on its own — no assigned worker, no power, no fuel. It's also the only incubator in the game that cares about temperature, which is the single thing new players get stuck on: an egg sitting in the wrong climate crawls, and the fix is heaters and coolers, not patience.

How to Build It

• It's a boss technology: 1 Ancient Technology Point at level 10, gated behind defeating the Grizzbolt tower boss. That's usually your very first Ancient Technology purchase, and it's worth it.
• Costs 10 Paldium Fragments, 5 Cloth, 30 Stone and 2 Ancient Civilization Parts.
• One egg at a time, no power draw, and no per-base build limit — so the standard early-game move is simply to build a row of them.

Temperature Is the Whole Mechanic

Under the hood, the basic Egg Incubator is the only one of the five that carries a temperature component — it actively compares the surrounding temperature against the egg's required temperature and works out the difference. Every later incubator drops that component entirely, which is exactly what their descriptions mean by "automatically maintains a suitable temperature".

An egg's element sets what it wants: a Scorching Egg needs heat, a Frozen Egg needs cold, and most others sit comfortably in a temperate base. You control the surrounding temperature with heat sources, each of which projects a fixed heat level over a fixed radius:

Two practical notes. The electric versions are worth far more than their +1 step suggests — double the heat level over four times the area, so one Electric Heater covers a whole incubator row where a Campfire barely reaches one machine. And heaters and coolers only work while a pal with the right suitability is actually assigned; an unstaffed Heater projects nothing.

The Incubator Ladder

There are five incubators, and they differ on three axes: how many eggs they hold, how fast they incubate, and whether they handle temperature for you. The incubation rate below is the per-second work value each machine applies from the game files:

The jump at the end is not a typo. The Ancient Hatchery incubates at 1,200 work per second against the base incubator's 1.0 — eggs are effectively instant — which is why it replaces an entire hatching room despite holding only one egg.

The other surprise is that the Large Incubator is slower per egg than the Electric Egg Incubator that precedes it. It wins anyway: three slots at 1.0/s beats one slot at 1.5/s, and it does it on zero power.

How Long Eggs Actually Take

Two things scale hatch time. The first is the egg itself — every Pal Egg exists in five tiers of increasing rarity (0 through 4), and the bigger ones take proportionally longer; you can spot the tier by weight, at 10, 10, 25, 25 and 50 respectively. The second is your world difficulty, which applies a flat multiplier through the PalEggDefaultHatchingTime setting: 0.5× on Easy, 1.0× on Normal, and 2.0× on Hard and Hardcore. That's a fourfold spread between the easiest and hardest presets, and on a custom world it's a slider you can set to anything you like.

The base per-tier duration isn't published in the exported data tables — it's computed in the game's compiled code — so treat the incubator rates above as the reliable comparison and the difficulty multiplier as the other half of the equation.

Tips

• Build several immediately. At 1 Ancient Technology Point and one egg apiece, the early game is won by parallelism, not speed. Six basic incubators out-hatch anything you'll own for the next 25 levels.
• Put them all inside one Electric Heater's radius. 30 m of +2 heat covers a large hatchery, and it's far less fiddly than scattering campfires.
• Keep a cold corner too. Frozen Eggs want the opposite treatment, and a base that's globally hot will stall them. A Cooler on the far side of the base, out of the heater's radius, handles it.
• Skip straight to the Large Incubator if you're close to level 48. It needs no power and no temperature management, and three slots makes it the biggest single throughput jump in the ladder.
• Eggs come from more than breeding. Wild eggs are scattered across the map and hatch the same way — the incubator is worth building well before you unlock the Breeding Farm at level 19.