Can you capture humans in Palworld?

Despite its earliest comparisons to Pokemon, practical experience has shown that Palworld is, broadly, way more similar to ARK: Survival Evolved and other survival sandbox titles than it might seem at a glance. This includes the game’s eagerness to allow players to do whatever, including engaging in slavery.

Indeed, capturing dozens (if not hundreds) of magical creatures to do your bidding is iffy when taken out of context, but the funny thing is that Palworld doesn’t stop there, either. Not only can you put all those creatures to work making guns in a Factorio-esque manufactory, but you can also add actual, veritable human NPCs to their ranks, too.

Capturing human NPCs

Unlike Pokemon, which does its absolute best to avoid dubious fridge horror and whatnot, Palworld is more than happy to let you capture anyone and anything, if you want to. To that end, if you ever end up coming across a human trader NPC, you can capture them just as you would any other Pal.

Are humans Pals? Are Pals… humans? What’s the relationship between the two types of creatures in Palworld? We don’t know, and Palworld sure as heck doesn’t care enough to even bother explaining. Instead, you can go wild. In fact, if you’re “lucky,” you may even end up capturing the very cops that come running when you break the law in Palworld.

Now, we don’t know just yet whether this is an official feature, a bug, or just a strange interaction between the game’s many complicated gameplay systems. One thing that suggests the ability to capture humans is a bug, for example, is that there’s no capture chance UI when you aim a Palsphere at them. Still, until the developer itself chimes in, we just don’t know if this is intended.

Should you capture humans in Palworld?

Now that we’ve established the fact that you can catch humans in Palworld, the question that remains is whether you should even be attempting to do so in the first place. The answer is a tentative ‘yes,’ though you should only really try to capture trader NPCs to have ready access to them whenever needed.

The odds of you catching a human are extremely slim, note. Expect to spend plenty of Palspheres on any given human NPC you might be trying to catch, in other words. Further, armed human NPCs, such as the PIDF combatants, only appear to be using their firearms to bludgeon their enemies into submission. Worse yet, humans don’t get any of the regular Pals’ special passive abilities, and they cannot be equipped with custom weaponry either.

As this is Palworld we’re talking about, it’s important to note two other things about captured humans: you cannot use them as mounts, and we’re extremely thankful for the fact that they are excluded from the game’s Pal fusion systems.