Active Skills
Active Skills are combat abilities used by Pals in Palworld. They are a Pal’s primary means of attacking enemies, activating special effects, and influencing the flow of battle.
Unlike Passive Skills, which provide constant bonuses, Active Skills must be triggered either automatically by the Pal or manually by the player while mounted. Each skill is governed by cooldown time (CT), timing, positioning, and elemental properties, all of which play a major role in combat effectiveness.
Pals will use their Active Skills autonomously when unmounted, selecting abilities as they become available. When riding a Pal, the player can directly activate these skills, enabling precise control and tactical decision-making. Each Pal can have up to three Active Skills equipped at once, chosen from the full set of skills it has learned, and these can be swapped freely via the Party menu or a Palbox.
Active Skills vary widely in behavior, ranging from fast, low-cooldown attacks to slower, high-impact abilities that can dominate encounters when used effectively.
Active Skill Lists
For comprehensive listings of Active Skills, including filtering by various criteria, see the following pages:
Learning Active Skills
Pals acquire Active Skills in three primary ways:
- Leveling up – Each Pal naturally learns a predefined set of skills as it gains levels.
- Skill Fruits – Special items found growing on trees throughout the world. Consuming a Skill Fruit permanently teaches the contained skill to a Pal.
- Breeding – Offspring may inherit Active Skills from their parents, allowing certain skills to be obtained earlier or on Pals that do not normally learn them through leveling.
A Pal may learn many Active Skills over time, but can only equip three at once. Each skill can only be learned once per Pal.
Using Active Skills
Active Skills behave differently depending on whether the Pal is mounted:
- Unmounted – The Pal automatically selects skills based on availability and cooldowns.
- Mounted – The player manually triggers skills, allowing for deliberate combos, positioning, and timing.
Each skill has a Cooldown Time (CT), which determines how long must pass before it can be used again. Cooldowns play a major role in combat strategy, especially when combining fast, low-CT skills with slower, high-impact ones.
Skill Properties
Every Active Skill has several defining attributes:
- Cooldown Time (CT) – How often the skill can be used.
- Power – A base measure of the skill’s damage potential.
- Element – Determines elemental effectiveness against enemies.
- Behavior – Includes range, area of effect, movement, wind-up time, and special effects.
While higher-CT skills often deal more damage per use, they are not always superior. Skills with short cooldowns can outperform heavier attacks over time, especially when factoring in animation length and downtime.
Strategy Considerations
Optimizing Active Skills is less about raw power and more about how skills interact with cooldowns, usage time, and elemental coverage.
In general, skills with longer cooldown times (CT) tend to deal more damage per use, but this does not always result in higher overall damage. In practice, combining high-impact skills with faster, low-CT abilities often yields better results than relying on either approach alone.
- For example, a Pal repeatedly using a high-power, long-CT skill such as Beam Comet may deal significant damage per hit, but a faster skill like Wind Cutter can often be used many more times in the same period, resulting in higher total damage over the course of a fight.
When unmounted, Pals will typically prioritize using their highest-CT skills first, then fall back to lower-CT skills while waiting for stronger abilities to recharge. When mounted, players can deliberately control this flow, allowing precise timing and more efficient skill rotations.
In addition to cooldowns, the amount of time a Pal is committed to a skill is an important factor. Some Active Skills have long wind-up or recovery animations during which the Pal cannot move or use other abilities. In these cases, repeatedly using shorter, faster skills may outperform a single powerful attack when measured over the same time span.
Elemental composition is another key consideration. Equipping a Pal with multiple skills of the same element can be effective in certain situations, but it may also severely limit performance against enemies resistant to that element. A Pal using only Electric-element skills, for instance, will struggle against an Electric-resistant foe such as an Alpha 
Anubis. Mixing elements allows a Pal to adapt to a wider range of encounters, including boss and raid battles.
Ultimately, effective use of Active Skills depends on balancing cooldowns, cast times, and elemental coverage rather than selecting the highest-power abilities alone.
Recommended Skills
This guide is courtesy of Chapapote.
Quick Skills
With the way active skills are designed in Palworld, in general the lower a moves CD value is, the higher DPS it provides, so its no surprise that the quickest moves with 2 second CD have the highest DPS. So IMO every pal should have one of these moves although they are not all created equal. Here's my evaluation of the currently available quick moves.
Godly Tier:
- Dark Cannon - 20 more dmg then other skills with same CD and has a small AoE
Good Tier:
- Wind Cutter - Small AoE
- Air Cannon - Can Pierce through Pals
Average Tier:
- Poison Blast
- Dragon Cannon
- Ignis Blast
- Hydro Jet
Below Average Tier:
- Bog Blast - Ground doesn't get 2-second CD skill, so this is best, at 4 seconds
Ignore Tier:
- Ice Missile - Long cast time and less DPS
- Spark Blast - Long cast time and less DPS
Powerful Skills
Things get a lot more interesting when we look at the other active skills. This list doesn't include exclusive skills other then a few that were already on the Pal's i was testing skills with.
There were 2 main things I was looking for when testing Active Skills:
- Any hidden Power multipliers
- How long it took the cast. I measured how long until I was able to move again while mounted. There's a few Skills where I was able to move before the skill finished casting.
One thing I noticed that hasn't been mentioned when talking about skills is the dmg loss while casting the skill. Most skills take around 3 seconds to cast with some being as high as 7. During that cast time you could be spamming your OP quick move instead. With Serenity + Impatient its just over a second per an attack, so while casting that 55 dmg move with 10CT (or 5.5dps) you may have missed out on casting your quick attack 3 times for 90 dmg. I referred to this as adjusted DPS and used the standard 30 power 2CT moves to adjust an Active Skills DPS value.
SSS - Higher DPS than Quick Skills:
- Curtain Splash - Water
- Holy Burst - Neutral
- Blast Cannon - Dragon
- Lightning Streak - Lightning
- Air Blade - Neutral
- Seed Mine - Grass
SS - Similar DMG Potential to SSS, but more RNG:
- Star Mine - Neutral
- Thunder Rain - Lightning
- Beam Slicer - Dragon
- Rockburst - Ground
A+ - Best of the non-OP skills:
- Multicutter - Grass
- Blizzard Spike - Ice
- Ignis Rage - Fire
- Apocalypse - Dark
A - Good DMG Potential, but more RNG:
- Splash - Water
- Thunderstorm - Lightning
B - Good filler moves
- Acid Rain - Water
- Fire Wall - Fire
- Diamond Rain - Ice
- Icicle Cutter - Ice
C - Better than nothing
- Iceberg - Ice
- Sand Twister - Ground
- Grass Tornado - Grass
- Shadow Burst - Dark
- Dragon Burst - Dragon
- Fire Ball - Fire
- Circle Vine - Grass
- Solar Blast - Grass
- Rock Lance - Ground
- Trispark - Lightning
- Pal Blast - Neutral
D - Anything below this point is either neutral or a loss of DPS in Serenity Builds
- Spirit Flame - Dark
- Electric Ball - Lightning
- Dark Laser - Dark
- Stone Cannon - Ground
- Spirit Fire - Fire
- Dark Arrow - Dark
- Comet Strike - Dragon
- Ice Breath - Ice
- Volcanic Rain - Fire
- Nightmare Ball - Dark
- Aqua Burst - Water
- Power Shot - Neutral
E - Barely Worth Casting
- Flare Storm - Fire
- Flare Arrow - Fire
- Hydro Laser - Water
- Lightning Bolt - Lightning
- Sand Tornado - Ground
- Ignis Breath - Fire
- Lightning Strike - Lightning
- Power Bomb - Neutral
- Dragon Breath - Dragon
- Tri-Lightning - Lightning
- Icicle Line - Ice
- Spine Vine - Grass
- Plasma Funnel - Lightning
- Dark Ball - Dark
F - You're losing DPS by using these
- Dragon Meteor - Dragon
- Umbral Surge - Dark
- Seed Machine Gun - Grass
- Lock-on Laser - Lightning
- Bubble Blast - Water
- Stone Blast - Ground
References