Why your Pals are depressed, sick, or won't work — and how to fix it
A SAN stat drops every time a Pal works, and low SAN turns into sickness, refusal to work, or full Depression — beds, food, and a Hot Spring are what bring it back up.
Contents
Your Pals are depressed because their SAN (sanity) stat has been draining while they work, and nothing at your base has been putting it back. Below a certain point they start slacking off or getting sick; if it stays low long enough, they develop the Depression status outright. The fix is the same three things every time — a bed, food, and a Hot Spring — but which one you're missing depends on what your base actually looks like.
What drains SAN in the first place
SAN goes down simply from working. Every task a Pal does at a base costs sanity, and how fast depends on the job and on the work intensity you've set at the Monitoring Stand — a stricter setting burns through SAN faster than a relaxed one. Hunger makes it worse on top of that: a Pal that isn't getting fed loses SAN more easily than one that's full, so a base with an empty Feed Box is bleeding sanity on two fronts at once, not one. Sleeping without an actual bed also drains SAN instead of restoring it — a Pal left to nap on the ground is losing sanity in what should be its recovery time.
None of this is about temperature or a specific "too many chores" cap; it's simply throughput. A Pal assigned to constant, high-intensity work with nothing recovering it in between will always trend toward zero, no matter how well-fed your base looks on the surface.
The symptoms, in order
Low SAN doesn't jump straight to the worst outcome — it escalates:
| SAN state | What you'll see |
|---|---|
| Dropping, still moderate | Pal takes occasional breaks on its own to claw a little sanity back |
| Low | Pal may get sick or injured mid-task, or simply refuse to work |
| Low for a long stretch | Depression sets in: Work Speed −20, Movement Speed −10 |
| Bottomed out | The Pal enters a "Rioting" state |
Depression is the one that actually shows up as a status ailment, and it's rarely the first thing you notice — you usually catch a Pal slacking off long before it. Sickness and the milder physical afflictions (a sprain, an ulcer) that show up alongside low SAN are treated separately, with Low Grade, standard, or High Grade Medical Supplies depending on severity — that clears the ailment itself, but it doesn't refill SAN, which is why a Pal you just medicated can slide right back into the same state if nothing else changes.
The cure: bed, food, Hot Spring
Three things raise SAN back up, and a base missing any one of them will keep producing depressed Pals no matter how well the other two are handled:
- A bed of its own. Pals recover SAN sleeping in a bed, and higher-quality beds recover more of it — but they don't share: put fewer beds down than you have Pals, and some of them are sleeping on the ground every night, which drains SAN instead of restoring it. Straw Pal Beds are the entry point; better tiers exist as you climb the tech tree.
- A stocked Feed Box. An empty one means Pals go hungry, which accelerates SAN loss on its own — so the fix for a chronically low-SAN base is often as basic as checking whether the Feed Box ran out three days ago. Certain cooked dishes go further and actively slow SAN loss while a Pal works, which is worth knowing about if you're deep in a database of what each item does and wondering why one recipe keeps coming recommended for base builds.
- A Hot Spring. This is the dedicated recovery building, and Pals will head there on their own once SAN gets low enough, provided one exists and it's reachable. A High Quality Hot Spring recovers faster than the basic version.
On top of all three, upgrading the Monitoring Stand itself to its High Quality or Ancient tier reduces how much SAN working Pals lose in the first place — it doesn't replace rest, but it slows the bleed enough that the same number of beds and one Hot Spring go a lot further.
Why a bigger base makes the same problem worse
Scaling up doesn't create a new mechanic — it just multiplies the existing one. The number of Pals a base can put to work rises with the base's own level, climbing from a single worker at level 1 toward roughly thirty at level 30 and beyond. Add Pals faster than you add beds and Hot Springs, and you haven't changed how SAN works — you've just put more Pals through the same recovery bottleneck. A base with ten workers and two beds behaves exactly like the one-Pal, no-bed case, ten times over: most of the roster is sleeping on the ground or standing in a queue for the one Hot Spring while its SAN keeps dropping in the meantime.
The practical order to check, in a base full of sluggish or sick Pals: count beds against Pal count first, then check the Feed Box, then confirm a Hot Spring actually exists and is reachable, and only then look at whether the Monitoring Stand's work intensity is set stricter than the base can sustain. If you're assigning Pals by hand rather than letting them self-select tasks, it's also worth matching Work Speed-boosting passives to the jobs that need them — which is the same trait pool covered in how Palworld breeding actually works if you're building a roster for it rather than just catching whatever wanders by.