If you’ve spent any time moving past Palworld’s early game of basic stone tools and wooden bases, you’ve probably run into a roadblock when you try to build your first fast travel pad or advanced workstation. A lot of new players struggle to figure out how to make circuit board in Palworld, since it requires unlocking midgame tech and gathering resources that aren’t available near the starting spawn. This guide walks you through every step of the process, from unlocking the right recipes to setting up an efficient crafting loop that lets you stock up on as many as you need.
Resources You Need to Make Circuit Board in Palworld
Before you can start crafting, you’ll need to unlock the right tech and gather three core resources, plus access to a specialized workstation. You’ll unlock the circuit board recipe automatically when you hit level 35 and spend a technology point on the Production Assembly Line Mk II, so don’t waste points on unrelated midgame tech if you know you want to start building advanced gear soon.
Your required materials per circuit board are:
- 2 Refined Metal Ingots: Crafted by combining 2 iron ore and 2 coal in an improved furnace. You can find large coal deposits in the northern mountain biome, or smaller nodes scattered around the desert edge.
- 2 Plastic: Made by processing 1 crude oil in an oil refinery. Crude oil seeps are scattered all across the desert biome, and you can unlock the oil refinery at level 31.
- 1 Electric Organ: Dropped by electric-type Pals when you defeat or capture them. Low-level Sparkits spawn in large groups along the eastern edge of the starting plateau, so you don’t have to fight high-level electric Pals to farm this resource.
You can only craft circuit boards at the Production Assembly Line Mk II, so make sure you have enough space in your base for this large workstation before you gather all your materials. It takes up 4 tiles of floor space, and needs a direct connection to your base’s power grid to run.
Best Setup to Craft Circuit Boards Efficiently
You can make circuit boards one at a time if you only need a couple for a specific build, but if you want to stock up for a full base upgrade or fast travel network, you’ll want to set up a dedicated crafting outpost to cut down on travel time. The best spot for this outpost is on the border between the starting plateau and the desert, so you have easy access to iron ore, coal, and crude oil without long transport runs.
Assign Pals with matching work skills to each step of the process to speed up production as much as possible. Prioritize Pals with high handiwork skill for the assembly line, high mining skill for resource gathering, and high transporting skill to move materials between stations. You don’t need rare endgame Pals to make this work either—even common level 20 Pals with the right skills will cut your crafting time in half compared to using mismatched Pals.
Don’t mix other high-demand crafting jobs on the same assembly line, or your Pals will get distracted making other items when you need circuit boards. If you have space, build a separate assembly line for other midgame crafts so your circuit board production stays consistent even when you need to make other items for your base.
Common Mistakes to Avoid When Making Circuit Boards
Even if you have all the right resources, it’s easy to run into delays if you skip small steps that most new players miss. The most common mistake I see new players make is forgetting to unlock the Production Assembly Line Mk II first. You can get all the resources for circuit boards as early as level 30, but you can’t craft them until you hit 35 and unlock the workstation, so don’t waste time farming materials before you hit that level threshold.
Another common mistake is farming electric organs from high-level Grizzbolts or Raynees when low-level Sparkits drop the exact same item. Sparkits only spawn at level 10 to 15 along the eastern starting border, so you can farm 10 electric organs in 15 minutes without taking any significant damage to your character or Pals. You don’t even need to fight them if you have a strong enough Pal to send out to auto-battle while you gather nearby resources.
Always have 20% extra power capacity for your base if you’re running a Production Assembly Line Mk II. The workstation uses a lot of power, and if your generators get damaged during a raid or you add another powered station, your circuit board production will shut down entirely until you fix the power supply. Keep a couple extra wind turbines or coal generators running at all times to avoid this issue.
Don’t hoard all your circuit boards for small builds either. It’s better to do one big crafting run of 10 to 15 circuit boards at a time, instead of making one every time you need it for a new build. That way you don’t have to keep restarting your entire crafting loop every few hours, which saves you a ton of time in the long run.
Practical Uses for Circuit Boards in Your Palworld Playthrough
Once you have a steady supply of circuit boards, you’ll unlock almost all of Palworld’s most useful mid and endgame content. The most common use is for fast travel pads, which require 2 circuit boards each. If you want to set up pads across every biome on the map, you’ll need at least 20 circuit boards total to cover all the best spawn and resource locations. This cuts down on cross-map travel time from 20 minutes per trip to just a few seconds, which makes exploring way less tedious.
You’ll also need circuit boards to build advanced workstations like the weapon assembly line and the tech lab, which let you craft endgame guns, armor, and Pal gear. If you’re playing on a PvE server with base raids, you’ll need circuit boards to build auto turrets that protect your base from enemy Pals and raiders without you having to be online all the time. These turrets are especially useful if you keep rare breeding Pals in your base that you don’t want to lose to random raids.
If you play on a multiplayer server, circuit boards are one of the most valuable trading items you can make. Most new players can’t access the desert or unlock the required tech until they’re dozens of hours into their playthrough, so you can trade extra circuit boards for rare Pals, high-tier seeds, or rare resources you don’t want to farm yourself. I once traded 5 extra circuit boards for a perfect stat Anubis on my last multiplayer server, which saved me weeks of breeding for the right stats.
You can also use circuit boards to craft electric tools like the electric axe and pickaxe, which harvest resources three times faster than metal tools and never break as long as you have a supply of batteries. That alone makes the work of setting up a circuit board crafting loop worth it, since it cuts down your resource farming time by more than half.
Once you get the hang of how to make circuit board in Palworld, you’ll be able to move past the slow midgame grind and access all of the game’s most fun content way faster. You don’t need a perfect, fully upgraded base to start making them either—even a small outpost with a few Pals assigned to each step of the process will give you enough circuit boards to build all the gear and stations you need. I wasted three hours running around the northern mountains looking for crude oil my first time making circuit boards, so stick to the desert border for your first crafting run to avoid that same frustration.