Best Hoocrates and 4 Daedream Team, Passives, and Gear

The Hoocrates + 4 Daedream team is the cheapest damage stack in Palworld: four benched Daedream all shooting at whatever you're shooting, while Hoocrates stands out front pumping your gun. This guide covers how the stack works, the exact gear that enables it, where both Pals spawn, the breeding pairs that mass-produce them, and the passives worth chasing.

The Hoocrates and 4 Daedream Team

Your party has five slots but only one Pal out at a time — that's the rule the whole team is built to break. Daedream's partner skill, Dream Chaser, lets it fight from a bench slot once it's wearing its Necklace, so four of them attack without ever being summoned. That leaves the deployed slot free, and Hoocrates takes it purely for Dark Knowledge, a flat ranged Attack boost for you. Both Pals are rarity 1, both are catchable in the level 4–22 band, and neither costs anything rare to gear.

Slot	Pal	Why it's there
Deployed	Hoocrates	Dark Knowledge — up to +30% ranged Attack for you
Bench 1	Daedream	Dream Chaser — attacks from the party, 100 Melee Attack
Bench 2	Daedream	Second stream of Dark damage, no extra input
Bench 3	Daedream	Third stream — output scales linearly per copy
Bench 4	Daedream	Fourth stream, fills the last free slot

The point of the comp is that nothing in it competes for the same resource. Hoocrates' buff wants the deployed slot; the Daedreams want bench slots; your gun wants ammo. Compare that to a conventional party built around Solenne, whose up-to-80% Attack buff only pays out while every party member is a different species — four identical Daedream switch that off completely, which is exactly why this is its own team rather than a module you bolt onto the standard boss-killer comp.

Daedream's Necklace: The Item That Makes It Work

Dream Chaser does nothing until the Pal is wearing Daedream's Necklace, a piece of Pal Gear that keeps Daedream at your side and attacking while it sits in your team. One Necklace covers one Daedream, so a full stack needs four of them — and that's the whole barrier to entry. Four Necklaces cost 20 Leather, 40 Fiber, and 40 Paldium Fragment in total, which is a single evening of early-game gathering.

Material	Per Necklace	For all 4
Leather	5	20
Fiber	10	40
Paldium Fragment	10	40

Fiber is the one you'll notice, and there's a neat loop here: Hoocrates itself drops 5–10 Fiber every single kill at a 100% rate, so night-hunting the owls you're already farming pays for the collars. Leather comes off the herd Pals around any starting base, and Paldium Fragment is the blue rock you've been stepping over since minute one.

Hoocrates' Dark Knowledge Buff by Rank

Dark Knowledge boosts your Attack with ranged weapons while Hoocrates is the Pal you have out. Like every partner skill, the number scales with the Pal's star rank from the Pal Essence Condenser, and the jump from a fresh catch to a five-star is a doubling:

Ranking Hoocrates up is unusually painless because you're already catching them in bulk for Fiber — feed the duplicates to the condenser instead of the butcher and 5★ arrives on its own. Two nearby upgrades exist if you want more later: Nox runs the same style of ranged buff up to +40%, and Solenne tops out at +80% but demands the all-unique party this team can't give her. The full ladder is on the partner skills database, and the standouts are ranked in the best partner skills guide.

What You Need Before You Build It

How to Get Daedream

Daedream is a Dark-element Humanoid with 164 known spawn points, and every one of them is a night spawn — walk the same ground at noon and you'll find nothing. Its capture rate is 1.0, meaning no capture penalty at all, so early spheres land it reliably once you've chipped the health down. Three areas hold three quarters of the population between them:

Hill of Beginnings is the beach you wake up on, which is why this team is genuinely a day-two project — you can farm the whole stack in the starting zone. Open the Daedream spawn map to see all 164 pins plotted, and run the loop after dusk. Each kill also gives a guaranteed Venom Gland and a 1% shot at a Small Pal Soul, so the trips aren't wasted even when you already have four.

Breed Daedream Instead of Hunting It

Catching four is fine; breeding four with matching passives is better, and Daedream is one of the easiest Pals in the game to mass-produce. It breeds true — two Daedream make another Daedream — so once you own a pair with good traits, the pen prints copies that inherit them. If you don't have a pair yet, two Neutral starters do the job:

Parent A	Parent B	Notes
Daedream	Daedream	Breeds true — the passive-farming loop
Cattiva	Vixy	Both are starting-area commons
Cremis	Pupperai	Backup pair if you skipped the foxes
Daedream	Nox	Uses a Dark partner you may already own
Hoocrates	Cremis	Recycles spare Hoocrates from the Fiber runs

The Cattiva × Vixy pair is the one to remember — both are Neutral commons you trip over in the first zone, and neither needs a night trip. Once a good Daedream exists, switch to same-species pairing so the passives carry down instead of rerolling. The mechanics behind inheritance are laid out in the breeding guide, and the breeding calculator will check any pair you're curious about.

How to Get Hoocrates

Hoocrates is the other half and it's even more common — 263 spawn points, all nocturnal, spread wider than Daedream's. It has the same 1.0 capture rate and a slightly higher wild level ceiling at 22, plus 80 Defense, the sturdiest stat on either Pal. Its spawns are less concentrated, so no single area dominates the way Sea Breeze Coast does for Daedream:

Sea Breeze Archipelago Church is the convenient one — it sits in the same early region as the Daedream coast, so one night circuit can fill both halves of the team. The Hoocrates spawn map plots all 263 pins. If you'd rather breed it, Hoocrates also breeds true, and Chikipi × Mozzarina produces one from two of the tamest Pals on the island; Daedream × Clovee works too and keeps everything inside the Dark line.

Parent A	Parent B	Notes
Hoocrates	Hoocrates	Breeds true — best for stacking passives
Chikipi	Mozzarina	Two ranch Pals you likely already keep
Daedream	Clovee	Turns spare Daedream into the buffer
Depresso	Cremis	Alternative if you're short on ranch stock

Best Passives for the Daedream Stack

Four Daedream means every passive you breed in gets applied four times, which is where the comp goes from cute to genuinely strong. Daedream is pure Dark, so the element-boost passives are worth as much as the raw Attack ones — and unlike a mixed party, there's no wasted coverage here:

Musclehead is the sleeper pick. Its Work Speed penalty is what stops people running it on base Pals, but a combat Daedream that lives in your party permanently never touches a workbench, so the drawback costs you literally nothing. Aim for Demon God + Invader + Siren of the Void + Lord of the Underworld as the ceiling, and take Musclehead or Ferocious on the road there. Passive rolling is covered end to end in the min-maxing guide, and every passive in the game is listed on the passives database.

Daedream's Attack Skills by Level

Benched Daedream use their own move list, so what they learn matters as much as their stats. Dark Ball at level 1 is the workhorse — 50 power on a 2-second cooldown is the best sustained output on the list, and with four copies firing it, the low cooldown matters more than the big numbers:

Power and cooldown only make sense together: Dark Whisp's 600 power looks like the obvious keeper, but on a 30-second cooldown it lands less often than Dark Ball does in the same window. For a stack whose job is constant chip damage, keep at least one short-cooldown Dark move on every copy and let the heavy hitters fill the gaps. Skill Fruits can force the good ones on — the Dark Skill Fruit list shows which are farmable, and the active skills database has the full move table.

Ranged Weapons That Cash In the Buff

Dark Knowledge only reads ranged weapons, so a melee build wastes the deployed slot entirely. These are the ranged options you can realistically hold while the team is at its strongest. Attack numbers only compare within a weapon class — a single-shot Musket and a 20-round Assault Rifle deliver their damage completely differently:

Weapon	Class	Tech level	Attack
Old Bow	Bow	3	65
Crossbow	Crossbow	13	280
Musket	Assault Rifle	21	1,000
Makeshift Handgun	Handgun	24	320
Handgun	Handgun	28	250
Pump-Action Shotgun	Shotgun	43	220
Assault Rifle	Assault Rifle	45	320

The Crossbow at tech 13 is the sweet spot for this build's window — it arrives right when four Necklaces are affordable, and its ammo is cheap enough to fire all night. The Musket's 1,000 per shot is the biggest single number you can reach early, but the reload between shots means the Daedreams are doing most of the sustained work while you line up the next one. Where each class peaks later is mapped in the weapons-by-tech-level path and ranked in the guns tier list.

Other Pals That Fight From Your Party

Daedream isn't the only Pal with a tandem-attack collar — there are exactly three in the game, and the other two are straight upgrades in stats but much later unlocks. Once you're deep enough to catch them, a mixed bench is worth considering:

Pal	Element	Wild level	Melee / Shot	Collar cost
Daedream	Dark	4–16	100 / 75	5 Leather, 10 Fiber, 10 Paldium
Dazzi	Electric	30–40	110 / 80	15 Leather, 15 Fiber, 10 Ingot, 20 Paldium
Dazzi Noct	Dark / Electric	50–66	110 / 80	10 Leather, 30 Fiber, 10 Dark Fragment, 40 Paldium

Dazzi Noct is the best of the three on paper — 110 Melee Attack, 75 Defense, and dual Dark/Electric coverage — but it spawns at level 50–66 and its collar wants Dark Fragment, so it's an endgame swap rather than a replacement. The honest read: build the Daedream stack early because it costs nothing, then rotate benched slots to Dazzi and Dazzi Noct as you clear the map. Dazzi lives around Anubis Dunes (74 of its 140 spawn points, 52.9%) and Dazzi Noct clusters at Stone Pillar Cave Entrance (57 of 135, 42.2%).

Where the Team Falls Off

Being upfront about it: this is an early-to-mid game power spike, not an endgame answer. Daedream carries 70 HP and 60 Defense, the softest numbers in the comp, and benched Pals still take damage — against anything with area attacks you'll be re-summoning constantly. The bigger problem is elemental. Every Daedream move but one is Dark, and Dragon attacks hit Dark for 1.5× damage, so a Dragon boss shreds the whole bench at once while your four copies deal reduced damage back. Dark is only strong against Neutral, which is a narrow payoff.

The comp is also locked out of the biggest player buff in the game, since duplicate species disable Solenne's condition. When you get to towers and raids, switch to a role-diverse party from the team comps guide and use a counter-element mount instead. Until then, four Daedream and an owl will out-damage almost anything else you can assemble at that level for the same materials.

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