Best Research to Rush at the Pal Labor Research Lab
Updated 2026-07-24
The Pal Labor Research Lab hides some of the biggest permanent buffs in the game behind 168 projects, and picking blind wastes months of Pal work-hours. The data gives a clear answer on what to rush: one line makes every other line faster, one project is almost free, and the rest depends on how you actually play. Full costs for everything live on the research database — this is the strategy layer.
Rush These First, Whatever Your Playstyle
Two openers stand out from the entire table. Cooling Storage Lv1 is the cheapest project in the whole system — a tiny 5K workload and a handful of Ice Organs for 10% slower food spoilage, pure profit for any base. And the Research Speed lines are the compounding pick: sixteen tiers that stack to a massive +160% research speed, which discounts every single project you run afterward. Rushing speed before substance feels wrong and is mathematically right:
| Project | Workload | Cost | Effect |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cooling Storage Lv1 | 5K | 30 Ice Organ, 5 Ancient Pal Manuscripts | 10% slower food spoilage |
| Cooling Research Tips Lv1 | 15K | 50 Ice Organ, 5 Swee Hair, 7 Manuscripts | +10% research speed |
| Incubation Acceleration Lv1 | 15K | 50 Ice Organ, 5 Swee Hair, 20 Ingots | +5% egg hatching speed |
Notice the pattern in the costs: Ice Organs and Ancient Pal Manuscripts gate the early lab. A Foxcicle farming route and a manuscript stockpile keep the queue moving — and the drop-booster crew doubles the organ hauls.
The Best Line for Each Kind of Player
After the openers, the lines diverge by playstyle, and the totals say which are worth finishing:
| If You Mostly… | Rush This Line | Full-Line Payoff |
|---|---|---|
| Breed Pals | Egg Hatching (8 tiers) | +60% hatching speed |
| Craft gear | Material Saving (9 tiers) | Up to 65% fewer materials consumed |
| Run expeditions | Expedition Rewards + Speed (5 each) | +35% rewards, 35% faster trips |
| Farm crops | Crop Yield + Growth (5 each) | +50% harvest, faster growth |
| Fight base raids | Base Attack line (18 tiers) | Stacked combat rates for base workers |
| Mass-produce | Bonus-output lines (spheres, ammo, ingots, ore, food) | Extra items per craft, free |
The Material Saving line deserves a special call-out — 65% fewer materials on weapon, armor, and gear crafts effectively multiplies every stockpile you own, and it pairs absurdly well with the weapon and armor upgrade paths' expensive late tiers. Breeders get the same story from Egg Hatching plus the Special Cake loop.
The Core Nodes and the Tech Unlocks
Sixty-nine projects carry a core flag — they're the trunk of each line, gating the tiers behind them, so a line's flagged entries are never skippable on the way up. The ten Technology Unlock projects are different from everything else: they grant no percentage at all, just new recipes (the Snowman is the famous first one) — grab them when you want the toy, not as part of any rush. Deep tiers escalate hard: the top Handiwork tier alone is a 10M workload wanting 30 Computers and 70 Ancient Pal Manuscripts, so the endgame lab wants the same Ancient Parts pipeline as everything else at that stage.