List of Dark Skill Fruits: Stats and How to Get Them

There are 12 Dark Skill Fruits in Palworld, and any Pal can eat any of them — element and level don't matter. This guide lists all 12 with the power, cooldown and damage per second of the skill they teach, the Battle Ticket prices, the drop chance out of every chest pool that carries them, and which Pals already learn the move for free.

All 12 Dark Skill Fruits

Palworld has 45 Dark attacks in total and only these 12 exist as fruit — the other 33 are level-up moves and signature attacks no merchant will ever sell you. Power runs from 30 up to 600 across the set. The standout is Dark Laser: at 450 power on a 20-second timer it is both the second-hardest single hit in the element and the best sustained damage of any Dark fruit, which almost never happens in one skill. The other thing to notice is the status column — Dark is the only element whose fruit set spreads across three different ailments instead of stamping the same one on everything.

Skill Fruit	Power	Cooldown	Damage/sec	Status (proc)	Rarity	Why bring it
Dark Whisp	600	30s	20.0	Blind (100%)	Rare	Biggest Dark hit in the game; the orb chases whatever you fired it at
Dark Laser	450	20s	22.5	Blind (100%)	Rare	Best damage over time in the element — charges up, then fires a beam
Apocalypse	400	20s	20.0	Blind (100%)	Rare	Drops vortexes on the target from 5,000 range — the long-reach heavy hitter
Nightmare Ball	300	16s	18.8	Blind (65%)	Uncommon	Big lobbed ball, but it needs 1,000 range before it will fire
Spirit Flame	200	12s	16.7	Burn (102%)	Common	Three homing orbs and the only Dark fruit that sets things on fire
Poison Shower	160	8s	20.0	Poison (100%)	Rare	Scatters poison orbs around the Pal; one of only two Poison fruits in the game
Dark Arrow	120	8s	15.0	Blind (102%)	Uncommon	Homing shot at 5,000 range that Blinds every single time it connects
Shadow Burst	80	4s	20.0	Blind (50%)	Common	300 range only, but it fires every four seconds and clears what's on top of you
Dark Cannon	70	4s	17.5	Blind (20%)	Common	Plain energy ball with 5,000 range — reliable filler between big casts
Umbral Surge	60	4s	15.0	Blind (35%)	Common	Fan of fast orbs that widens with distance; useless closer than 1,200 range
Dark Shot	40	2s	20.0	Blind (20%)	Common	Accelerating projectile — the best damage per second of the two-second fruits
Poison Blast	30	2s	15.0	Poison (100%)	Common	Weakest hit here, but it poisons on every cast from 5,000 range

All 12 share the same purple fruit art in your inventory, so you can't tell them apart at a glance — check the tooltip, or use the sortable Palworld Skill Fruit database to match a fruit to its move before you feed it to something.

Power, Cooldown, and What Dark Is Good For

Every Dark fruit skill is Shot class, which means it scales off the Pal's Shot Attack and completely ignores its Melee Attack — that one fact decides most of your picks further down this page. Element-wise, Dark is the counter to Neutral and there are 36 Neutral Pals to point it at, while Dragon is what shuts Dark down. That makes a Dark carrier a great answer to the game's biggest Neutral bruisers and a liability the moment a Dragon shows up, so don't build a mono-Dark team.

Range matters more here than in most elements, because the two biggest Dark hitters are surprisingly short-ranged. Dark Whisp stops at 1,500 and Dark Laser at 1,800, so both want your Pal in the fight. Apocalypse gives up 50 power against Dark Laser and reaches 5,000 in exchange — that is the pick for a boss that never lets you close. Watch the minimum ranges too: Nightmare Ball won't fire inside 1,000 and Umbral Surge won't fire inside 1,200, which is why both feel dead when something is chewing on your Pal.

The table below is the ceiling at each cooldown length — the best Dark fruit you can slot at that timer. Two rows carry the element. The 20-second row is where Dark peaks at 22.5 damage per second, better than the 30-second monster above it, so Dark Laser is the single best fruit in the set on raw output. The 8-second row is Poison Shower at 20.0, which also happens to be the only realistic way to hand Poison to a Pal that didn't grow up with it.

Cooldown	Best Dark fruit at that timer	Power	Damage/sec
2s	Dark Shot	40	20.0
4s	Shadow Burst	80	20.0
8s	Poison Shower	160	20.0
12s	Spirit Flame	200	16.7
16s	Nightmare Ball	300	18.8
20s	Dark Laser	450	22.5
30s	Dark Whisp	600	20.0

There is no 24-second Dark fruit, so the jump from Dark Laser to Dark Whisp is the only step up you get at the top end — and it costs you 700 range and 2.5 damage per second to take it. Nine of the 12 fruits apply Blind, and the proc chance swings wildly: the three Rare fruits and Dark Arrow land it on every hit, while Dark Cannon and Dark Shot only manage it one time in five. Full numbers for every skill in the game are on the Palworld active skills database.

How to Get Dark Skill Fruits

There are five routes, and Dark is missing the one that makes other elements easy. Fire, Water and Electric each have elemental-sealed chests scattered across the map with roughly a 2.4% shot at a fruit per open; Dark has none, so every fruit here comes out of a general chest pool, the Arena Shop, an oil rig crate, a relic recycler or the ground. The useful split is by fruit tier — the three Arena fruits are guaranteed purchases, the Rare chest fruits only appear from the Desert onward, and the cheap end drops in the starting regions.

Arena Shop — Battle Tickets

This is the fastest route to a top-tier Dark skill and the only guaranteed one. Three Dark fruits sit in the Arena Shop permanently, bought with Battle Tickets you earn from arena rounds, and stock never rotates — save up and buy exactly what you want. Dark Whisp is the 45-ticket premium pick. Apocalypse at 30 is the better fight-winner if you're being kited, since it's the only Rare Dark fruit with real reach. Poison Shower at 30 is the sleeper: it's the only Dark fruit whose skill can't be bred onto anything, which makes the Arena the sole supplier for most of your box.

Skill Fruit	Battle Tickets	Power	Cooldown	Max range
Dark Whisp	45	600	30s	1,500
Apocalypse	30	400	20s	5,000
Poison Shower	30	160	8s	1,000

Tickets come from the arena itself — the full round list and what each one pays out is on the Palworld arena guide, and the rest of the Battle Ticket stock is listed on the Palworld merchant database. Note that no Dark fruit is sold for plain Gold anywhere, so the Wandering Merchant is a dead end for this element.

Region Chests and Fishing Spots

Ordinary treasure chests are the main supply, and which fruits you can pull depends entirely on where the chest is. Grasslands and Forest chests only cough up the cheap four; the Rare fruits don't enter the pool until the Desert, Mount Obsidian and Snowfields, and the Sakurajima–Feybreak–Sunreach band is the only place regular chests drop Apocalypse, Dark Arrow, Dark Cannon and Umbral Surge. Snowfields has the best per-chest odds of any region at 1.64%, but Feybreak is the better farm in practice — 201 chest pins, six Dark fruits in the pool and a 1.49% shot at each of them. Fishing spots mirror the chest pool of whatever region they sit in at slightly lower odds, which is a free bonus if you're already working through the Palworld fishing guide.

Fishing follows the same regional split at 0.50% to 1.61% per catch, with Snowfields again the best of the bunch. Skill Fruit Trees are the wildcard on top of all this: 47 of them exist across both regions — 35 on the mainland and 12 in the World Tree — and each hands you a fruit without a fight, but you don't pick the element. Run the tree route when you're passing anyway, not as a targeted Dark farm.

Oil Rig Crates and Field Drops

Oil rig crates carry the best per-open odds Dark gets anywhere: 2.56% for each of Nightmare Ball, Spirit Flame, Shadow Burst and Poison Blast. There are 56 crates on the oil rig crate map layer and they respawn, which makes rigs the strongest repeatable route for the cheap end of the list once you can handle the guards. Field drops are the opposite — pure luck. Dark Cannon and Umbral Surge fall on the ground in Feybreak (0.38%), Sunreach Isle (0.37%) and the World Tree (0.62%), and Nightmare Ball shows up in Sakurajima at a barely-there 0.03%. Nice when it happens, never worth planning around.

Recycling Ancient Relics

Five Dark fruits come out of the recycler — Dark Whisp, Dark Laser, Apocalypse, Nightmare Ball and Poison Shower — which is notable because three of those are Arena-only otherwise. The catch is the rate: each sits at roughly 0.27% per relic, and the payout climbs with the relic grade, so Glistening relics are what you want in the machine. Treat this as a bonus you notice while farming relics for something else rather than a plan. The full setup is covered in the Ancient Relic Recycler guide.

Best Pals to Put Dark Skills On

Because every Dark fruit skill is Shot class, the only stat that matters is Shot Attack — a Pal with monstrous Melee Attack gains nothing from a Dark Whisp fruit. Frostallion Noct is the clear home for your best fruit at 140 Shot Attack, and it pairs that with 140 HP and 135 Defense, so it survives long enough to actually use a 30-second cast. Bushi Noct is second at 130 and by far the easiest to find with 1,990 spawn points, though 80 HP means it dies to anything that looks at it. Shadowbeak trades 20 attack for 140 Defense, the toughest carrier in the element.

Pal	Shot Attack	HP	Defense	Elements	Why it's a good carrier
Frostallion Noct	140	140	135	Dark	Highest Shot Attack of any catchable Dark Pal, and it learns Dark Whisp free at Lv. 60
Bushi Noct	130	80	80	Fire / Dark	1,990 spawn points — the strong Dark carrier you can get earliest
Helzephyr	125	100	100	Dark	Flier with 1,099 spawn points; best pick for kiting a boss
Sootseer	125	105	90	Dark / Fire	Fire typing patches the matchups Dark can't cover
Astegon	125	100	125	Dragon / Dark	125 Defense and Dragon damage on top; an alpha at Lv. 55
Eidrolon	125	115	120	Dragon / Dark	Learns no Dark move at all by levelling, so a fruit is pure upside here
Helzephyr Lux	125	105	100	Dark / Electric	Same attack as Helzephyr with an Electric option against Water Pals
Ghangler	125	90	105	Dark / Water	Strong attack on a Pal you can catch at 316 spots across the map
Shadowbeak	120	120	140	Dark	Highest Defense in the element — the one that survives a raid
Lyleen Noct	120	115	115	Dark	Balanced statline and an alpha at Lv. 58 if you'd rather not hunt spawns
Gildra	120	105	105	Dark / Ground	Ground typing gives it something to do against Electric Pals

Bellanoir tops the whole Dark stat sheet at 150 Shot Attack, but it's a summoned raid boss rather than something you go catch — the fight itself is broken down in the Bellanoir Libero raid guide. Feeding a fruit doesn't care about the Pal's element at all, so a high Shot Attack Pal of any type is still a perfectly good answer to Neutral bosses. Check the Palworld combat tier list before you commit a Rare fruit — they aren't refundable once eaten.

Fruits You Can Skip

Plenty of these skills are handed out free by levelling, which makes buying the fruit a waste. The two numbers that matter are how many Pals learn the skill by levelling up and how many can inherit it as an egg move through breeding. Dark Whisp is the big trap — 63 Pals learn it on their own, more than any other Dark fruit skill, so check your Pal's move list before spending 45 tickets on it. Flip it around and Poison Shower is the standout buy: nine Pals learn it, nobody inherits it, and it's one of only two Poison fruits in the game. That 30-ticket fruit is the only way anything else will ever carry Poison.

Skill Fruit	Pals that learn it by levelling	Pals that can inherit it	Verdict
Poison Shower	9	0	Buy it — no breeding route and no chest carries it
Apocalypse	13	126	Cheap at 30 tickets, but breeding covers it if you have the pair
Dark Whisp	63	0	Check your box first — most Dark Pals get it around Lv. 50
Dark Laser	47	173	Skip — very widely inherited
Nightmare Ball	47	167	Skip — easy egg move
Spirit Flame	41	58	Skip — 41 Pals learn it, several as early as Lv. 7
Shadow Burst	35	0	Only worth it for a Pal outside the 35
Poison Blast	26	0	Cheap Poison access from chests and oil rig crates
Dark Cannon	20	0	Decent filler if you find one; not worth hunting
Dark Arrow	17	0	Guaranteed Blind at 5,000 range — grab it from a Feybreak chest
Umbral Surge	14	0	Situational; the 1,200 minimum range kills it up close
Dark Shot	3	0	Unobtainable — no source in the game carries this fruit

If breeding is the cheaper path for Dark Laser, Nightmare Ball and Apocalypse, the inheritance rules are worth reading properly — how breeding works in Palworld covers which parent passes what, and the Palworld breeding calculator finds the pair.

Farm Your Own at the Skillfruit Orchard

Late in the game you can stop hunting fruits and start growing them. The Skillfruit Orchard unlocks at level 71 for 3 technology points and costs 200 Mythical Wood, 500 Paldium Fragment and 150 Soralite to build — a real endgame bill, and the Mythical Wood is the slow part since relic recycling is the source. Plant a fruit and every harvest rolls against a fixed table: 60% of cycles give you nothing at all, 15% return the exact fruit you planted, and the remaining 25% split between a Common, Uncommon or Rare fruit of the same element.

That last part is the whole point for Dark specifically. With no elemental-sealed chest to farm, the orchard is the only renewable source of Rare Dark fruit that doesn't cost Battle Tickets — planting a cheap Poison Blast out of an oil rig crate can eventually roll you a Dark Whisp, Dark Laser, Apocalypse or Poison Shower at a 3% clip per harvest. It's slow, but it's free. The full payout table is on the Skill Fruit database page.

Material	Qty	Where it comes from
Mythical Wood	200	Every grade of Ancient Relic recycles into it — guaranteed output
Paldium Fragment	500	711 Paldium Ore nodes on the map, or 70 Gold each from the Wandering Merchant
Soralite	150	226 Soralite nodes, plus Sunreach Isle supply drops and expeditions

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