How to Get the Cold Food Box: Level 51 and Materials

The Cold Food Box is the level 51 replacement for the wooden Feed Box, and it is the only Pal feeding station that fights spoilage instead of ignoring it. This guide covers the technology cost, all three materials and the raw pile underneath them, the two machines you need running before you can craft any of it, and which Cooling Pals are worth the worker slot it takes.

Cold Food Box at a Glance

Two things about this box catch people out. First, nothing in the recipe is lootable — every one of the three materials is crafted, so the real barrier is having an Electric Furnace and a Production Assembly Line already turning, not the 2 technology points. Second, it draws no electricity at all, which makes it far friendlier than the Refrigerator (50 power) or the Electric Cooler (100 power) if you want cold storage at a satellite base with no generator. What it does cost you is a permanent Cooling worker.

How to Unlock the Cold Food Box

Reach character level 51, open the Palworld technology tree, and spend 2 points. It is the cheapest node on a very expensive row — three of its neighbours want 5 points each — so there is no reason to skip it if you have already committed to the Plasteel tier of gear. Use the full technology list if you want to see what your next few levels unlock before you start spending.

What You Need Before You Can Build It

The unlock is trivial; the supply chain behind it is not. Every material is machine-made, and the two machines involved are late-game builds that both want power. Running the Electric Furnace and the Production Assembly Line at the same time pulls 700 power, which is more than a single mid-tier generator covers, so plan the electricity before you plan the box. Counting the box itself, the whole path costs 14 technology points across five separate nodes.

All Build Materials and Where to Get Them

Three materials, two stations, and one of them dwarfs the other two. The Plasteel is where your base time actually goes — 20 of it is 4,000,000 work at the furnace, four times what the ingots cost and roughly 27 times the coolant. If you are queueing this build overnight, queue the Plasteel first and let the coolant slot in around it.

Material	Qty	Recipe per unit	Station	Work total
Pal Metal Ingot	20	4 Ore + 1 Pure Quartz + 2 Paldium Fragment	Electric Furnace	1,000,000
Plasteel	20	2 Crude Oil + 5 Ore	Electric Furnace	4,000,000
Cryogenic Coolant	15	1 Aquatic Pal Fluids + 1 Ice Organ	Production Assembly Line	150,000

Pal Metal Ingot: 20 Needed

Pal Metal has no technology node of its own — the Electric Furnace at level 44 is the unlock, and once that is standing you can smelt it. Twenty ingots come out to 80 Ore, 20 Pure Quartz and 40 Paldium Fragment. Ore is the easy part with 1,632 nodes on the map, and Paldium is fine at 711, but Pure Quartz is the pinch point at 607 nodes and it is what every other Pal Metal project will also be eating. Set up an Ore Mining Site or two before you start rather than running manual laps.

Raw material	Need	Map nodes	Best route
Ore	80	1,632	Show every Ore node on the map — or automate it with a base Ore Mining Site
Pure Quartz	20	607	Show every Pure Quartz node on the map — desert and volcanic ground
Paldium Fragment	40	711	Show every Paldium Ore node on the map, plus what you get from dismantling spheres

Plasteel: 20 Needed

Plasteel is its own node at level 50 for 2 points, and it is the expensive half of this build in both materials and machine time. Twenty units want 40 Crude Oil and another 100 Ore, which is why the ore total for the whole box lands at 180. The oil is the awkward one: there are 185 oil fields marked across the map, and looting them by hand gets old fast. The Crude Oil Extractor at level 50 turns that into a renewable supply for 2 points, 250 Pal Metal Ingot and 50 Circuit Board — but it only works planted directly on an oil field, so it usually costs you a whole base slot in the desert or on Sakurajima.

Raw material	Need	Where it comes from	Note
Crude Oil	40	185 oil fields on the interactive map	Renewable only via an extractor parked on a field
Ore	100	Mined, or automated at a base Ore Mining Site	On top of the 80 the ingots already need

Cryogenic Coolant: 15 Needed

Coolant is the cheapest material here by work cost and the most easily automated. Each unit is one Aquatic Pal Fluids plus one Ice Organ at the Production Assembly Line, so 15 coolant is 15 of each. Both halves can come off a ranch instead of a hunt: Kelpsea drops Aquatic Pal Fluids on a ranch and is the single most common Pal on the island at 1,359 spawn spots, sitting at level 9 to 19 so you can catch one at any stage of the game. Foxcicle is the Ice Organ equivalent with 187 spots and a level 15 to 37 band. Two ranch Pals and you never farm this material again.

If you would rather kill for the organs, the yields are lopsided enough to matter. Every source below drops at a 100% rate, so the only question is how many you get per kill and how hard the fight is.

Source	Ice Organ	How to find it	Level
Frostallion	10	Alpha only — no wild spawns anywhere	60
Kingpaca Cryst	3–6	Alpha only — no wild spawns	46
Moldron Cryst	4–5	Alpha only — no wild spawns	78
Pierdon Cryst	4–5	50 wild spawn spots — show on the map	68–69
Bastigor	2–5	69 wild spawn spots — show on the map	75–80
Foxcicle	Ranch	187 spawn spots, and it produces on a ranch instead of dying for it	15–37
Mau Cryst	Ranch	Also a ranch producer, but only 3 spawn spots — hard to find	30–45

What the Cold Food Box Does

Functionally it is a Feed Box: you drop food in, and Pals working the base walk over and eat when their hunger drops. The difference is the Cooling slot. Assign an Ice Pal and the food sitting inside spoils more slowly, which matters the moment you stop stocking berries and start stocking cooked meals — a stack of proper dishes represents real Kindling time, and watching it rot because your base went unattended for an in-game week is the reason this node exists. Pocketpair has never published the exact spoilage timer, so treat the effect as a meaningful slowdown rather than a hard number.

The trade is one worker. That Pal is locked to chilling duty and is not mining, hauling or crafting while it does, so on a small base with six Pals the box costs you a sixth of your labour. On a big food-producing base it pays for itself immediately.

Cold Food Box vs the Other Cold Storage

Three structures keep food cold and they are not interchangeable, which trips up a lot of bases. The Cooler Box and Refrigerator are storage — your food, in a container, that Pals will not touch. The Cold Food Box is a feeding station — food your Pals actually eat from. If your goal is to stop your own cooked stockpile from rotting, the Cooler Box at level 13 does that for 10 Ingot, 10 Stone and 2 Ice Organ and is one of the best-value nodes in the early game. If your goal is to stop the base's feed from rotting, only the Cold Food Box does it.

Structure	Tech	Power	Materials	What it is for
Cold Food Box	51	None	20 Pal Metal Ingot, 20 Plasteel, 15 Cryogenic Coolant	Pals eat from it — the only chilled feeder
Cooler Box	13	None	10 Ingot, 10 Stone, 2 Ice Organ	Small chilled container for your own food
Refrigerator	38	50	50 Refined Ingot, 20 Polymer, 10 Cryogenic Coolant, 5 Circuit Board	Bigger chilled container, but needs a power line
Feed Box	4	None	20 Wood	The unchilled original — keep one as overflow

Best Cooling Pals to Staff It

Cooling is a narrow suitability — only 38 Pals have it at all, and exactly one of them, Bastigor, reaches the maximum Lv. 8. Here is the part that saves you a lot of effort: the Cold Food Box asks for Cooling Lv. 1, and so does every other Cooling structure in the game. There is no station that a Lv. 1 chiller is locked out of. That means the right pick is not the strongest Ice Pal, it is the one whose *other* jobs you do not need — a Bastigor parked on a feed box is also a Lv. 6 Lumbering and Lv. 5 Mining worker doing nothing.

Pal	Cooling	Other jobs	Why it works
Bastigor	8	Lumbering 6, Mining 5	The only Lv. 8 chiller in the game — but too valuable elsewhere to waste on a box
Frostallion	7	None	Pure chiller with no competing jobs, so nothing is wasted; you have to beat the level 60 Alpha first
Pierdon Cryst	6	Mining 5	Second-highest Cooling with a real mining fallback, and it spawns wild in 50 spots
Univolt Cryst	6	Lumbering 3	Lv. 6 Cooling with almost nothing else to lose — a clean dedicated chiller
Whalaska	6	Watering 5	Easy to find at 187 spawn spots and it doubles as a Lv. 5 waterer for your plantations
Icelyn	5	Handiwork 5, Medicine Production 4, Transporting 2	Catchable in the low 40s, so it is the first decent chiller most players can actually get
Wumpo	5	Transporting 6, Lumbering 5, Handiwork 3	Strong all-rounder — good chiller, but you will want it hauling instead
Foxcicle	4	Farming 3	The budget answer: level 15 to 37, 187 spawn spots, and Lv. 4 is four times more Cooling than the box needs

Assign your pick to the box directly from the structure rather than leaving it to wander the base, or it will drift onto whatever job it is better at and leave the food warm. The full Cooling ranking has all 38 Pals if you want to match one to what your base is short of.

Every Structure That Needs a Cooling Pal

Once you have a chiller in the base it can serve more than the feed box, and knowing the full list helps you decide where to place it — a Pal assigned to one structure is not covering the others, so a base that wants both temperature control and cold feed needs two Ice Pals. Note how the power column splits the list: the Cold Food Box and the old stone Cooler run on nothing, while the electric versions and the Cryogenic Crusher want a live grid.

Structure	Tech	Cooling needed	Power	What it does
Cooler Box	13	Lv. 1	None	Small food vault, slows spoilage
Cooler	18	Lv. 1	None	Lowers base temperature a little
Refrigerator	38	Lv. 1	50	Large chilled storage
Electric Cooler	42	Lv. 1	100	Serious base cooling for hot regions
Cold Food Box	51	Lv. 1	None	Chilled Pal feeding station
Cryogenic Crusher	54	Lv. 1	300	Production station driven by cold

Summary

Short version: hit level 51, spend 2 technology points, and bring 20 Pal Metal Ingot, 20 Plasteel and 15 Cryogenic Coolant — which is 180 Ore, 40 Crude Oil, 40 Paldium Fragment, 20 Pure Quartz, 15 Ice Organ and 15 Aquatic Pal Fluids at the bottom. You need an Electric Furnace and a Production Assembly Line already running, plus 700 power to run both at once. Then park any Ice Pal with Cooling on it — Lv. 1 is the whole requirement, so Foxcicle does the job and your Bastigor stays free for real work.

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