Palworld players stumble on cunning new strat to defeat bosses in one hit: a literal 'stairway to heaven'

Palworld early access
(Image credit: Pocketpair)

Palworld players are working smarter, not harder by letting gravity do the work of killing bosses for them. Specifically, they're constructing enormous stairways into the sky, luring bosses up, then deleting them, leaving poor foes to plummet helplessly to a sticky end on the ground below. It's a bit like the bowl of petunias from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, or a metaphor for the role of collateralized debt obligations in the 2008 financial crisis.

Spotted by GamesRadar, you can see the tactic in action in the Twitter clip below. It's alarmingly easy: Our hero just builds a massive staircase then runs up, and poor, heedless Jetragon follows them. Once the boss hits the top, the player just glides down to the ground and deletes the very first block of stairs, demolishing the entire structure and slaying Jetragon in one strike from the earth. 

The player who posted the link calls it (via Google Translate) the "stairway to heaven" strat, which is exactly what I'd call it too, so well done there. They also say it's "popular in Korea," which I frankly lack the particular knowledge to attribute to anything specific about the country or its players.

But I think you might want to get in quick if you want to take advantage of this gap in boss defences for yourself. It seems a remarkably easy way to defeat enemies that are meant to be true hazards, and that's before you remember that creatures like Jetragon are supposed to be able to fly. It strikes me that the stairway to heaven might not be long for this world, or at least that Pocketpair might soon patch flying Pals to remember their wings.

One more thing for the Palworld roadmap, then, and with Pocketpair putting out regular updates, I imagine it won't be long before players have to find a new strat. Still, at least they can be sure they'll never lose a fight because the game went down: the studio is paying $500,000 a month to keep its servers running, with a network ordered to "never let the service go down no matter what." It's a new world, my friends, a Palworld. 

Joshua Wolens
News Writer

One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.