Pocketpair Says Terrain Digging and Underwater Areas Would Be Palworld 2-Scale Work

Palworld has built the kind of audience every live game wants: a vocal, engaged community that keeps imagining new ways its world could grow. That enthusiasm has helped sustain interest in Pocketpair's creature-collecting survival game, but it also creates a difficult expectation problem. Players see a mountain, a shoreline, or a patch of earth and understandably wonder why they cannot reshape it, tunnel through it, or explore beneath the water. For the developers, however, those requests are not small additions waiting to be switched on.

John "Bucky" Buckley, Pocketpair's head of publishing and communications, has drawn a firm line around two especially recurring suggestions: fully destructible terrain and substantial underwater environments. Speaking with Gaming World Interviews, Buckley said these are the kinds of changes that move far beyond the scope of a conventional patch, expansion, or ongoing-content update. In his view, a request for terrain digging is effectively a request for Palworld 2.

It is a blunt answer, but one rooted in the complicated foundations supporting an open-world survival game. The ability to alter the ground may sound like a natural fit for a game with building, gathering, automation, creature management, and exploration. Yet changing terrain dynamically affects much more than the surface that players can see. It can touch world design, performance, collision, building placement, resource distribution, save data, enemy behavior, and the navigation systems used by Pals and other characters.

Why digging is not just another survival-game feature

In the interview, Buckley explained that terrain deformation would require much deeper work than an engine-level adjustment. He characterized it as a landscape overhaul and said that reworking pathfinding around such a feature could take years. That is a crucial distinction for players comparing a desired mechanic to something seen in another survival game. A system can be technically possible in the broadest sense while still being unrealistic to retrofit into an already released game with an established world and huge number of interacting systems.

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Palworld's Pals need to traverse bases, wilderness areas, and work sites while reacting to objects players place around them. The game already has to manage the practical frustrations familiar to the survival genre: creatures becoming stuck, workers taking awkward routes, or automated tasks not unfolding exactly as planned. Introduce player-made tunnels, pits, caves, cliffs, and underground structures into every possible landscape, and the range of paths the game must understand expands dramatically.

The issue is not simply whether a player character can swing a tool at the ground and remove a chunk of soil. The rest of the game must be ready for the result. Can a Pal find its way into and out of the hole? What happens to a structure that intersects modified land? How does the game prevent players from bypassing areas or breaking encounter spaces? What does this do to multiplayer servers and the amount of world-state information they must preserve? Those are examples of the kind of knock-on effects that can turn an apparently straightforward community wish into a long-term redevelopment project.

Buckley's frustration appears to come from the gap between a feature's visible simplicity and its development cost. A player may only see an extension of mining or construction mechanics already in Palworld. The team, by contrast, has to consider every system connected to the terrain and every unusual case that could emerge once thousands or millions of people begin reshaping the world in unexpected ways.

Underwater exploration raises a similar problem

Terrain digging is not the only idea Pocketpair has had to push back against. Buckley also pointed to underwater areas as another repeated fan request that would involve years of work. Water often looks like unused space in an open world, especially when players can travel across coastlines and see large bodies of it surrounding explorable land. But a true underwater feature is much more involved than allowing a character model to descend below the surface.

A meaningful underwater region needs its own environmental rules and gameplay loops. Movement has to feel different; visibility, controls, oxygen or survival mechanics, combat, creature behavior, harvesting, building limitations, audio, and world art all need consideration. If underwater locations are supposed to be worth visiting rather than merely decorative, they also require things to discover there: resources, enemies, Pals, points of interest, objectives, and reasons to return.

That does not automatically mean Palworld will never feature any water-related expansion or mechanic. Pocketpair has not announced that sort of content here, and Buckley's comments should not be interpreted as a detailed roadmap. His point was narrower but important: the fully realized underwater experience many players are asking for would not be a modest update. It would require a level of time and commitment that must be weighed against everything else the studio could deliver in that same period.

Buckley framed the decision around a practical question for both developers and the audience: would anyone genuinely want to wait three years for an update? For a game being actively supported, spending that long on one enormous feature has an obvious opportunity cost. During those years, the team could potentially address bugs, refine existing systems, add smaller content, make quality-of-life improvements, or pursue other priorities. A major new technology pillar can be exciting, but it can also consume the space where many more immediate improvements might otherwise happen.

Community feedback remains valuable, even when the answer is no

There is an understandable tension in Buckley's stance. Fans request digging, underwater zones, and similarly ambitious systems because they care about Palworld and can see potential in its premise. They are not necessarily demanding impossible things out of bad faith. In fact, Buckley acknowledged the disconnect between what players believe should be easy and what development actually requires. That disconnect exists across nearly every ongoing game, particularly those built around sandbox creativity.

Players experience a game as a cohesive whole. If they can mine stone, construct a base, glide through the air, breed Pals, automate production, and explore a large map, then it is logical to ask why a neighboring feature is absent. Development teams experience that same game as a collection of technical systems, content pipelines, dependencies, budgets, testing demands, and design compromises. The feature request may make perfect sense from the player's perspective while still being a poor fit for the current game's architecture.

The challenge for a studio is communicating that answer without making the community feel dismissed. Buckley's language is emphatic because these particular requests keep returning, but it also offers a useful reality check. Not every popular idea is a candidate for a future patch. Some belong in the earliest planning stages of a new project, when the world, technology, and gameplay systems can all be designed around them from the beginning.

That is why Buckley connected terrain deformation to the notion of a sequel. A hypothetical Palworld follow-up could, in theory, be constructed with destructible landscapes or deep underwater exploration as foundational pillars rather than additions bolted onto a functioning release. There is no announced Palworld 2 in these comments, and the reference should not be taken as confirmation that one is in production. It is instead a shorthand for the scale of the work involved.

Palworld's support continues after its 1.0 moment

The conversation arrives after Palworld's 1.0 launch drew close to one million concurrent players, illustrating that interest in the game remains enormous. A large audience naturally produces an equally large range of priorities. One group may want more creature content, another may focus on endgame activities, balance, performance, building options, social features, or new map spaces. Requests that take years to implement must compete with all of those expectations.

Pocketpair's message is therefore less about rejecting imagination than about setting limits. Terrain digging and comprehensive underwater worlds may be appealing ideas, but they are not realistic promises for Palworld's current update path. The studio would rather not imply otherwise and create a cycle where fans wait for a feature that cannot sensibly arrive.

That leaves Palworld players with a clearer understanding of what to expect from the game's continuing evolution. The community can keep proposing ideas, and Pocketpair can still choose from that feedback when it aligns with its plans. But some of the most transformative requests are simply too large for an update cycle, no matter how often they are repeated. For terrain deformation and extensive underwater exploration, Buckley's answer is unmistakable: those concepts would need the scope of a new game, not a routine addition to this one.