Picks September 29, 2026 6 min read

Which Pal to Leave Active: Where Quest EXP Lands, and What Ignores the Choice

Once you have a pal, exactly one of your pals is the active one: the pal whose dashboard card reads Active beside a little star, and whose face sits at the top of your sidebar. The game never spells out what that star decides. For most of what you do, the honest answer is not much. For one thing it is the whole answer: when you press Claim on a quest, the quest's EXP goes to whichever pal wears the star at that moment. We read the claim, the arcade, the lake, the PP toolbox and the nightly jobs this morning to map what the star catches, and what walks straight past it.

What the Star Catches

Most daily and weekly quests pay some companion EXP on top of their NP, even though the quest list only ever shows you the NP. The moment you press Claim, the game looks up your active pal and pays the quest's EXP to it. Not the pal you played the quest's games with, not the one you fed last: whichever pal wears the star right then. Nothing about the quest remembers who helped you finish it.

Three things the claim screen will not tell you

It arrives at face value. Arcade EXP is scaled by your pal's mood; quest EXP is not, so a sulky pal collects exactly what a cheerful one would. It lands on a sleeping pal. Resting keeps a pal out of the arcade, not out of the payout: if the star is on a pal that is napping, the EXP still goes to it. No toast names the pal. The dashboard's toast reports the NP you earned and the sidebar's adds the EXP, but neither one says who got it.

One smaller thing rides on the star as well: if the game emails you a care reminder after a few days away, the reminder is written about your active pal. Everything else a claim pays, from the NP to the completion bonus for finishing the set, is covered in the daily quests guide; this pick is only about where the EXP goes.

The one way to lose it

If no pal wears the star, the claim still pays its NP and the quest's EXP goes to nobody. Once you own a pal, the game works to keep that from happening: your first pal gets the star automatically, and abandoning the starred pal hands it to the pal you have had longest. So in practice this only comes up before your first pal, but it is the one way a quest's EXP is simply not paid.

Why Most Players Never Notice: The Arcade Follows the Star

Here is what hides all of this. Most arcade games that take a pal along open on your active pal: the “Playing with” strip at the top of the game starts on whoever wears the star. And when you tap that strip and switch pals from the sidebar, you are not only picking a game partner. That switch moves the star, and the game says so: “… is now your active pal!” So on an ordinary day, the pal earning EXP in your games and the pal catching your quest EXP are the same pal, and nobody has a reason to wonder where the quest EXP went. Which games actually pay the pal you bring, and which only enjoy its company, is what the pal-influence ranking sorts out. This pick is about the other slot.

The two come apart in three ordinary ways, and each one is worth recognising when it happens:

You move the star after playingA few rounds with your young pal, then you set your veteran active, then you claim: the quest EXP goes to the veteran

Your active pal is asleepA resting pal cannot come to the arcade, so the game plays with a pal that is awake and leaves the star where it is. The session's EXP goes to the stand-in; the quest's EXP still goes to the sleeper

You go fishingFishing has its own pal picker, and it starts on “No pal” every visit. It never looks at the star

What Ignores the Star

Away from the arcade, several things that sound as if they should follow your active pal answer to something else.

Skipper's LakeThe lake has a picker of its own, and it also starts on “No pal” every visit. Its small skip bonus, about one extra skip per hundred levels, comes from the pal you pick there; with nobody picked, the throw counts as level 1

Luma's Dawn's EmbraceIf you own a Luma, all your pals are healed to full once a day in the nightly run. Owning is what counts: your Luma does not need the star, and it does not need to be awake

The PP toolboxFeeding, healing, bond boosts, level-ups and auto-care go to the pal picked in the toolbox's own dropdown, or else the pal you have open on your dashboard. The dashboard opens on your active pal, so that is where it starts, but open another pal's card and the toolbox follows it, star or no star

That is the real reason the star goes unnoticed: the parts of the game that feel most pal-shaped each ask their own question. The lake asks who you are throwing with. Luma asks whether you own one. The toolbox asks which pal you are looking at. A quest claim asks just one thing: who is wearing the star right now? The pal care guide has the resting, feeding and levelling side of all this, and hidden features collects more of the small controls the game never announces.

So Which Pal Do You Leave Active

Think of the star as the inbox for quest EXP, plus a few defaults, and ask which pal you want that inbox to fill. Quest EXP is a flat amount, while the EXP a pal needs for its next level grows with every level it gains, so the same claim is a much bigger step for a young pal than for a veteran. If you are raising a young pal, that makes it the natural one to leave active on the days you do quests: every claim adds to whatever it earns in the games you bring it to, and because the arcade opens on the starred pal, it is the pal your games start with as well. If you would rather your veteran keep the star, because it is the face of your sidebar or simply the pal you like seeing first, that is a perfectly good choice too. The quest EXP will just be a smaller step for it.

What this pick does not suggest is moving the star from pal to pal, claim by claim. Nothing in the game rewards that, and the choice underneath it is a simple one: who should the quest EXP reach? Make it once, and leave it until the answer changes.

The one habit

Before you press Claim, glance at the pal card at the top of your sidebar, the same panel that lists your Daily Quests further down. That is who the EXP is about to reach. If it is not the pal you meant, set the right one active first, then claim. And never claim with no pal wearing the star at all: the NP will still arrive, but the EXP will not go anywhere.

Every rule above was read out of the game's own code the morning this published.