Palworld's headline feature is a bestiary of 288 creatures. Less advertised is the fact that the humans standing around the map are built out of the same parts.
They have hit points, an attack value, a defence value and a faction, and they sit in the same data tables as the creatures do. That is why the sphere you throw at a wild Pal also works on a person.

There are 401 of them with names, which is a considerably larger cast than the game ever draws attention to.

Who Is Actually on the List

The full Palworld NPC list covers all 401 named humans with their HP, attack and defence, sorted into seven factions. Islanders make up the largest group at 206, followed by the Rayne Syndicate on 141 and the PIDF on 25.

The smaller factions are the interesting ones. The Free Pal Alliance has 14 members, the Brothers of the Eternal Pyre 12, the Allies 2 and the Brigade a single entry.

Most of the cast sits in a narrow stat band, somewhere between 20 and 100 HP with attack and defence in a similar range. Harold is the clear exception with 500 HP, 100 ranged attack and 500 defence.

The figures are base values before level scaling, extracted from the game's own files rather than measured in play. The site is an unofficial reference with no connection to Pocketpair, which is worth saying because none of this appears anywhere in the game itself.

Why Anyone Would Catch a Person

Caught humans go to work like any other Pal. They occupy a slot at the base, they have work suitabilities, and they perform tasks without complaint.

They are generally mediocre at it, which is the joke. A human with a low handiwork rating is worse than a purpose built Pal at almost every job you could assign.

What they are good for is the Black Marketeer, who will buy them. That is the part the game handles with a straight face and no explanation whatsoever.

Sphere throws work the same way they do on creatures, with the same capture rate maths behind them. A weakened human is easier to catch than a healthy one, exactly as you would expect.

Factions Tell You Where to Look

The faction column doubles as a location guide. Rayne Syndicate members cluster around their camps and towers, PIDF around their bases, and Islanders in and around the settlements.
That makes the list a reasonable route planner if you are trying to find a specific named character. Faction first, then stats, is faster than wandering.

It also explains the raid events. When a faction turns up at your base uninvited, the roster it draws from is the same one on the list.
The two Allies entries sit apart from all of this. They are the handful of characters the game treats as being on your side, which is why Harold's stat line looks nothing like anybody else's.

The Stat Table Is More Useful Than It Sounds

Attack and defence values give you a rough difficulty ranking before you engage. A camp full of 30 HP Islanders is a very different proposition to one guarded by the higher end Syndicate entries.

Ranged is the column worth reading carefully. Human enemies with guns punch above their stat line because they do not need to close the distance first.

Level scaling then multiplies all of it, so a low base value at level fifty is still dangerous. The base numbers tell you relative strength rather than absolute.

Sorting by defence is the quickest way to spot the fights worth avoiding early. A high defence NPC with a modest attack value will simply take a very long time to bring down.

What It Says About the Game

Building humans and creatures out of one system is a shortcut, and it is the kind of shortcut that produces most of Palworld's better jokes. Pocketpair has never particularly hidden this, and its published notes have generally been open about how quickly the game was assembled.

It also gives the world a strange consistency. Everything on the island obeys the same rules, including the people who are supposedly in charge of it.
Four hundred and one named characters is a lot of writing for a game with almost no dialogue. Most of them exist as a name, a faction and three numbers.

The seven factions also do more narrative work than the writing does. You learn what the Syndicate is by fighting forty of them, not by being told.

Moving Forward

The human cast is larger than the creature roster and considerably less explained. If you have wondered whether a particular guard has a name, the answer is almost certainly yes.
Catching them is a novelty rather than a strategy, and the stat table is the practical part. Reading it before you walk into a camp is worth more than any amount of trial and error, and there are plenty of walkthroughs that skip this side of the game entirely.