Palworld 1.0 went live on July 10, it's free for everyone who already owns the game, and the patch notes run long enough that Steam nearly refused to publish them. If you run a dedicated server, this is the biggest update your server will ever take. The good news is the day-one checklist is short.
Here's what actually changed, and what to do about it.
What 1.0 changed for servers
The headline items, now that the patch is public:
- The World Tree region opens up, along with new Sky Islands and the Wing Pack for aerial traversal. Between the new areas, the playable map is a good chunk bigger than it was.
- 72 new Pals (47 brand-new plus 25 variants), which takes the roster to 287.
- The player level cap goes from 65 up to 80.
- Genetic Recombination, a new breeding layer that fuses traits from Legendary Pals, with outcomes that lean on your server config.
- PvP got a lot of trailer time. On the server side it's the same trial toggle it's been for over a year – enable it if you want, but Pocketpair still label it unsupported.
What carries over, and what resets
Straight from Pocketpair: you do not need to wipe your data for 1.0. Your character, bases, Pals and world carry forward when the server updates, and there's no forced wipe.
Two things do shift on a carried-over world, and they're worth knowing before you decide:
- Mission and quest progress gets reset (some missions auto-complete based on the towers you've already beaten), so the story side won't line up exactly with a fresh 1.0 run.
- If your world has ever run mods, Pocketpair specifically warn that mod-dependent save content may not behave correctly in 1.0.
Pocketpair's own recommendation is to start fresh to see 1.0 properly, because so much changed at once. So the real decision isn't "will I lose my world" (you won't), it's "fresh start for the full experience, or carry a mature Early Access world into a build that wasn't designed around it." If your group's world is young, wipe and start together on launch day. If you've got a months-old base nobody wants to lose, carry it over – but take a manual backup first so you can bail back if 1.0 doesn't sit right on top of it.
The "server clustering" thing isn't real
You may have seen other hosts describing a 1.0 "server clustering" feature that links dedicated servers together. Now that the patch is live and the config surface is public, there are no clustering, cross-server or server-transfer keys anywhere in the settings. It isn't a thing.
What's real, and what I think got mangled into "clustering", is World Transfers – a client-facing feature where the Global Palbox lets you carry your own Pals between your own worlds. Genuinely handy, but it's about moving your Pals between your worlds, not linking separate servers into a network. Don't promise your community something Pocketpair didn't ship.
Take a manual backup before you update
Cloud backups already run automatically on every LOW.MS plan, but go into Cloud Backup in the panel and take a manual one anyway. That gives you a known-good pre-1.0 snapshot that won't age out of the rotation. Self-hosting? Copy your Pal\Saved\SaveGames\ directory somewhere safe first. Whatever happens, you want the option of putting the world back exactly as it was.
If you run mods, pull them before you update
A version jump this size breaks RE-UE4SS and most .pak mods on day one, and the Palworld-specific RE-UE4SS build will take however long it takes to catch up. Pocketpair are explicit about one thing here: turning mods "off" is not enough, because mod files and loaders left in the game folder can still get loaded. Remove them properly before the update.
The sane play:
- Take that backup.
- Remove your mods – delete them, don't just disable – before the server takes the 1.0 update.
- Run vanilla for a few days.
- Reinstall one at a time once each author confirms 1.0 support.
If your server updates and then won't boot, mods are suspect number one. Our mods guide covers where everything lives and how to strip it back out cleanly. And if the only reason you ran UE4SS was PalDefender, don't reinstall it out of habit – PalDefender's standalone Windows build doesn't need UE4SS at all, which also sidesteps the character-reset bug that's still open upstream.
Check your RAM before the rush
Pocketpair already recommend 16 GB for a dedicated server, and a bigger map with more to load isn't going to make anything lighter. Memory is where Palworld gets you: a quiet world looks cheap, a mature one with sprawling bases does not, and 1.0 adds a lot of world. If you're on our 10 GB default and your world is already busy, this is a good week to bump to 15 or 20 GB – it's a quick upgrade and you won't lose anything doing it. Current options are on the Palworld hosting page.
Expect version-mismatch chaos on launch day
Every big Palworld patch produces the same support wave: Steam updates the player's client immediately, the server sits on the old build for a few minutes, and everyone gets "connection timed out" with no explanation. It's not your ports and it's not your firewall. Stop the server, hit Steam Update in the panel, start it again, and the error clears. There's a full writeup if you want the deeper diagnosis. And launch-day SteamCMD traffic is always rough for the first hour or two, so if the update crawls, that's Steam's CDN under load, not your server.
That's the whole checklist: take a backup, decide fresh-vs-carry with your players, pull your mods, run the update, glance at your RAM. If you want the full server-admin breakdown – the PvP settings, the clustering myth, the mod situation in more depth – that's over in what 1.0 actually changes for your dedicated server. And if you're not hosting with us yet, plans are on the Palworld hosting page and a server's ready a couple of minutes after checkout.