Creating a Palworld dedicated server

Palworld offers a co-op session from inside the game, capped at four players, and a dedicated server that scales to thirty-two. Moving from one to the other is not just a capacity upgrade: it is what makes the world persistent and independent of who happens to be online.

What you need

• A machine that stays up. Palworld is memory-hungry and sensitive to CPU clock speed.
• SteamCMD, Valve's command-line tool, which downloads the dedicated server application.
• An open UDP port — 8211 by default. Palworld only listens on UDP; a TCP forward does nothing.
• If you go public, the query port too, or the server stays invisible in the list.

The install

SteamCMD pulls the Palworld dedicated server application, which is separate from the game. It installs without a named Steam account: anonymous login is enough.

On first launch the server generates its folder structure and its configuration file. That file does not exist before the first boot: there is no point looking for it. Start once, stop, then edit.

First configuration

The PalWorldSettings.ini file holds the essentials: server name, description, password, admin password, player slots, and every gameplay multiplier.

Two things matter from day one:

• The admin password is what lets you kick, ban, or shut the server down cleanly. Setting it afterwards requires a restart.
• The slot count is not a free dial: thirty-two players on a machine sized for eight gives you a server that accepts connections and stutters for everyone.

The three recurring mistakes

• Editing the config before the first launch. The server regenerates the file at boot and overwrites what you wrote.
• Forwarding TCP instead of UDP. The server runs, the logs are clean, nobody connects.
• Editing the file while the server runs. Palworld rewrites its config on shutdown: your changes vanish.

Checking it works

The logs state the port actually bound and the slot count at boot. That is the only reliable place. If what you read there differs from what you configured, the file you edited is not the one the server loads — most often because a default config sits alongside yours.

If you would rather skip that phase, our Palworld server hosting delivers a running instance with the configuration file already generated and accessible.