Palworld 1.0 is live. It's the biggest update the game has ever taken – 72 new Pals (the roster's up to 287 now), the World Tree region, Sky Islands, the Wing Pack, and a patch note document so long Steam initially refused to accept it. If you play, there's weeks of stuff in there.
If you run a server, though, the list of things you actually need to do is short, and a lot of what's being written about the 1.0 server experience this week is either hype or flat-out wrong. So here's the server-admin version, with the marketing stripped out.
Your save is safe. Whether you keep it is a different question
Straight from Pocketpair's head of publishing, John Buckley: "You do NOT need to wipe your data for Palworld 1.0." No forced wipe. Your character, bases, Pals and world carry forward when the server updates.
And then he immediately added: "But you should."
That's not us being cautious, that's Pocketpair telling you their own game plays best on a fresh world in 1.0. There are that many mechanical overhauls. So the real decision for a server admin isn't "will I lose my world" (you won't), it's "do we start fresh to see 1.0 properly, or carry a mature Early Access world into a build that wasn't designed around it."
My honest take after running these launches: if your group's world is young or you've been winding down anyway, wipe and start fresh on launch day – everyone hits the new content together and you dodge any weirdness from forcing an old world through overhauled world-gen. If you've got a months-old base nobody wants to lose, carry it over, but take a manual backup first (Cloud Backup in the panel) so you can bail back to your pre-1.0 world if the new content doesn't sit right on top of it.
If you do want to start fresh without abandoning your best Pals, that's what World Transfers are for – the Global Palbox lets you carry Pals into a new world. More on that below, because it's the thing people keep confusing with something it isn't.
Taking the update
On LOW.MS it's the usual: stop the server, hit Steam Update in the panel, start it back up. A version bump this size means the download's chunky and Steam's CDN will be hammered for the first few hours after launch, so if it crawls, that's Valve under load, not your server.
The one thing that'll generate tickets today is the version-mismatch shuffle. Steam updates players' clients the moment 1.0 drops, but your server is still on the old build until you run that update – and anyone who tries to join in that window gets "connection timed out" with nothing useful in the message. It's not your ports and it's not your firewall, it's a version gap. Update the server and it clears. We've got the full diagnosis on those timeouts if you want the detail, but 90% of the time the fix is just "the server hadn't updated yet."
The map roughly doubled, so check your RAM
The World Tree area opens up and a second major island lands, which press estimates put at roughly double the old map. Pocketpair haven't published a hard figure, so take "double" as directional, but the direction is what matters here: more world, more assets, more memory.
Pocketpair already recommended 16 GB for a dedicated server before any of this. Memory is where Palworld gets you anyway – a quiet world looks cheap, a mature one with sprawling bases does not, and 1.0 hands you a lot more world to fill. If you're on our 10 GB default and your world is going to be busy, this is the 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. We'll be watching how 1.0 actually behaves on our own nodes and we'll say so publicly if it moves the floor.
PvP: what the trailers didn't mention to server admins
The cinematic made a lot of noise about PvP, and every hosting blog this week is running a "1.0 PvP mode!" headline. Here's the part they're skipping: on the dedicated-server side, PvP in 1.0 is the exact same thing it's been for over a year. Pocketpair's own server docs still describe it as "only a trial feature and is not covered by support," and the config surface hasn't changed.
You enable it with the same three settings you always could, all of which need to be on together in PalWorldSettings.ini:
bIsPvP=TruebEnablePlayerToPlayerDamage=TruebEnableDefenseOtherGuildPlayer=True
Flip bIsPvP on its own and nothing happens – that catches people out constantly. With all three on, players can damage each other, base Pals defend against trespassing guilds, airborne and mounted players take extra damage, and a "Champion's Emblem" drops on a PvP kill by default. There's a bEnableFriendlyFire toggle if you want same-guild damage too.
None of that is new to 1.0. So if you were planning a serious PvP server on the strength of the trailer, set expectations with your players: it's still the trial toggle, still unsupported by Pocketpair, and still rough around the edges. Worth running for fun, not worth building a competitive community's rules around yet. Our server settings guide has a PvP preset if you want a sensible starting point.
There's no "server clustering", and I want to be clear about that
You may have seen other hosts describing a 1.0 "server clustering" feature that links dedicated servers together. I went looking for a Pocketpair source for it before launch and couldn't find one, and now that 1.0's live and the config parameters are public, there are no clustering, cross-server or server-transfer keys anywhere in the server settings. It isn't a thing.
What's real – and what I think got mangled into "clustering" – is World Transfers. That's a client-facing feature: through the Global Palbox you can carry your tamed Pals from one world into another, so starting a fresh 1.0 character doesn't mean abandoning the team you spent Early Access building. Useful, genuinely nice, but it's about moving your Pals between your own worlds, not linking separate dedicated servers into a network. Don't promise your community something Pocketpair didn't ship.
Your mods are going to break, and that's normal
A version jump this large breaks mod loaders, full stop. Expect RE-UE4SS and most .pak mods to stop working the moment your server hits 1.0, and expect a wait while the Palworld-specific RE-UE4SS build catches up to the new engine build. That's not anyone doing anything wrong, it's just what happens.
The clean approach: pull or disable your mods before the server takes the update, run vanilla for a few days, then reinstall one at a time once each mod's 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 – the standalone Windows build of PalDefender doesn't need UE4SS at all, which also keeps you clear of the character-reset bug that's still open.
That's the whole server-admin checklist, really: take a backup, decide fresh-vs-carry with your players, run the update, glance at your RAM, and hold off on mods for a bit. Everything else in those 10,000 words is gameplay, and that part you get to just enjoy. If you're not hosting with us yet and 1.0 is the excuse you were waiting for, plans are on the Palworld hosting page and a server's ready a couple of minutes after checkout. And if you set up before the update lands, the 1.0 prep guide is the short version of everything above.