How to Host a Palworld Dedicated Server in 2026
Here's the thing nobody tells you about Palworld: the built-in multiplayer is a trap. It looks like co-op, it plays like co-op, but it caps at four people and the world only exists while the host's game client is running. We've been hosting Palworld servers since the January 2024 early access launch, and the single question we get asked most is "why can't my fifth friend join?" The answer is always the same. You need a dedicated server.
This guide walks through the three realistic ways to run one in 2026, what the hardware actually looks like now that Pocketpair has shipped Sakurajima, Feathered Pals and Tower of Solis, and how crossplay behaves once Steam, Xbox, PS5 and Mac players all want in on the same world.
Why bother with a dedicated server at all
The non-dedicated session baked into the game is fine for a weekend with three mates. Past that, it falls apart. A proper dedicated server pushes the player cap up to 32 (the current hard limit Pocketpair ships with), keeps your world online when everyone logs off, and gives you the admin tools, config files and backup story you'll eventually need once a base has 200 Pals and someone's breeding project is worth protecting.
It also unlocks crossplay properly, which is the bit most players underestimate.
Your three options
Self-hosting on a spare PC
Pocketpair gives the dedicated server binary away for free on Steam, for both Windows and Linux. If you've got a box sitting idle with decent single-thread performance and 16 GB of RAM to spare, you can absolutely run it yourself. The community Docker image at thijsvanloef/palworld-server-docker is well maintained and takes most of the pain out of a Linux setup.
The catch is everything else. Your home connection is now the server's connection, which means your upload bandwidth is the ceiling and your router is the front door. Updates, firewall rules, port forwarding, save backups, restart schedules — all you. And when your PC reboots for a Windows update at 3am, your server reboots with it. Fine for a LAN group. Painful for anyone remote.
Renting a VPS from a major cloud provider
Spinning up a virtual machine on a major cloud provider and installing the server yourself is the middle path. You get proper uptime and a real datacentre network. You also get a bill that scales with bandwidth, a Linux box with no game-specific tooling, and full responsibility for everything from SteamCMD updates to iptables.
We've seen plenty of people go this route, enjoy it for three weeks, and then get tired of SSH'ing in every time a patch drops. If you genuinely enjoy sysadmin work, a VPS is great. If you just want to play Palworld with your friends, it's a lot of yak shaving.
Managed hosting
This is what we do, so take the bias as given. Managed Palworld hosting means the server is provisioned for you, the control panel already knows how to start and stop Palworld, updates are a single click, and DDoS protection is sitting in front of the network before you've even logged in. You pay a monthly fee instead of a time tax.
On LOW.MS specifically, you pick a region at checkout, your server spins up on bare metal, and you get the TCAdmin panel at https://control.low.ms with Web Console, File Manager, Configuration Files, Scheduled Tasks, Steam Update and automatic cloud backups wired in. We run Palworld on both Linux and Windows plans depending on what you need, and support is there 24/7 when something weird happens at 2am (and with Palworld, something weird always eventually happens at 2am).
What the hardware actually needs to look like
Pocketpair's own technical documentation recommends 16 GB of RAM for a dedicated server, and honestly we'd take that as the floor rather than the ceiling once you've got a full world with a dozen players and mature bases. Memory is where Palworld gets you. A quiet server at launch looks cheap; the same server four weeks in, with breeding pens and pal boxes everywhere, does not.
CPU is the other half of the story. The server runs on Unreal Engine 5 and community testing suggests world simulation is heavily bound by single-thread performance, so clock speed and IPC matter more than raw core count. Pocketpair hasn't formally published a spec on this, but anyone who's watched htop during a base raid has seen the same pattern.
Storage is the easy one. An SSD with room for the game files plus a bit of headroom for saves and backups is plenty — Palworld isn't a disk-hungry game.
Crossplay, and the console gotcha nobody mentions
Crossplay has been stable since v0.5.0 in March 2025. It's on by default, it covers Steam, Xbox, PS5 and Mac, and on a managed server you don't have to touch a config file to enable it.
There is one wrinkle that catches people out every single time. PC players can connect to your server by direct IP through the in-game "Join via IP" flow. Console players cannot. Xbox and PS5 users can only find your server through the in-game community server browser, which means your server has to be listed as a community server (it is by default) and has to have a recognisable name your friends can actually search for.
If your Xbox mate is telling you they "can't find the server," the answer is almost never ports or firewall. It's the browser. Have them search the exact server name, not the IP.
Settings, ports and the obvious mistakes
Palworld's defaults for UDP are 8211 for the game and 8212 for the query port. If you're self-hosting, those need to be forwarded. On a managed server they're already open.
Most of the gameplay knobs people actually care about — XP rates, Pal capture rates, day/night length, death penalty, base limits — live in PalWorldSettings.ini. You can edit it through the File Manager, or use the Configuration Files section in the panel if you'd rather not stare at an INI. We've got a full reference in our Palworld settings guide if you want to go deeper, and if you're setting up a self-hosted box via SteamCMD the Palworld dedicated server guide covers the raw install.
Two things we see go wrong constantly:
- People forget to set an admin password in the config before first boot, then can't run admin commands in-game and have to restart the server to add one.
- People connect once, it works, then a patch drops and the client updates before the server does. You get "connection timed out" and assume it's a networking problem. It isn't. It's a version mismatch. We wrote a specific guide on those connection timeouts because it comes up that often.
Moving an existing world across
If you're already hosting somewhere else (or on a local machine) and you want to bring your save with you, don't start over. Palworld saves are portable with a bit of care, and we've written up the full process in our migration guide, including the auto-migrate tool that pulls from another host's FTP without you having to touch .sav files.
That's the bit we're proudest of, honestly. Losing a save to a hosting change is miserable, and it doesn't need to happen.