Palworld leaves early access this Friday. Version 1.0 lands on July 10, it's free for everyone who already owns the game, and Pocketpair say the patch notes run to 27 pages. If you run a dedicated server, this is the biggest update your server will ever have taken, and ten minutes of prep this week beats finding out on Friday night what you should have done on Thursday.
Here's what we actually know, what we don't, and what to do before the update hits.
What's confirmed
Pocketpair announced the date at Summer Game Fest with the game's first cinematic trailer. The headline items:
- The World Tree region finally opens up, plus new areas that roughly double the playable map by press estimates. Pocketpair haven't published a square-kilometre figure, so take "double" as directionally right rather than gospel.
- A PvP mode.
- The Wing Pack, new aerial traversal gear, and Sky Islands to use it on.
- Genetic Recombination, a new breeding system.
- New Pals. Pocketpair won't give a number, but their comms lead John Buckley says it's "more than we've ever added before in any one update". You'll see specific counts floating around this week; none of them are official.
It launches simultaneously on Steam, PS5, Xbox and Game Pass, targeting around 12:30 PM JST on the 10th, which is early morning in the UK and overnight in the US. Pocketpair have been upfront that the exact hour might slip.
What we don't know yet
This section exists because there's a lot of confident-sounding nonsense circulating this week. Until the patch notes drop, nobody outside Pocketpair knows:
- Whether
PalWorldSettings.inigains, loses or renames any keys, including how the new PvP mode is toggled server-side. - Whether the 32-player cap changes.
- Whether existing worlds get the new regions, or whether that needs a fresh world. Press reporting says saves carry forward and there's no forced wipe, which matches how Pocketpair handled Sakurajima and Feybreak, but treat it as unconfirmed until Friday.
- Anything about "server clustering". You may have seen other hosting sites describing a 1.0 clustering feature in some detail. We can't find a single Pocketpair source for it. If it's real, it'll be in the patch notes. If it isn't, well, you read it here first.
We'll publish a proper server-admin breakdown once we've read all 27 pages.
Take a manual backup this week
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 doesn't age out of the rotation. Self-hosting? Copy your Pal/Saved/SaveGames/ directory somewhere safe. Whatever happens on Friday, you want the option of putting the world back exactly as it was on Thursday.
Have the wipe conversation with your players now
No forced wipe is expected. But "your old world still works" and "your old world is the best way to experience 1.0" are two different claims, and with this many mechanical overhauls landing at once, plenty of communities will choose to start fresh so everyone hits the new content together. If your group has been winding down anyway, a fresh world on launch day is an easy sell. Decide before Friday, not in the panel at 6am while everyone argues in Discord.
If you run mods, assume they all break
A version bump this size will break RE-UE4SS and most .pak mods on day one. That's not a criticism of anyone, it's just what happens to mod loaders when the underlying game changes this much, and the Palworld-specific RE-UE4SS build will take however long it takes to catch up.
The sane play:
- Take that backup.
- Remove or disable your mods before the server takes the 1.0 update.
- Run vanilla for a few days.
- Reinstall mods one at a time once their authors confirm 1.0 support.
If your server updates and then crashes on boot, mods are suspect number one. Our mods guide covers where everything lives and how to pull things out cleanly. And if the only reason you had UE4SS installed was PalDefender, don't reinstall it out of habit – PalDefender's standalone Windows variant doesn't need UE4SS at all, which also sidesteps the character-reset bug that's still open.
Look at your RAM before the rush
Pocketpair already recommend 16 GB for a dedicated server, and a map that roughly doubles 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 mature, this is a good week to bump to 15 or 20 GB – it's a quick upgrade and you can do it without losing anything. Current options are on the Palworld hosting page. We'll be watching real memory behaviour on our own nodes from Friday and will say so publicly if 1.0 moves the floor.
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 is still 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 goes away. There's a full writeup if you want the deeper diagnosis, because Palworld's version-mismatch error message tells you nothing useful.
One more thing on timing: launch-day SteamCMD traffic is always rough for the first hour or two after a release this big. If the update crawls, that's Steam's CDN under load, not your server.
If you're not hosting with us yet and the trailer talked you into it, plans are on the Palworld hosting page and servers provision in a couple of minutes. Either way, see you Friday – we'll have the patch-notes breakdown up once the 27 pages are public and we've separated the genuinely server-relevant bits from the noise.