We had a ticket this month where every player on a customer's Palworld server got dumped into the character creation screen on connect, even players who'd been levelling on it for weeks. The player save files were all still on disk. The world data was still in Level.sav. PalDefender was loading cleanly. Nothing about the server looked broken, and yet every login looked like a first-time login. After a fair bit of dead-end debugging we tracked it down to an open UE4SS bug, and disabling UE4SS fixed it in about five minutes.
If you only read one thing: PalDefender does not require UE4SS on Windows. You can disable UE4SS entirely and PalDefender will keep working from its own d3d9.dll loader, and your players' characters will come back the moment UE4SS is out of the picture.
1. What you'll see
Every player (or several of them at once) hits the character creation screen on connect, even on a server they've played on for weeks. Bases, pals and guilds are still listed in the world if you open Level.sav in a save editor like PalworldSaveTools, so the world data isn't gone. The smoking-gun pattern is in the Players folder: each affected player has two save files, not one.
Pal\Saved\SaveGames\0\<WorldGUID>\Players\
4763757D000000000000000000000000.sav <-- original character
4763757D000000000000000000000000_dps.sav <-- original pal storage
steam_76561198413207868.sav <-- new file created by UE4SS-affected login
The <hex>.sav file is the real character with all the progress. The steam_<id>.sav file is empty (or has a brand-new character if the player accidentally clicked through the creation screen) and only exists because the server, under UE4SS, computed the wrong PlayerUId for the connection and so couldn't find the real file.
You'll also see the server log accept the connection cleanly with no error. Something like:
[d3d9][info] Loading 'PalDefender.dll'...
[info] Starting PalDefender Anti Cheat v1.7.2
[info] Running Palworld dedicated server on :27505
[info] steam_76561198413207868 ('94.106.140.18') connected to the server.
[info] 'Roxface' (UserId=steam_76561198413207868, IP=94.106.140.18) has logged out.
The server thinks everything is fine. The client is the one being told "you have no character here, make one".
2. What's actually happening
This is a regression in UE4SS. When UE4SS is loaded into a Palworld dedicated server, it interferes with how Palworld resolves player account IDs into the in-world PlayerUId that keys every player record in Level.sav and every file in the Players folder. The result is that a returning player's connection is computed against a different PlayerUId than the one their existing save was written under, so the server can't match them to their world data and treats them as new.
This is documented in two open issues on the UE4SS repository:
Both describe the exact "two save files per player, characters back the moment UE4SS is removed" pattern. As of writing, the bug is open. The PalDefender author Okaetsu has commented that older UE4SS releases used to cause this and were supposed to have fixed it, but multiple users on the issues are still hitting it on the latest builds.
3. What it is NOT
Worth being clear about this before you go reaching for any destructive tools:
The original <hex>.sav files still contain every player's full character, inventory, equipment and stats. Open Level.sav in PalworldSaveTools and you'll see bases, guilds, pals and players all listed exactly as they were. So this is not save corruption, not Level.sav data loss, and not a server identity / migration mismatch (it happens on the same host with the same Palworld version and the same DedicatedServerName value the server has always had).
A backup restore will not fix it on its own either. Restoring Level.sav and the Players folder gives you back any minor record cleanup UE4SS triggered on the first broken boot, but UE4SS will immediately re-break the next reconnection unless you also remove it.
And the xNul palworld-host-save-fix tool, which gets recommended a lot for "create new character" bugs, is for a different problem entirely: it fixes GUID changes when you're migrating between server architectures (Windows to Linux and vice versa, or co-op to dedicated). If your server is a Windows dedicated that's been a Windows dedicated all along, xNul's tool isn't your fix.
If you've already run a save-fix tool against your server before reading this, that's recoverable but messier. Stop the server, restore the pre-tool save from your backup, then continue with section 4.
4. The fix
Stop the Palworld service first.
4a. Confirm PalDefender's loader
In Pal\Binaries\Win64\, your PalDefender install is one of two variants from Nexus Mods:
- PalDefender (Windows) is standalone. It uses its own
d3d9.dllto inject into the server. The PalDefender folder,PalDefender.dllandd3d9.dllare all you need. - PalDefender (UE4SS version) is for Wine / Proton setups and loads as a UE4SS C++ mod. It only works with UE4SS present.
If your server log shows [d3d9][info] Loading 'PalDefender.dll'... directly (no UE4SS initialisation lines beforehand), you have the standalone Windows variant and disabling UE4SS will not touch PalDefender at all. Skip ahead to 4b.
If your log shows UE4SS init lines before PalDefender loads, your install is the UE4SS variant of PalDefender and you'll need the standalone Windows variant in place before disabling UE4SS, otherwise PalDefender will go with it. On LOW.MS this is a support ticket job. Our control panel blocks customer .dll uploads via File Manager, SFTP and FTP for security reasons, so you cannot swap the PalDefender DLL in yourself. Open a ticket asking us to install the standalone Windows variant of PalDefender from the Nexus page and we'll handle the swap, then you can continue with 4b. If you're self-hosting on your own box this restriction doesn't apply, just download the standalone variant from Nexus and replace the existing PalDefender.dll and its loader directly.
4b. Remove the orphan files
For every affected player, delete the steam_<SteamID>.sav file from Pal\Saved\SaveGames\0\<WorldGUID>\Players\ if one exists. Leave the <hex>.sav and <hex>_dps.sav pair untouched, that's the real character data. The orphan steam_<id>.sav will otherwise still be there as a half-created shell that confuses things.
If players have been clicking through the character creation screen since the bug started, their steam_<id>.sav files now contain new (level 1, empty) characters. Delete those too. The original <hex>.sav will load on the next connection.
4c. Disable UE4SS
In Pal\Binaries\Win64\, rename or move:
UE4SS.dll->UE4SS.dll.disableddwmapi.dll->dwmapi.dll.disabled(UE4SS's most common proxy on current builds; verify it's the UE4SS one and not the genuine Windows system file by checking its size, the UE4SS proxy is much larger)ue4ss\->ue4ss.disabled\- The UE4SS
Mods\folder ->Mods.disabled\
Leave alone:
d3d9.dllPalDefender.dllPalDefender\
4d. Start, verify, watch one player reconnect
Start the service. In the log, you should see PalDefender initialise via [d3d9] as before, with no UE4SS lines. Have one affected player reconnect. Their character, equipment, pals and base should all be back. If yes, you're done. Have the rest of your community reconnect.
5. Confirming it's actually this bug before you act
If you're not 100% sure UE4SS is the cause, three checks before you change anything:
- Look for the two-file pattern. Open the Players folder in File Manager. Any player with both a
<hex>.savand asteam_<SteamID>.savis almost certainly affected, that's the diagnostic signature. - Open
Level.savin PalworldSaveTools (Search Players tab). If you can see all your players listed with their UIDs, levels, guild memberships and pal counts, the world data is intact and the bug is a UID mismatch on connection, not data loss. - Check the server log for a clean PalDefender / UE4SS startup. PalDefender loading without errors but players still getting the create-character prompt means the connection is reaching the server fine, the problem is downstream in player matching.
If all three check out, you're looking at the UE4SS regression.
6. What if you actually need UE4SS for other mods?
Right now you cannot have both UE4SS-based mods and reliable character persistence on a Palworld dedicated server. That's the trade-off the open bug forces.
The honest path for almost every community is: disable UE4SS, keep PalDefender standalone, and drop any UE4SS Lua / scripted mods. PalDefender already covers most of what people install UE4SS for on a dedicated server (admin commands, anti-cheat, MOTD, whitelisting) so you might find you weren't really using UE4SS for anything that mattered. If you genuinely need a specific UE4SS-based mod, the only other option is accepting that every player creates a new character on first reconnect and that you'll have to use admin commands or a save editor to hand them back their inventory and base ownership each time, which is not a real option for most communities.
The longer-term answer is the upstream fix. Subscribe to UE4SS issue #1091 for updates, and we'll update this article with the version number whenever a fixed UE4SS release ships.
If you're not sure whether your specific mod stack actually needs UE4SS, open a support ticket and we'll have a look and work out what's required.
7. Related reading
If you're here because your customers reported lost characters, our general Palworld Server Troubleshooting Guide is the catch-all and worth a look. For background on the mod stack, How to Add Mods to Your Palworld Server covers both .PAK and UE4SS installation. If you're moving a save between hosts or operating systems (a different problem with similar-sounding symptoms), see Converting Palworld Save. And Palworld Save Location & How to Upload Your World is the reference for where everything lives on disk.
Primary sources behind everything above: UE4SS issue #1091 (the open Palworld character-reset bug), UE4SS issue #836 (the original report from 2025), the PalDefender Nexus page (for the Windows vs UE4SS variants), gartmand/palworld-player-tools (for the unrelated "records actually deleted from Level.sav" bug), and xNul/palworld-host-save-fix (for the unrelated cross-architecture GUID migration bug).