So you've been playing Palworld solo, built up a world you're proud of, and now you want to move it to a dedicated server so your friends can join. Good news: the world transfers cleanly. Less good news: there's a known Palworld quirk around the host character that catches people out every time. I'll cover both.
Where Palworld Saves Live on Your PC
Palworld stores singleplayer saves here:
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Pal\Saved\SaveGames\
Press Win + R, paste that path, hit Enter. That drops you in C:\Users\<YourUsername>\AppData\Local\Pal\Saved\SaveGames\ without having to fight Windows about hidden folders.
Inside you'll see one or more folders named with a 32-character hex string, something like 2E85FD38BAA792EB1D4C09386F3A3CDA. Each one is a separate save tied to your Steam account. If you've only played one world, there's one folder. If you've started a few, sort by date modified and pick the most recent.
Open that folder and you'll see:
Level.sav– the main world stateLevelMeta.sav– metadata Palworld uses to list the saveLocalData.sav– per-install local settingsWorldOption.sav– settings snapshot (more on this one in a minute)- a
Players/subfolder with one.savper player that has loaded this world
Make a note of the parent folder's name, that 32-character string. You'll need it later.
Xbox Game Pass players
Your saves are in a different place and a different format:
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Packages\PocketpairInc.Palworld_ad4psfrxyesvt\SystemAppData\wgs\
Microsoft's WGS container format isn't directly portable to a dedicated server. You'd need a third-party converter, and that's outside the scope of this guide.
The Host-Character Quirk
Before touching anything, the bad news. Palworld identifies players by a GUID, and the GUID your character gets in singleplayer is not the same one the dedicated server will assign you. So when you upload your singleplayer save and connect, the server doesn't recognise your old character. It spawns you as a brand new one with no Pals, no levels, no inventory.
The world itself transfers fine. Your base, your buildings, your Pal box, map progress, all of it comes across. It's just the host character that breaks.
Two ways round this:
- Accept the loss. Stash everything important in chests before you upload, roll a new character on the dedicated server, grab your stuff out of the chests. Quickest path if you don't mind re-levelling.
- Run palworld-host-save-fix, xNul's community Python script. It rewrites your old character's GUID to match the one the dedicated server gives you. Keeps the character intact. It needs
uesave-rsalongside it. There's a full walkthrough over at /knowledgebase/converting-palworld-save.
Anyone who wasn't the singleplayer host is fine. They just connect and create characters as normal.
Before You Do Anything
Two bits of housekeeping. Both matter.
Stop your server first. Head to control.low.ms, find your Palworld service, stop it. Uploading files to a running server is how you get corrupted saves – the server writes to Level.sav constantly, and overwriting it mid-write leaves you with garbage data.
Back up the server's existing save too. Even if the server is fresh and there's nothing worth keeping, build the habit. In the LOW.MS Control Panel, open Cloud Backup from the sidebar and hit create. Takes seconds. Saves headaches if the import goes sideways.
Uploading via File Manager
The panel's built-in File Manager is fine for small-to-medium saves:
- Log into control.low.ms and select your Palworld server.
- Click File Manager in the sidebar.
- Navigate to
Pal/Saved/SaveGames/0/. - You'll see one folder in here already, with a 32-character hex name. That's the server's current save. Rename it to something like
<original-name>_backupso it doesn't get clobbered. - Upload the entire save folder from your PC – the one named with the 32-char string from
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Pal\Saved\SaveGames\. Keep the original folder name. Drop it intoPal/Saved/SaveGames/0/. - Open the uploaded folder and delete
WorldOption.sav. This is the one step people skip, and it's the one that matters most. I'll explain why in the next section.
Once a save grows past a few hundred MB – and Palworld saves can balloon if your base has hundreds of placed objects or you've explored a lot of the map – File Manager gets slow. Use SFTP instead.
Uploading via SFTP
SFTP is on port 8822. WinSCP or FileZilla both work. Your credentials are in Service Settings on the panel.
Connection details:
- Protocol: SFTP
- Host: your server's address (shown in Service Settings)
- Port: 8822
- Username and password: same as your panel login for this service
Connect, navigate to Pal/Saved/SaveGames/0/ on the server side, drag your local save folder across. Same routine as File Manager – rename the old folder first, drop yours in keeping the 32-char name, delete WorldOption.sav from the uploaded folder. SFTP handles large transfers more reliably than the browser-based File Manager and you get a proper progress bar.
Why You Delete WorldOption.sav
Palworld has two server config files and they don't do the same job.
PalWorldSettings.ini is the primary one. It holds everything you think of as server settings: difficulty, XP rate, drop multipliers, server name, player limits, PvP toggles, stamina rates, hunger, the lot. This is the file you edit when you want to tweak how the server plays.
GameUserSettings.ini is a secondary file. The only line in it that really matters for save management is DedicatedServerName=, which tells the server which save folder under Pal/Saved/SaveGames/0/ to load. More on that in the next section.
Now the catch. WorldOption.sav is Palworld's way of storing a snapshot of world settings inside the save itself. When it's present, the server reads from it and ignores PalWorldSettings.ini entirely. Your carefully tuned XP rates, drop multipliers, base worker caps, whatever you had configured – all ignored. The server runs on whatever settings your singleplayer world was using.
Deleting WorldOption.sav from the uploaded save pushes control back to PalWorldSettings.ini, which is what you want on a dedicated server. Players will be asked to pick their respawn point again on first load. Nothing else is affected.
xNul calls this out in the host-save-fix README, and it's the fix for the classic "my server ignores my .ini settings" complaint.
Pointing the Server at Your Save
This is the step people forget, and then they wonder why the server boots into a fresh empty world.
DedicatedServerName in GameUserSettings.ini tells the server which folder under Pal/Saved/SaveGames/0/ to load. On LOW.MS the file is at:
Pal\Saved\Config\WindowsServer\GameUserSettings.ini
Open it through Configuration Files in the panel, or just edit it in File Manager. Find the DedicatedServerName= line and set the value to the exact name of the save folder you uploaded. If your folder is 2E85FD38BAA792EB1D4C09386F3A3CDA, the line becomes:
DedicatedServerName=2E85FD38BAA792EB1D4C09386F3A3CDA
Case matters. No quotes, no extra spaces. If the value doesn't match a real folder under Pal/Saved/SaveGames/0/, the server generates a new empty save with a fresh random name on next boot. That's the usual symptom of "I uploaded my world and it's not loading."
Save the file.
Starting Up
Start the server back up from the panel. First boot with an imported save takes a bit longer than a normal start while the server reads the world data, so give it a minute or two.
Open Web Console to watch the startup logs. When you see:
Setting breakpad minidump AppID = 2394010
…the server has loaded and it's ready to accept connections. (2394010 is the Palworld Dedicated Server Steam App ID. The main game is 1623730, which is why you'll sometimes see logs showing that number instead, depending on how the server was launched.) Grab your connection details from the panel and join.
If you're the singleplayer host and you didn't run the host-save-fix script, you'll spawn as a new character. That's expected – see the quirk section above. Other players just connect normally.
A Few Things Worth Knowing
The .sav files are Palworld's packed binary format – GVAS, the Unreal Engine save container, with a custom Palworld compression layer on top. You can't open them in a text editor and tweak a value. Tools like uesave-rs can convert them to JSON for editing, but it's not casual work. For most people, the in-game settings and PalWorldSettings.ini cover everything you'd want to adjust without touching .sav files.
Version mismatches cause problems. If your local game has updated to a newer patch but the server is still on an older one – or the other way round – the save may fail to load or behave oddly. Keep both on the same version. Use Steam Update in the panel to bring the server onto the same game build as your client before importing.
If something goes wrong after uploading, that's what the backup is for. Open Cloud Restore in the sidebar, pick the backup you made earlier, and you're back where you started.
For migrating from another host (rather than from your local PC), see /knowledgebase/migrating-to-lowms-from-another-host – the panel has an automated tool that handles it in about 60 seconds. For the full host-character GUID-fix walkthrough, see /knowledgebase/converting-palworld-save.