We've had a steady trickle of tickets about this one ever since Palworld launched, and they all look a bit different on the surface. Settings reverting after a restart. Egg timers stuck at 72 hours no matter what you set. Base camp worker counts snapping back to default. Global Palbox refusing to import Pals with that cryptic "current world settings forbid Pal reconstruction from genetic data" message. Different symptoms, same root cause: your server has a WorldOption.sav file, and it's overriding your PalWorldSettings.ini.
TL;DR: if WorldOption.sav exists in your world save folder, the server ignores most of your ini. Since Palworld 1.0 you almost certainly don't want that file. Make sure the Generate WorldOption.sav option (now marked Legacy) is unticked in your panel and restart. Our startup process removes the stale file automatically and your ini takes over again.
The one rule to remember
Palworld dedicated servers read their settings from PalWorldSettings.ini, which on your LOW.MS server lives at:
Pal\Saved\Config\WindowsServer\PalWorldSettings.ini
But if a WorldOption.sav file exists inside your world save folder:
Pal\Saved\SaveGames\0\<your world ID>\WorldOption.sav
the server reads its world settings from that file instead, and most of the ini gets ignored. Server-level settings like the server name, passwords, ports and RCON still come from the ini. The gameplay stuff – rates, timers, caps, toggles – all comes from the .sav. You can edit the ini all day and nothing changes.
Quick way to check which situation you're in: open File Manager in your control panel, browse to Pal\Saved\SaveGames\0\, open your world folder and look for WorldOption.sav. If it's there, it's winning.
How the file gets there
Two ways, usually.
You uploaded a world that was created in-game. Co-op and single-player worlds always ship with a WorldOption.sav, because that's how the game itself stores world settings. Move one of those saves onto a dedicated server and the override comes along for the ride. Our save upload guide covers the actual move.
The legacy Generate WorldOption.sav feature. Back at early access launch in January 2024, dedicated servers genuinely ignored some ini keys – max Pals per base (
BaseCampWorkerMaxNum) was the famous one. The community workaround was converting your ini into a WorldOption.sav, so we added a one-click generator to the panel, plus an option to regenerate the file on every restart. It was the right fix at the time.
It isn't any more. Pocketpair sorted the ini handling long ago, and since 1.0 the server reads everything straight from the ini. Worse, the old converter predates 1.0, so anything added since – Global Palbox import and export, hardcore mode, the randomizer, crossplay platform control – never makes it into the generated file. That's exactly the Global Palbox ticket we keep seeing: the ini says bAllowGlobalPalboxImport=True, the WorldOption.sav doesn't contain the key at all, and the .sav wins.
The fix
On a LOW.MS server this is now a two-minute job:
- In your panel, make sure the Generate WorldOption.sav option (labelled Legacy these days) is unticked. It's off by default on new servers.
- Restart your server.
That's it. On startup we check every world folder and remove any stale WorldOption.sav while the option is off, so PalWorldSettings.ini becomes the single source of truth again. From then on, edit your settings through Configuration Files in the panel and they'll actually apply.
Self-hosting or on another provider? Stop the server, back up the save folder, delete WorldOption.sav from the world folder, then start it back up. Same result.
A few things people trip over after the fix:
- Some values only apply to new things, not existing ones. Eggs already sitting in incubators keep the hatch timer they started with – pop a fresh egg in and the new
PalEggDefaultHatchingTimekicks in. We had a customer convinced the fix hadn't worked when the eggs just needed swapping out. - If you use our config editor, it writes the ini for you. Hand edits to the ini are fine too, just keep everything on the one
OptionSettings=(...)line. Palworld is fussy about the format. - Take a restart as the apply step. Nothing you change takes effect until the server restarts.
If you actually want to keep WorldOption.sav
There's not much reason to these days, but if you're running an older save or you just prefer it, you can edit the file directly with a community tool like pal-conf.bluefissure.com: download the .sav via File Manager, load it into the editor, change what you need, upload it back.
One warning from experience: take a backup first. Cloud Backup in the panel does this in one click. We've restored more than one server where a hand-edited WorldOption.sav wiped days of progress, and while our backups saved the day, you don't want to be the person finding out how recent the last one was.
If you're not sure which file your server is reading, or your settings still won't stick after all this, open a support ticket and we'll take a look. It's usually a thirty-second diagnosis once we can see the save folder.
For the full rundown of what every setting in PalWorldSettings.ini does, see our Palworld server configuration guide, and if you've just come back for 1.0, the 1.0 server update guide covers what changed.