Tuning Palworld world settings: XP, capture, and raids
Tune your Palworld server with PalWorldSettings.ini: adjust XP rates, capture chance, raid frequency, day length, and drop rates without breaking your save.
Tuning Palworld world settings happens in one file: PalWorldSettings.ini. Edit it, restart the server, and your XP rates, capture chances, raid frequency, day length, and drop rates take effect. No dashboard sliders, no separate tools.
Where the file lives
The full path inside your server is:
/data/Pal/Saved/Config/LinuxServer/PalWorldSettings.ini
Open your dashboard, hit Files, navigate to the path above, click the file, edit, and save. The server picks up changes on the next restart.
The file is one long line of Key=Value pairs inside an OptionSettings=(...) block; don't break the structure or the server will refuse to read it.
Common knobs and what they actually do
These are the settings most groups touch. There are plenty more in the file; these are the ones that move the needle for balance.
Experience multipliers
- ExpRate: player XP multiplier. Default 1.0; 2.0 doubles levelling speed.
- PalCaptureRate: how likely a pal sphere is to succeed. Default 1.0; 2.0 makes catching considerably easier.
- PalSpawnNumRate: how many wild pals appear in the world. Bump this up for busier biomes; it does cost CPU.
Day and night
- DayTimeSpeedRate: how fast daylight passes. Lower is longer.
- NightTimeSpeedRate: how fast night passes. Long nights make raids scarier; short nights make them mostly cosmetic.
Combat and damage
- PalDamageRateAttack / PalDamageRateDefense: how hard your pals hit and how much they soak.
- PlayerDamageRateAttack / PlayerDamageRateDefense: the player side of the same coin.
- DeathPenalty: from no penalty to dropping everything including pals. Sensible groups pick DropItemAndEquipment.
Raids and drops
- EnableInvaderEnemy: turns base raids on or off. Off is a popular pick for builder-focused groups.
- DropItemMaxNum: how many ground-drop items the world holds before old ones despawn. Lower it on long-running worlds; it helps save bloat.
- DropItemAliveMaxHours: how long dropped items survive on the ground.
Tip: change one or two things at a time
It's tempting to crank ten settings at once and ride off into a custom server. Resist. If something feels off (raids too brutal, captures trivially easy, XP gain runaway), you want to know which dial caused it. Change one or two values, play a session, decide if you like it, then adjust further.
Back up before you tweak
Saves can be sensitive to config changes, especially on patch days. Before any non-trivial edit, hit the Manual backup button on the dashboard. Full instructions in Manual backups. It takes about ten seconds and has saved more than a few worlds.
Admin actions from the dashboard
Palworld doesn't have a traditional console or RCON, but it does have a REST admin API, and we surface the useful bits in the dashboard:
- Announce: send a broadcast message to everyone on the server. Handy for "restarting in five minutes" warnings.
- Save: force the world to save immediately. Run this before risky config changes or before kicking a problem player, rather than waiting for the next auto-save.
- Kick: remove a player by their Palworld user ID. They can rejoin.
- Ban / Unban: same, but persistent. Banned IDs go into the server's banlist.
The admin panel handles authentication for you via the REST API; you don't need to configure anything to use these actions.
No mods, by design
Palworld doesn't have a third-party mod ecosystem. There's no official mod loader, and the dashboard doesn't have a Mods & Plugins tab for Palworld because there's nothing for it to install. PalWorldSettings.ini and your save files are the customisation surface for now. If the modding scene matures later, we'll add support; until then, the config file is where all the tuning happens.
Next steps
Last updated 2026-05-20. Notice a mistake? Tell us.