Tuning Palworld world settings: XP, capture, and raids

Tune your Palworld server with PalWorldSettings.ini: XP, capture, raids and day length, plus the new 1.0 settings for voice chat, Pal transfers and changed defaults.

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.

New in 1.0

The 1.0 update added a handful of settings worth knowing, and changed a couple of defaults that will surprise you if you do not.

bEnableVoiceChat: turns on proximity voice chat for the server. It is off by default, and it is the only way voice works on a dedicated server. VoiceChatMaxVolumeDistance and VoiceChatZeroVolumeDistance set how far your voice carries at full volume and where it fades to nothing. One catch: voice chat does not work for players on the Microsoft Store (Game Pass) build of the game.
bAllowGlobalPalboxExport / bAllowGlobalPalboxImport: let players deposit Pals into the global Palbox on this server and withdraw them on another. This is how you move Pals between two separate servers, since proper clustering did not ship (see Palworld server clustering).
bIsPvP: switches the server to PvP so players can damage each other. The full setup, and the death-penalty decision that goes with it, is in Setting up a Palworld 1.0 PvP server.
bEnableBuildingPlayerUIdDisplay: shows the ID of the player who placed a structure, which is handy on community servers for working out who built what.
MonsterFarmActionSpeedRate: adjusts how fast your ranch Pals produce items.
PhysicsActiveDropItemMaxNum: caps how many dropped items use full physics at once. Lowering it is another lever against save bloat and stutter on busy worlds.

Two default changes caught people out on launch day. Dedicated-server defaults now track single-player Normal difficulty rather than the old server defaults, and on Normal difficulty players no longer drop their equipped items on death. If you want the old behaviour, set it deliberately; do not assume it carried over.

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.

A word on mods

Palworld does have a mod scene through the Steam Workshop and pak-based loaders, but it is a fragile one for servers: mods break on version bumps, and Pocketpair were blunt about 1.0 that leftover mod files crash servers and can corrupt saves. Our managed Palworld image does not run third-party mods, which is deliberate; it keeps your server stable through patches like this one. PalWorldSettings.ini and your save files are your customisation surface, and between them they cover most of what people reach for mods to do.

Next steps

Last updated 2026-07-10. Notice a mistake? Tell us.