How to Change World Settings: All Options and Defaults

World settings are the sliders that decide how fast you level, how easily Pals go into a sphere, what dying costs you, and how many Pals your base can hold — and almost all of them can still be changed on a save you have already sunk 60 hours into. This guide covers the exact menu path for a new world, an existing world and a dedicated server, every setting with the value it ships at, the three options that lock the moment a world is created, and the ones actually worth touching.

Where World Settings Live

There is one rule that trips up everybody: you cannot change world settings while you are in the world. There is no entry for them in the pause menu, and the Options screen you can reach in-game only holds graphics, audio, controls and language. Every world setting is edited from the title screen instead, which means saving out and reloading. The upside is that the change costs you nothing else — your progress, base and Palbox are untouched, and the new values apply the next time the world loads.

Changing Settings on a World You Already Started

Setting Them While Creating a New World

On the creation screen you name the world, choose whether Multiplayer is on, and pick a Difficulty. Choosing Custom unlocks the Custom Settings button, which opens the full list of sliders and toggles below. The screen tells you outright that difficulty can still be changed after the world is created, so there is no need to agonise over the choice — pick Normal, play a few hours, and adjust once you know what actually annoys you. The only decisions that genuinely stick are the randomizer and the two hardcore switches.

Difficulty Presets and What Each One Changes

The presets are bundles of the same sliders you can set by hand, so picking one is just a fast way to move twenty values at once. Casual is the relaxed-builder option — easier captures, more EXP, faster gathering and hatching, softer fights and no death penalty at all. Normal is the balance the game was tuned around. Hard raises incoming damage, cuts your damage and EXP, makes Pals harder to catch, slows gathering and incubation, and drops your items and your Pals when you die. Hardcore is a separate beast: it is permanent loss, and unlike difficulty it cannot be switched on or off later.

Custom is underused. If Hard's combat is what you want but losing a team on Mount Obsidian is not, set the damage multipliers to Hard's feel and leave Death Penalty on the mildest option — the full breakdown of those five values is in the how to keep items on death guide. Nothing in the game gates content behind a difficulty setting, so there is no achievement cost to running a mixed profile.

The Settings You Cannot Change Later

Three options are permanent, and the menu warns you about each with a note attached to the line itself. Random Pal Mode rewrites which Pals live where, so it has to be decided before the world generates. Hardcore Mode and permanent Pal loss lock as soon as the game starts, because letting a player switch them off after a bad fight would make them meaningless. Everything else on the list — difficulty included — stays editable for the life of the save.

Note that the two hardcore switches are separate lines. You can run permanent Pal death without risking your own character, which is a far more interesting middle ground than the full Hardcore preset — every fight suddenly matters, but a bad fall does not end the save. Just be certain before you confirm, because that is the last chance you get.

Every Custom Setting and Its Default

Below is the full Custom Settings list with the value each one ships at and the name it uses in a server config file, so the in-game slider and the text file line up when you go looking. Nearly every multiplier starts at 1.00 — that is the baseline the whole game is balanced against, so treat a change as a deliberate trade rather than free value.

Rates and Multipliers

Twenty-six of the settings are plain multipliers, and they split into three jobs: pacing (time, EXP, capture, work speed), survival pressure (hunger, stamina, regeneration, damage), and resource flow (gathering, drops, structure decay). The four most impactful for a normal playthrough are EXP Rate, Pal Capture Rate, Work Speed Multiplier and the incubation time — those decide how long the mid-game grind runs. The damage multipliers are the ones to leave alone longest, because they change what every boss fight feels like rather than how long it takes to get there.

Item Weight Rate deserves a callout because it solves a problem players usually attack with levels instead. Dropping it to 0.5 halves the weight of every stack you carry, which frees the stat points you would have poured into Weight for the stats that actually raise your damage. The incubation line is the other quiet one: it sets the base clock for a Massive Egg in hours, and everything in the how to hatch eggs fast guide — temperature, the Incubation Acceleration research, Dynamoff's partner skill — multiplies against that number.

Death, Travel, and Survival Toggles

These are the switches that change how a session feels rather than how fast it moves. Fast Travel is on by default and there is a second line that restricts it to your own bases only, which is the setting hardcore-leaning servers use to make the map feel large again — worth knowing before you assume the 137 fast travel points on the Palworld interactive map's fast travel layer are permanent infrastructure. Death Penalty ships on the option that spares your equipment, so out of the box you drop your bag but keep your gear and your whole team.

World Events and Dropped Items

Both event toggles are on by default, and both are worth leaving on unless a base is genuinely getting flattened. Raid events are what send the game's 88 raid groups at your camp, everything from a six-Thug Syndicate patrol up to the late-game herds — the full roster with wave composition and rewards is on the Palworld base raids page. Predator Pals are the roaming elite variants that hit far above the local level band. The supply drop interval governs how often the game's supply crates land, and each of the 8 regions has its own loot pool, which the supply drop loot tables break down.

Base, Guild, and Structure Limits

This block is where a multiplayer world is really tuned, and the base worker cap is the single most requested change in the whole list. Fifteen Pals per base sounds generous until you price out a full production chain — kindling, watering, planting, handiwork and transporting all competing for slots, which is exactly the pressure the best base Pals ranking exists to solve. Raising it works, but every extra worker is another AI actor the host has to simulate, and the game will tell you when your numbers exceed what your hardware is comfortable with. Structure count is uncapped out of the box, and with 485 buildable structures in the game there is plenty of room to find the ceiling on your own machine.

Multiplayer, Cross-Play, and the Global Palbox

Multiplayer is a per-world toggle rather than a separate mode, so a solo save can be opened up to friends later without starting over. A hosted co-op world takes 4 players, while a dedicated server takes 32 — that gap is the whole reason to run a server, and the Palworld multiplayer guide covers the trade-offs. The Global Palbox lines are newer and asymmetric by default: exporting a Pal's genetic data is allowed, importing one back into the world is not, which stops a fresh save from being filled with fully-bred endgame Pals on day one.

Editing a Dedicated Server's Settings

A dedicated server has no menu, so everything above is edited as text. The file you want is PalWorldSettings.ini inside the server's Pal/Saved/Config folder — LinuxServer on a Linux host, WindowsServer on a Windows one — and it only exists after the server has been launched once. There is a second file, DefaultPalWorldSettings.ini, sitting in the server root, and it is a decoy: it states in its own header that it is a sample and that changes to it are not reflected on the server. Copy its contents across, then edit the real file.

Server-Only Settings That Never Appear in the Menu

The config file carries a second tier of settings with no slider anywhere in the game, and some of them are genuinely useful to know about. Equipment durability, food spoilage and ranch production all have their own multipliers, so a server can soften the parts of the survival loop that annoy its players without touching combat. There is also a switch for each of the five stats you can raise, which lets a server disable stat point spending on, say, Weight while leaving the rest alone — a heavier-handed version of the Item Weight Rate trick above.

The Settings Worth Changing First

Most players do not want a different game, they want two or three specific frustrations gone. These are the changes that buy the most quality of life for the least damage to the balance — and because none of them are locked, you can undo any of them the moment the game feels too soft. Capture rate is the one to reach for first: catching ten of a Pal for the Paldeck bonus is the single most repetitive job in a playthrough, and it is not a skill test. Everything else here is about removing chores rather than removing challenge.

The ones to leave alone for a first playthrough are the damage multipliers and Pal Appearance Rate. Damage sliders change every boss fight at once — including the tower bosses the story is paced around — so a small nudge there does far more than it looks like it will. Appearance Rate is the performance killer of the group, and the menu warns you about it directly; more Pals on screen means more simulation, and on a hosted co-op world that cost lands entirely on the host's machine.

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