Palworld 1.0.4 Patch Notes: New Missions, Fishing, and Fixes

Version 1.0.4 is live on every platform, and it is the widest patch since 1.0 itself — two new sub-missions, a proper fishing rework, cheaper access to Ancient Bark, and roughly eighty bug fixes. Below is what changed, which numbers it moves in your save, and the handful of entries that quietly matter more than they look.

Palworld 1.0.4 Release Date and Platforms

The patch went out on September 7, 2026 for every supported platform at once — Steam, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One and One S, and Game Pass. It is a mixed release: real balance and system changes on top of a long fix list, so it is not one to skim. Dedicated-server groups need everyone on the same build before anyone can connect, and version mismatch errors now print the target's version number, which makes matching your server to your client a lot less guessy than it used to be.

The Changes That Actually Affect Your Save

Most of 1.0.4 is repair work, but six entries change what you can do rather than how smoothly you do it. The Ancient Bark requirement is the headline because it unblocks four of the best accessories in the game for players who never built a specialist logging team. The fishing changes are the biggest quality-of-life swing, the Pal Critic swaps rewrite two collection checklists, and three separate fixes (Lucky, Idiosyncratic, Mercy Hit) restore bonuses you have been paying for and not receiving.

Change	What it does	Why it matters
Ancient Bark needs only Work Suitability Lv. 1	Any Lumbering Pal can gather it	Unlocks 4 accessories that need 90 Bark between them, with your starter loggers
Two new sub-missions	"Beyond Dimensions", then "From the Far Side of the Moon"	First new quest content since 1.0; starts at Fisherman's Point in Mount Obsidian
Bait item yields retuned	Every one of the 9 baits pays out differently	The 80% bonus bait is the whole reason to fish for loot rather than Pals
Pal Critic requests changed	Selyne → Dogen, Bastigor → Faleris Aqua	Both swaps are easier to fill than what they replaced
Lucky and Idiosyncratic fixed	Two rank 4 passives were only partly firing	You get the Defense you were already rolling for
Mercy Hit works while riding	Damage cap now applies to your mount's attacks	Pal Tamer's Glasses finally does its job in mounted combat

Ancient Bark Now Needs Work Suitability Lv. 1

Ancient Bark is a rarity 1 wood that weighs 5.0 a unit and sells for 800 gold, and it exists for exactly one reason: four accessories. Before 1.0.4 the gathering job was gated above the bottom rung, which meant a base full of early Pals sat next to bark it could not touch. Now anything with Lumbering at all qualifies, and the six Pals sitting at Lumbering 1 include Lifmunk and Tanzee — two rarity 1 Pals you can have on day one. Of the 63 Lumbering Pals in the game, all 63 now clear the bar.

That matters because the four recipes are not filler. Between them they want 90 Ancient Bark, and the payoff includes mid-air jumping, the best carry-weight accessory in the game, and the only wearable that caps your damage so you stop killing the Pals you are trying to catch. All four sit at rarity 3 and all four are worth building.

Accessory	Ancient Bark	Other materials	What it gives you
Air Walker Mk I	15	20 Hexolite, 30 Paldium Fragment, 15 Dark Fragment, 30 Nightstar Sand	Mid-air jump plus a mid-air dash
Islander's Tool Belt	30	20 Refined Ingot, 40 Leather, 35 Paldium Fragment	Large carry-weight and work-speed boost
Pal Tamer's Glasses	15	20 Refined Ingot, 30 Paldium Fragment, 10 Ancient Civilization Parts	Mercy Hit — attacks can't drop a target below 1 HP; reveals hidden Pal info
Reptyro Charm	30	20 Refined Ingot, 20 Flame Organ, 30 Paldium Fragment, 30 Carbon Fiber	Heat resistance tier 3 and Fire resistance tier 4

There is a second 1.0.4 entry that lands on this same table. Mercy Hit — the passive the Pal Tamer's Glasses grant — was not being applied to attacks your Pal made while you were riding it, so mounted combat could flatten a capture target that the glasses were supposed to leave at 1 HP. That is fixed, which makes the 15 Bark the cheapest catch-rate upgrade in the patch. The full list of options is on our Palworld accessories list.

Two New Sub-Missions Start in Mount Obsidian

"Beyond Dimensions" is picked up from an NPC at Fisherman's Point in Mount Obsidian, and clearing it opens "From the Far Side of the Moon" as a follow-up. Fisherman's Point is one of the 137 fast travel points on Palpagos, so if you have already tagged it you can be standing on the quest-giver in under a minute — check the map's Fast Travel layer if you are not sure whether you unlocked it. These are the first new missions added since launch, and they go on top of the existing list on our Palworld missions list.

Pocketpair hasn't published the reward tables for either one, so don't plan a farm route around them yet. Two smaller mission fixes ship alongside: the marker for "Collecting Pure Quartz" was missing entirely, and the No. 1 Wildlife Sanctuary pin in Zoe's sub-mission was pointing at the wrong spot. If Pure Quartz is what you actually need, there are 607 nodes marked on the map's Pure Quartz layer and no marker required.

Fishing Got a Real Overhaul

Four separate fishing changes land at once: difficulty was retuned for spots in Sunreach and the World Tree, the item payout per successful catch was adjusted for each bait type individually, control prompts and recommended-gear displays were added to the minigame UI, and fish behaviour during the minigame is now a World Settings option you can turn down. There is also a fix for the reward panel showing the same item type in more than one slot, which was making good hauls look better than they were.

Because the yield change is per bait, the bait you pick is now the single biggest decision in fishing. Only three of the nine baits carry an item bonus at all, and one of them carries more than double the next best. Risky Bait is the outlier — it shrinks nothing in the numbers below because it grows the bar, but the tradeoff is real difficulty rather than a smaller bar in practice. If you are fishing for loot rather than Pals, it is the only correct answer.

Bait	Bar size	Bite chance	Gauge drain	Extra items
Risky Bait	1.30x	1.0x	1.0x	+80%
Alluring Bait	1.30x	1.0x	1.0x	+40%
Lucky Bait	1.25x	1.0x	1.0x	+40%
Quick Bait	1.25x	1.5x	1.0x	—
Deluxe Bait	1.15x	1.0x	1.0x	—
High Quality Bait	1.00x	1.5x	1.0x	—
Sweet Bait	1.00x	1.5x	1.0x	—
Beginner Bait	1.00x	1.0x	0.68x	—
Simple Bait	1.00x	1.0x	1.0x	—

The difficulty retune is aimed at two specific areas. The World Tree has 55 fishing spots plus 22 rare ones on the World Tree fishing layers, against 367 plus 102 rare across the main map, and those World Tree spots feed the hardest brackets in the game — Grand Master catches run difficulty 104 to 130 against levels 71 to 79. Sunreach sits in the same conversation. If either area was walling you before, retry it: the numbers moved, and the new on-screen recommended-equipment readout will tell you when your rod is the problem. Our Palworld fishing guide covers the rod ladder, and the best fishing team covers the Pals.

Pal Critic Swaps: Dogen and Faleris Aqua

Both Pal Critics changed the Pal they ask for, and both changes are in your favour. The Sakurajima critic dropped Selyne — a rarity 9 Pal with only 40 spawn points — for Dogen, a rarity 6 Humanoid with 52. The Sunreach critic dropped Bastigor for Faleris Aqua, and that is the bigger gift: Faleris Aqua occupies 197 spawn points against Bastigor's 69, so even at rarity 9 it is far easier to find.

Neither replacement is a throwaway either. Dogen brings Handiwork 4 and triple Lumbering, Gathering and Transporting at level 3, which makes it a genuinely useful base Pal to keep after the critic is done with it — and its Lumbering 3 now clears the new Ancient Bark bar. Faleris Aqua is a flying mount with Watering 6 and Transporting 5, a saddle at tech level 60, and a partner skill that adds 40% to 80% more Fire-element item drops as it ranks up. Catch it once and it earns a slot.

Pal Critic	Was	Now	Rarity	Spawn points	Best use after
Sakurajima	Selyne (40 spots)	Dogen	6	52 spawn points	Handiwork 4, Lumbering 3, Gathering 3, Transporting 3
Sunreach	Bastigor (69 spots)	Faleris Aqua	9	197 spawn points	Flying mount, Watering 6, Transporting 5, +80% Fire drops at max rank

One thing to note if you go hunting: Faleris Aqua also has an alpha at level 66, and a Pal Critic does not care whether yours is the alpha or a regular spawn. Take the regular one — it is 197 pins to choose from and no fight.

Core Eject Shotgun Damage Adjusted

The change here is to the damage of Core Eject, the shotgun's own effect, not to the listed attack value on the weapon. Pocketpair didn't state the direction, so treat the table below as the weapon's unchanged frame and the effect as the variable. It is worth knowing where this gun sits before you commit materials: at 575 attack the legendary version is the third-strongest shotgun in the game, behind the Prototype Shotgun's 1,400 and Beam Scatter's 609, and those are shotgun-to-shotgun comparisons only — a shotgun's attack number does not read across to a rifle's.

Version	Rarity	Attack	Durability	Buy price
Core Eject Shotgun (base)	0	230	150	363,220
Schematic 1	1	402	225	178,800
Schematic 2	2	460	300	271,200
Schematic 3	3	517	450	412,800
Schematic 4	4	575	600	736,030

The base version unlocks at tech level 56 and costs 80 Pal Metal Ingot, 65 Plasteel, 32 Carbon Fiber and 40 Flame Organ at 400,000 work units. Durability quadruples from base to legendary while attack only two-and-a-halfs, so the schematic tiers are as much about how long the gun lasts as how hard it hits. Compare it against the rest of the class on our Palworld weapons list and best weapons by tech level.

Partner and Passive Skill Fixes

This is the section to read twice, because three of these were silently costing you stats. Lucky is a rank 4 passive advertised as Shot Attack +15%, Defense +15% and Work Speed +20% — the Defense line was not activating at all, so a third of one of the best passives in the game was dead weight. Idiosyncratic, the mutation passive worth +50% auto HP regeneration for both Pal and player, +25% Defense and full immunity to Burn and Poison, was not triggering correctly either. Both now work as written.

Grintale's fix is the one breeders care about. Its partner skill Glaring Cat's Eye adds an extra egg on a 50% to 75% roll depending on rank, and the eggs it was granting were not carrying mutated stat values through — so a mutation you thought you had bred was arriving as a plain Pal. Anyone running a mutated egg farm should redo their maths after this patch, not before.

Fix	Entity	What was wrong
Lucky Defense bonus	Rank 4 passive	The +15% Defense never applied; Shot Attack and Work Speed did
Idiosyncratic not activating	Rank 4 mutation passive	+50% HP regen, +25% Defense, Burn and Poison immunity all inert
Mercy Hit while riding	Negative-rank passive	Your mount's attacks ignored the 1 HP floor
Mutated egg stat values	Grintale	Extra eggs from Glaring Cat's Eye lost their mutated stats
Partner skill ranks reversed	Killamari Primo	Lv. 2 and Lv. 3 effects were swapped, so ranking up made it worse
Alpha summoned at normal size	Paladius	Its partner skill pulled an alpha Necromus from your party and shrank it

The Paladius bug is the funniest of the batch and the least consequential. Both centaurs are rarity 20 — Paladius carries the highest Defense of the pair at 145, Necromus the highest Shot Attack at 145 and a 1,900 ride sprint — and their partner skills each grant Move Speed +10% to +20% from rank 2 upward. If you ride one and keep the other in your party, the summon now appears at the size it should. Full effect lists are on our partner skills page.

Battle, Boss, and Arena Fixes

Ophydia's exclusive skill Lotus Bloom had an interruption bug, and it is a skill worth protecting: 700 power on a 30-second cooldown, Grass element, melee range out to 3,000, and it applies Ivy-Covered on hit. Ophydia is the only Pal in the game that has it. Interrupting the burrow-and-bloom sequence could leave the skill in a broken state; that is corrected.

On the boss side, some raid encounters were failing to enter their stagger state after taking enough damage, and failing to summon their smaller Pals — which in a fight built around adds means the whole phase structure collapsed. Eleven raid summons exist in the game and 16 raid altars are placed on Palpagos, so this touches every raid boss rotation. The World Tree boss's attack warning indicators were also failing to appear on certain attacks, which is exactly the kind of bug that turns a learnable fight into a coin flip.

Fix	Where it bit you
Ophydia's Lotus Bloom interruption	A 700-power, 30s-cooldown exclusive skill breaking mid-cast
World Tree boss warning indicators	Attacks with no telegraph at all
Raid bosses not staggering or summoning adds	Phase structure of raid fights silently broken
Panthalus body collision mismatch	A 200-Defense Water boss with a hitbox that disagreed with its model
Arena targeting and revived Pals	Opponent Pals untargetable; revived Pals refusing to re-enter the fight
Removing a skill mid-use	That skill became permanently unusable
Summoned Pal cooldown bleed	Attacks put unused skills on cooldown too
Aiming while riding	Movement speed dropped to a crawl
Wild Pals attacking through walls	Damage from Pals with no line of sight
Prixter Lux field boss icon	A level 70 field boss missing its map marker

The Arena pair deserves attention if you compete. There are 43 opponents across 7 ranks, 19 of them in Legend alone, and an untargetable enemy Pal or a revived ally that stands still is a straight loss in a bracket that deep. Two more combat entries are balance rather than bugs: Power Bomb (120 power, 8-second cooldown, Neutral, and on 44 Pals' move lists) had its minimum use distance raised so summoned Pals stop backstepping repeatedly before firing it, and summoned Pals prioritise higher-damage skills now instead of whatever came off cooldown first.

Base, Building, and Server Changes

Three of these are outright quality-of-life wins. Cancelling work at a production facility now returns the materials to your inventory instead of the floor. Cancelling construction or dismantling respects the "don't auto-pick-up over the weight limit" option properly, dropping only the overflow at your feet. And players, summoned Pals and base Pals no longer catch fire from touching a Campfire you built yourself — a tech level 2 structure costing 10 Wood that has been quietly burning bases down since launch.

The Ancient Material Synthesizer gets two fixes, which is a lot of attention for one machine — but it is a tech level 78 build costing 50 Paloxite Ingot and 10 Ancient Civilization Core, so it is one of the last things you unlock and you want it working. Its collision was wrong, and its work speed multiplier was not reapplied after you resumed the game, meaning a synthesizer that ran fine before you logged off ran slow afterward.

Area	Change	Detail
Campfire	No longer sets anything on fire	Applies to you, summoned Pals and base Pals; tech 2, 10 Wood
Ancient Material Synthesizer	Collision fixed; work speed persists after resume	Tech 78 — 50 Paloxite Ingot, 10 Ancient Civilization Core
Logging Site II	Preview collision no longer lingers	Tech 43 — 100 Hardwood, 50 Stone, 20 Paldium Fragment, 5 Ancient Civilization Parts
Clinic	Front-facing arrow corrected	Tech 24 — 10 Wooden Board, 20 Cloth, 15 Nail
Production cancels	Returned materials go to inventory	No more scooping your own ingots off the ground
Chest permissions	Now respected when crafting at a base	Guild members could pull from chests they had no access to
Worker assignments	Now reflected correctly in base facilities	Assigned Pal did not always take the slot
Paint Mode	Colour picking and editing fixed	Builders only
Corner roofs and stairs	Diagonal joins and side-mounted stairs corrected	Follows on from the stair fixes in 1.0.3

Server hosts get two new levers. There is now a per-player cap on how many buildings a single player can place in the world — useful on any public server where one person's mega-base is the reason everyone else's frames are bad, given the game ships 485 placeable structures. Separately, when building restrictions are enabled, no-build zones now cover the area around the level 45 Fire field boss Suzaku in the desert, the desert main-mission cave, and several Sakurajima mission sites. If you have a base near Suzaku's spawn, check it before your server updates.

Radiant Gem Element Bias Fixed

This is the most valuable fix in the patch for anyone deep in the World Tree, and the patch notes undersell it badly. Radiant Gems dropped by wild Pals in the World Tree could come out with mismatched or heavily biased elements — and because the gems do not convert between elements, a biased table meant you piled up hundreds of one type and never reached the threshold for the one you needed.

The threshold is the part that makes this hurt: each Awakening Crystal costs 50 Radiant Gems of that exact element plus 10 World Tree Holy Water, and there are nine elements with nine separate crystals. Nine full sets is 450 gems and 90 Holy Water. A drop table skewed toward, say, Neutral could leave a Dragon build stalled indefinitely. If your gem stock looks lopsided, farm again after updating — see how to farm Radiant Gems for the best droppers per element and the World Tree resource guide for everything else in the region.

Awakening Crystal	Radiant Gems needed	Holy Water
Dragon Awakening Crystal	50 Dragon Radiant Gem	10
Dark Awakening Crystal	50 Dark Radiant Gem	10
Electric Awakening Crystal	50 Electric Radiant Gem	10
Fire Awakening Crystal	50 Fire Radiant Gem	10
Water Awakening Crystal	50 Water Radiant Gem	10
Grass Awakening Crystal	50 Grass Radiant Gem	10
Ground Awakening Crystal	50 Ground Radiant Gem	10
Ice Awakening Crystal	50 Ice Radiant Gem	10
Neutral Awakening Crystal	50 Neutral Radiant Gem	10

Items, Effigies, and Shops

The Echoing Flute can now be dropped from your inventory. That sounds trivial until you remember what it is: a rarity 4 key item assembled from four Echobones — Marine, Silent, Seafoam and Tidewind — after deciphering a Faded Schematic, and the thing that summons Panthalus. It weighs nothing, so this is about clearing a permanent slot once you have beaten Panthalus and opened the World Tree, not about weight.

The Lunaris Effigy homing value was also retuned, and this one is worth flagging because the track is unforgiving. Lunaris Effigies feed the Sphere Homing upgrade, which has 4 ranks and needs 4 effigies — and there are exactly 4 placed in the world, so there is zero margin for a missed pickup. Going into 1.0.4 that track topped out at 100% sphere homing; Pocketpair adjusted the value without saying which direction, so read 100% as the old ceiling and check yours in-game. All 360 effigy pins are on the map's Pal Effigies layer, and the full track list is in our effigies and upgrades guide.

Change	Item	Detail
Now droppable	Echoing Flute	Rarity 4; built from 4 Echobones, summons Panthalus
Homing value retuned	Lunaris Effigy	Sphere Homing track: 4 ranks, exactly 4 effigies exist
Shop sale totals fixed	—	Selling multiple items at once miscalculated the payout
Item counts fixed	—	Stack totals failed to update when moving items in some cases
Bounty Token notifications	Faleris Aqua Bounty Token	Pickup pop-ups now show the passive effect and item description — useful across 102 tokens
Field drops no longer buried	—	Items from gathering objects could sink into the terrain

The Bounty Token change is small but genuinely good design. Every token carries a passive effect, and until now the acquisition pop-up told you nothing about what you had just picked up — you had to go dig through the menu. With 102 tokens in the game, that is a lot of digging saved. Our Pal Bounty Tokens guide lists every effect if you want the full picture.

Crash and Progression Fixes

Seven hard stops are gone, and two of them were run-enders rather than annoyances. The main-mission blocks are the worst: if you killed Panthalus before the main mission told you to, the World Tree Guardian would never appear later — a soft-lock created by playing well. And "Crafting an Axe and a Pickaxe" would refuse to complete if you already had or had equipped either tool before accepting it, which is the default state of almost anyone who explored first. Both are fixed.

Problem	Type	Severity
World Tree Guardian never spawns if Panthalus was killed early	Main mission	Soft-lock
"Crafting an Axe and a Pickaxe" won't complete if you already own the tools	Main mission	Progression block
Controls dead after a connection error returns you to the title screen	Crash-adjacent	Run-ending
Crash from overlapping NPC dialogue and riding	Crash	Run-ending
Crash during the animation after a fishing spot vanished	Crash	Run-ending
Crash displaying a long mission description	Crash	Run-ending
Server crash when sorting Pals	Server crash	Run-ending for a group
Controls dead after map-switching with a custom marker open	Input lock	Progression block
Pal unsummonable if recalled immediately after summoning	Pal state	Annoying
Co-op joiners not added to the host's guild	Multiplayer	Blocks shared progress
Host's mission advancing when a client entered the trigger area	Multiplayer	Desyncs a co-op run

The multiplayer pair matters more than the crash list if you play co-op. A joining player who does not correctly enter the host's guild has no shared base access and no shared progress, and a host mission that advances because a client walked into a trigger zone quietly desyncs the story for everybody. Also fixed: the on-screen keyboard failing to appear when opening chat from the Radial Menu on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, Voice Chat settings not applying, and a crafting overlay that stuck to the screen on dedicated servers.

Performance, UI, and Controls

The performance work is aimed squarely at the two platforms that needed it and the one region that stutters. Memory use is down on Xbox One and down during PS5 co-op, foliage and effect rendering costs less, and field rendering load in the World Tree — the newest and heaviest region — was reduced. Passive-skill activation stutter was also cut, which is the one most players will actually feel, because it fired constantly in combat.

On PC the default FPS cap is now 120 rather than the old ceiling, so if you have never touched the graphics menu you may see a change on your first launch; check our PC system requirements if 120 is optimistic for your build. The Palpedia also finally got a name search — with 288 Pals in the game, scrolling was never a reasonable way to find one, and our searchable Palworld Paldeck exists partly because of that.

Area	Change
Xbox One	Memory usage reduced
PS5	Memory usage reduced during co-op
All	Rendering, foliage and effect playback load reduced
All	Passive-skill activation stutter reduced
World Tree	Field rendering load reduced
PC	Default FPS cap raised to 120
Palpedia	Name search added; Work Suitability explanations added to Pal status and Palpedia
PS5	Chat can be opened from the Radial Menu
PC	PS5 controller no longer shows Xbox key icons
All	Version mismatch errors show the target's version
All	HUD ammo count no longer stuck at 0 after a reload
Map	Revisiting an unlocked Watchtower now reveals unexplored map around it
Wing Pack	Turning guide icon corrected
Palbox	UI misalignment fixed when base Pal slots fill four rows

The Watchtower fix is the sleeper here. If you unlocked a tower but the map around it stayed dark, you previously had no way to force the reveal — now returning to the same tower does it. Combine that with the 137 fast travel points on our fast travel point list and any half-explored save can be filled in with a short tour. Two more field entries: updraft positions and behaviour were adjusted, terrain and water display was cleaned up in Sunreach and the World Tree, and temperature was not applying correctly on Bicornis Islet.

Should You Update Right Away?

Yes, and on console or a dedicated server you do not get a choice anyway. Nothing in 1.0.4 nerfs a build or invalidates progress — the closest thing to a downside is the Core Eject Shotgun effect change and the Lunaris Effigy homing retune, neither of which has a published direction. Everything else is additive: two new sub-missions, Ancient Bark within reach of any logger, fishing that tells you what gear it wants, two easier Pal Critic requests, three passives that now pay what they promise, and a Panthalus soft-lock that could have ended a save. Version history for everything before this is on our Palworld patch notes hub.

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