Palworld 1.4 Patch Notes: All 27 Fixes and Changes

Palworld 1.4 is the January 31 patch that shut down the Pal-stealing exploit, took the first swing at the guild crash that was eating saves, and quietly moved the Pal lift key off F. This page lists all 27 changes it shipped, sorts them by how much they actually mattered, and explains the systems behind the big ones.

Palworld 1.4 Release Date and Version Number

The build string in the corner of your title screen reads v0.1.4.0, but nobody searches for it that way, which is why this patch lives in every changelog as "1.4". Xbox and Game Pass got the same set of changes under a completely different number — 0.1.1.3 — a day later, and that mismatch is the single most confusing thing about early-access Palworld versioning. Nothing new was added to play here: no Pals, no region, no weapons, just fixes and control options.

If you run a dedicated server, this is the patch where the update dance became routine — host and clients have to sit on the exact same build or nobody connects, and that has not changed in any version since. Updating a Palworld server and fixing version mismatch covers the process end to end.

Every Change in Palworld 1.4

Twenty-seven lines, and they are nowhere near equal. Two of them were security patches for exploits that let other players walk off with your Pals, one was the first half of a fix for a crash that corrupted entire worlds, and the rest range from genuinely useful (overweight movement, double damage on servers) down to camera tweaks. The Impact column below is the honest ranking — if you only read four rows, read the four marked Critical.

The Pal Stealing Exploit and the 30% HP Rule

This was the reason 1.4 shipped when it did. The capture check only asked whether a Pal's HP had dropped to 30% or below — it never asked whether the Pal belonged to somebody. On a public server that meant anyone could soften up your working Relaxaurus or a Pal you had out fighting, throw a sphere, and walk away with it. The patch fixed the check itself and added separate measures against Pal theft, which is why two of the 27 lines are really one problem attacked from both ends.

The 30% figure is not arbitrary — weakening a Pal is genuinely how capture rate works, and the further you push HP down the higher your odds get before sphere tier and level gap are applied. That system is unchanged today: how to catch Pals and every sphere tier breaks down the full formula, and the Palworld capture rate calculator will give you the exact percentage for a specific target. Cheap Pal Spheres weigh 0.1 each, so there is never a reason to carry fewer than a stack.

The Guild Crash at ~7,000 Captured Pals

Once a guild's lifetime captured-Pal count crossed roughly 7,000, the world stopped loading and the save was left in a state nothing could open. On a dedicated server that was the whole server's world file. 1.4 is the half of the fix that stops the crash happening — worlds could pass 7,000 captures and keep running — but it did not repair saves that had already been destroyed. That came a week later in Palworld 1.4.1, which reloaded the broken data.

Nothing in the guild UI warned you that you were near a limit, because 7,000 was never a designed cap — it was an internal overflow, which is why the symptom was corruption instead of a polite error. The caps that *are* designed are much smaller and much more visible, and none of them counts captures. Creating and joining a guild covers how ranks and permissions work alongside them.

The Pal Lift Key Moved From F to V

This is the change that broke everyone's muscle memory for a week, and it was the right call. Picking a Pal up was bound to F, sitting right next to the interact key, so half the player base was scooping up their own workers every time they reached for a chest. 1.4 moved it to V on keyboard and from X to Y on controller, then added mouse side buttons and the numeric keypad as bindable inputs so you could put it back wherever you liked.

The mounted camera got a pass in the same patch — a handful of rideable Pals had the camera sitting inside the model or too far back to aim from. There are 115 Pals you can actually ride once their saddle is unlocked, so the odds of hitting a bad one were higher than they sound; the full Palworld mount speed list ranks every one of them by sprint speed.

Overweight Movement and Why It Mattered

Before 1.4, going over your carry limit pinned you in place — a full ore run meant dropping loot on the ground and hoping you remembered where. The patch replaced the hard stop with a crawl, so you can always limp back to a chest. It only matters because the heaviest things in the game are exactly the things you mine in bulk: a single unit of Ore weighs 8, more than Coal, Ingot, Stone, or Wood, and a hundred of them is a full inventory on its own.

Material	Weight per unit	Why you carry it in bulk
Ore	8.0	Heaviest common haul — every Ingot starts here
Coal	5.0	Refined Ingot fuel, mined in stacks
Ingot	5.0	Weight doesn't drop after smelting
Refined Ingot	5.0	Same weight, better gear tier
Stone	3.0	Base building and Stone Walls
Wood	3.0	Base building and arrows
Paldium Fragment	1.0	Spheres and the Palbox
Pal Sphere	0.1	Carry hundreds, cost nothing

Two systems take the pressure off permanently, and both still work: a hauling Pal in your party and carry-weight gear. The best Pals for carrying more items and carry weight gear ranks them, and if you would rather not haul at all, farming Ingots explains how to move smelting to the base instead of your backpack.

Capture Power Stopped Resetting

Capture power is the hidden multiplier on every sphere you throw, and you raise it by handing Lifmunk Effigies to the Statue of Power. In 1.4 and earlier, drinking Memory Wiping Medicine to respec your stat points also wiped that capture power back to zero — the medicine was reaching into a system it had no business touching, and there was no warning and no way to get the effigies back. The patch cut that link.

Worth knowing that the effigy system stayed buggy for another week: 1.4.1 fixed a separate problem where the bonus wasn't applying at all. If you were playing in this window, your capture rates were worse than the menu claimed on both counts. Effigies are scattered across the map as small green statues — the interactive Palworld map has the layer, and the Statue of Power and every other buildable shows what you spend them on.

Base Fixes: Fire Spread, Stuck Pals, and Wasted Work

The base half of this patch is seven lines long and every one of them was costing you production. The headline is fire: a single fire attack used to race across a wooden base, and 1.4 cut both how fast it spread and how far it reached. That is a stopgap rather than a solution, because wood is still wood — the real fix is the material you build in, and the jump from wooden walls to stone is only a technology tier away.

Wall	Cost	Tech level	Fire risk
Wooden Wall	2 Wood	2	Burns — spread reduced but not removed
Stone Wall	3 Stone	19	Doesn't burn
Metal Wall	1 Ingot, 2 Stone	30	Doesn't burn, highest durability
Wooden Defensive Wall	10 Wood	8	Perimeter only — burns
Stone Defensive Wall	10 Stone	19	Perimeter, fireproof
Metal Defensive Wall	10 Ingot, 1 Cement	30	Perimeter, best available

The other six lines are all the same complaint in different costumes: Pals doing work that produced nothing. Loggers were swinging at trees they had already felled, haulers were dropping materials mid-carry, workers were taking damage from falls that never happened, and Pals assigned to plots under a second-storey structure could not path to them at all. If your base still feels slow after all that, the problem is usually assignment rather than pathing — the base work optimizer shows which suitabilities you are short on.

Overleveled Relaxaurus in Base Raids

Base invasions pull from level-banded herds, and Relaxaurus was showing up in them far above where it belonged, turning a routine raid into a wall for anyone who had not built defenses yet. It is a Dragon and Water type with 120 base HP and 110 base defense, the highest defense of any Pal that turns up in these raid herds, so an overleveled one simply outlasted whatever a mid-game base could put in front of it. The bands below are the intended ones after the fix.

Raid wave	Your level	Relaxaurus level	Other Pals in the herd
Herd of Violent Wild Pals	21-40	10-13	Leezpunk Lovander Incineram Noct
Herd of Ferocious Wild Pals	41-60	24-26	Nitewing Vanwyrm
Herd of Extremely Ferocious Wild Pals	61-80	35-37	Beakon Direhowl Mammorest
Desert herd (extremely ferocious)	61-80	35-39	Relaxaurus Lux at 23-26, plus Menasting Terra

Notice how far the raid Pals sit below your own level — a level 61-80 player is fighting Pals in the mid-30s, because the difficulty comes from the wave count, not the individual Pal. That is exactly why an overleveled Relaxaurus broke the maths so badly. Clearing the top band is worth 106,470 EXP, which makes late base raids one of the better passive XP sources in the game.

Breeding Farm Pals Stopped Starving

Pals you hand-assigned to the Breeding Farm were still running their hunger timer, so a pair left to work overnight would be starving — or asleep — by the time you came back, and the egg never appeared. 1.4 stopped assigned breeding Pals from getting hungry at all, which is why you can safely park a pair and go do something else. The Breeding Farm unlocks at technology level 19, the same tier as stone walls.

This one is easy to confuse with the 1.4.1 fix, which handled breeding Pals falling asleep for a different reason. Both landed inside eight days, and together they are what made overnight breeding actually reliable. If you are setting up a breeding line now, how breeding works, combi ranks and inheritance explains which parents produce what, and the Palworld breeding calculator does the pairing for you.

Is Palworld 1.4 Still Relevant?

Every change here is baked into the current build, so there is nothing to install and nothing to opt into — but three of them still shape how you play. Overweight crawling is why an ore run is annoying instead of fatal, the 30% HP capture check is still the core of how weakening a Pal improves your odds, and V is still the lift key. Everything else was cleanup on a game that had exploded in popularity a fortnight earlier and was finding new ways to break daily. For the full timeline, the Palworld patch notes and version history lists every update from this one through to the current release.

Related Guides

Start with the hubs if you want the whole picture, then drop into the specific systems this patch touched.