Palworld server settings — where the knobs are, and why nothing changed

You turned the capture rate up to 3, hit save, went back into the game, and Pals still resist exactly as much as they did before. Nothing is broken. Palworld settings on uniz.host are written for the next boot, not injected into a running server, and that one fact explains most of the "it did nothing" reports. This guide covers where each knob lives, what the real defaults are, and the three ways a change can silently amount to nothing.

Everything here applies on the next restart

Saving updates your server's stored configuration immediately and returns a "Saved" message, but it does not interrupt or reconfigure the process that is currently running. The settings page says so itself: every section carries an "Applies after a restart" tag, and if you save while the server is running, the server page shows a "Changes pending a restart" banner with a "Restart now" button.

So the sequence is always: edit, save, restart, then check in game. There is no way to change a gameplay rate live from the dashboard — not for the eight sections of in-game knobs, not for difficulty or death penalty, not for the admin password, and not for the engine performance block.

One consequence worth knowing: a Palworld server here is created with a daily auto-restart already scheduled, at 05:00 Thai time. That is our own operational default, not a recommendation from the game's publisher, and you can move it or switch it off in the "Automatic schedule" section of the "Sleep, wake and schedule" group. If you leave it on, a setting you save in the evening is live by the next morning even if you never press restart yourself.

Where the settings live

Palworld's settings are spread across the Settings tab's groups; all the in-game knobs live in the "Game rules" group, and the steps below happen there.

Open the Game rules group on the Settings tab

Go to your server's page at /dashboard/servers/<id> and pick the "Settings" tab. The named settings are spread across its groups like this:

Under the Game rules heading the page states the rule for the whole group: "Palworld's in-game settings (PalWorldSettings.ini) · leave a field empty to use the game's default". If you are not sure where a knob lives, type its name into "Search settings" at the top.

Every team member can open this tab, but without the settings permission every field is read-only — the owner grants that per member.

Go to the section that owns the knob you want

The in-game knobs sit in eight sections, one after another down the group — nothing is collapsed — and the section menu at the top of the group has a button for each, so one press jumps straight to it. Under each row's label the game's own parameter name is printed small.

That is 87 knobs across the eight sections, plus difficulty, death penalty and the master PvP switch in the Basics section, and the seven engine values in the Version and performance group. Every one corresponds to a parameter in the game's own configuration file, so if you want the exact in-game meaning of a knob this article does not spell out, the publisher's configuration reference is where to look it up.

One row is worth stressing: "Base Camp Max Num In Guild" is a cap only — the dashboard label says as much — so raising it does not by itself grant anybody another base.

Type a value, or press Reset to default

Each numeric row is a number box plus a slider. The box shows the game's default as its placeholder, so an empty box is already telling you what happens if you leave it alone. A row whose saved value differs from the game's default gets an orange bar on its left, a bold label and a "Reset to default" button; pressing it puts the field back to the game's default.

Enum settings like difficulty and death penalty are dropdowns that list only the game's real values, and an untouched toggle displays its default state. Both get the same "Reset to default" button once their saved value differs from the default.

Save from the group's save bar

As soon as you change a field, a save bar appears at the bottom of the group with the count of changed values. Press "Save"; on success you get a "Saved" confirmation. While the server is running the bar also offers "Save and restart", which saves and restarts in one go.

Only fields you actually changed are sent. If you scroll through every section and change nothing, the save bar never even appears and your server is unaffected. Settings in other groups, such as the admin password in General, use that group's own save bar.

Restart the server, then confirm in game

Press "Restart now" on the pending-restart banner, or "Restart" in the server's header (skip this if you pressed Save and restart), wait for it to come back, and verify the change in game — a capture rate is quickest to confirm by throwing a sphere at something you have already caught.

If the value still looks wrong after a restart, work through the three causes in the sections below in order: a blank field that is not zero, a knob whose default is not what you assumed, or an uploaded save file.

Blank is not zero

The rule for the entire group is one line, and the dashboard states it under the group's heading: empty means the game's own default.

Mechanically, if you clear a box you saved before and press save, the platform writes the game's default (the faint number in the box) in its place. That is why clearing a box is not the same as typing 0 — zero is a real, transmitted value, and on several knobs zero means something specific and quite unlike "off".

To put a knob you previously saved back to the game's own value, press "Reset to default" on that row and save. The default is still printed in the box as placeholder text and listed in the table above, so you never have to guess it.

Two defaults that look like typos

Two knobs use a sentinel number instead of a blank, and both read backwards at first glance.

"Max Building Limit Num (0 = unlimited)" defaults to 0, and 0 means unlimited. A fresh server has no structure cap at all. If you want to limit building — usually to protect performance on a busy server — you type a positive number, and the smaller the number the tighter the limit. Setting it to 0 to "remove the limit" is a no-op, because that was already the state.

"Physics Active Drop Item Max Num (-1 = unlimited)" defaults to -1, which hands the decision back to the engine — there is no cap of ours in play. Any value from 0 upward is a real cap on how many dropped items are simulated at once, and 0 here genuinely means none.

The same instinct applies to "Guild Auto-Reset After (h)" at 72 and "Pal Egg Default Hatching Time (h)" at 72: those are hours, not multipliers, and dragging them toward zero is a much bigger change than it looks.

PvP is three switches, not one

The Basics section carries the master PvP switch, and turning it on is necessary but not sufficient. Player-versus-player damage is its own toggle in the PvP section, "Player-To-Player Damage", off by default; damage between members of the same guild is a third, "Friendly Fire (same-guild damage)", also off by default. Flipping only the master switch produces a server that calls itself PvP and where nobody can land a hit.

The silent trap: an uploaded save carrying WorldOption.sav

There is one failure mode where every setting stops working at once, including the admin password, and no amount of re-saving fixes it. It comes from uploading a save exported from a co-op world.

Those saves include a file called WorldOption.sav alongside the world data. On a server here where that file was present, the entire settings block stopped taking effect and the admin password behaved as if it had never been set. We have not found any documentation from the game's publisher describing this file, so we will not tell you what the game does with it — only what we do about it.

Every boot of a Palworld server on uniz.host renames WorldOption.sav out of the way, to WorldOption.sav.bak, before the game starts. It is renamed rather than deleted, so nothing of yours is destroyed and support can always recover it. The practical consequence is simple: after uploading a save, restart once. That restart clears the file, and from then on your settings behave normally.

If you are troubleshooting a server where nothing at all responds to the Settings tab, this is the first thing to rule out, and one restart is the whole test.

Read next

• Palworld server hosting — what a Palworld server needs before you start tuning it
• Dashboard tour — reading the other tabs and graphs on the server page
• Game server RAM — Palworld is one of the hungrier games we host
• /pricing — what a Palworld server actually costs per hour