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 success message, but it does not interrupt or reconfigure the process that is currently running. The card says so itself, under the save button: saving updates the setup right away, but will not interrupt the server while it is running, and you restart to apply the changes.
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 groups 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 same card. 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
The whole surface is one card. Everything below happens inside it.
Open the Settings tab of your Palworld server
Go to your server's page at /dashboard/servers/<id> and pick the Settings tab. The card is titled "Palworld settings". The top of it holds the named settings — server name, description, join password, admin password, max players, difficulty, death penalty, daily auto-restart, crossplay and community listing. Below those sits the section headed "In-Game Settings", which is the accordion of gameplay knobs, and below that the "Engine performance boost (Server FPS)" block.
If the tab is missing, you are looking at a server you joined as a team member without the settings permission — the owner grants that per member.
Expand the group that owns the knob you want
The in-game accordion has eight groups. They are collapsed by default; expanding one shows its toggles first, then its numeric rows.
| Group | Knobs | What it covers | Headline knobs and their defaults |
|---|
| World & Rates | 8 | Day/night length, experience, capture, spawns, work speed | "Exp Rate" 1, "Pal Capture Rate" 1, "Pal Spawn Number Rate" 1, "Work Speed Rate" 1 |
| Pals | 11 | Pal damage, hunger, stamina, regen, hatching, breeding farm | Damage and drain rates all 1, "Pal Egg Default Hatching Time (h)" 72 |
| Players | 15 | Player damage, hunger, stamina, regen, hardcore, stat enhancement | All six rates 1; hardcore off; aim assist for pad on, for keyboard off |
| PvP | 12 | Player damage, friendly fire, respawn penalties, kill drops | "Player-To-Player Damage" off, "Friendly Fire (same-guild damage)" off, respawn block 5 s |
| Building | 6 | Structure HP, damage taken, decay, the building cap | "Build Object HP Rate" 1, "Build Object Deterioration Damage Rate" 1, "Max Building Limit Num (0 = unlimited)" 0 |
| Items & Gathering | 13 | Gathering yields, enemy drops, weight, durability, dropped-item limits | "Collection Drop Rate" 1, "Enemy Drop Item Rate" 1, "Item Weight Rate" 1, "Drop Item Max Num" 3000 |
| Guild & Bases | 8 | Guild size, base counts, base workers, inactive-guild reset | "Guild Player Max Num" 20, "Base Camp Max Num In Guild" 4, "Base Camp Worker Max Num" 15, "Max Base Camps (whole server)" 128, "Guild Auto-Reset After (h)" 72 |
| Other | 14 | Supply drops, chat limits, autosave, replication distance, voice chat | "Supply Drop Span (min)" 180, "Auto-Save Interval (sec) — longer = fewer lag spikes, more rollback on crash" 30, "Show Player List" off, "Enable Voice Chat (proximity)" off |
That is 87 knobs across the eight groups, plus the master PvP switch at the top of the PvP group and the seven engine values in the performance block. 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.
Each numeric row is a number box plus a slider, with a reset control labelled "Reset to default". 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. Pressing reset empties the box; it does not send anything on its own, and the next section covers the limit on what that achieves.
Enum settings like difficulty and death penalty are dropdowns whose first option is "Server default" — the same idea in a different shape. Toggles differ from numbers in one respect: they have no reset control. An untouched toggle displays its default state, and once you flip and save one it is stored as an explicit choice.
Save the settings
Press "Save settings" at the bottom of the card. On success you get a "Settings saved" confirmation.
Only fields you actually changed are sent. If you open the card, expand five groups, change nothing and save, an empty change set goes out and your server is unaffected.
Restart the server, then confirm in game
Restart from the server page, 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 sent nothing, a knob whose default is not what you assumed, or an uploaded save file.
The rule for the entire card is one line, and the dashboard states it above the accordion: empty means the game's own default, and the reset button clears a value you set.
Mechanically, a blank field is not sent to your server at all. Nothing is written for it, so the game uses whatever it would use if the setting had never been mentioned. 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".
Here is the limit that catches people. Clearing a box works perfectly for an edit you have not saved yet: you typed 5, changed your mind, pressed reset, and the field goes back to being unset. But a value you saved on a previous visit is stored on your server, and a blank field sends nothing — so there is nothing to overwrite it with. Reset-then-save leaves the stored value exactly where it was.
To put a knob you previously saved back to its original value, type that value into the box and save it. The default is 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 PvP group header carries a master switch, and turning it on is necessary but not sufficient. Player-versus-player damage is its own toggle, "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 header 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 card, this is the first thing to rule out, and one restart is the whole test.
Read next
- — what a Palworld server needs before you start tuning it
- — reading the tabs, cards and graphs around this one
- — Palworld is one of the hungrier games we host
- — what a Palworld server actually costs per hour