How to Install Palworld and Join a Server

The question that decides how you should play Palworld is this: do you want your base running while you are asleep?

If the answer is no, host a world from your own machine, invite three friends and stop reading after the next section. If the answer is yes — and once you have built a proper production base, it usually becomes yes — you want a dedicated server, and that changes several things you need to know before you start rather than after.

Listings collect on the hub. This guide covers both routes and, more importantly, the character problem that catches almost everybody who switches from one to the other.

What you are getting into

Palworld is a creature-collecting survival game where the creatures work. Not fight-and-store — work. A captured Pal assigned to your base plants crops, mines ore, chops wood, runs a furnace, powers a generator or transports items between containers, depending on what it is suited to.

Which means your base is a factory staffed by animals, and the game becomes a management problem as much as a survival one. Your Pals get hungry. They get tired. They get depressed if you overwork them without a bed. One of them will get stuck on a rock and stay there.

On top of that sits everything a survival game has: a tech tree, base building, biomes with things that will kill you, bosses that require preparation, and a progression from punching trees to something considerably more industrial.

It is in early access, which is stated plainly because it matters — mechanics, balance and multiplayer functionality have all changed since launch and will change again. Anything specific about numbers should be checked against the game rather than a page written at one point in time.

The two ways to play with other people

A hosted co-operative world runs on one player's machine. Somebody starts a world with multiplayer enabled, the game produces a code, and friends join with it. Player numbers are small — a handful, not a crowd.

The catch is the one you would expect: the world exists only while the host is playing. Your Pals stop working when they log off. Crops stop growing. If the host is busy on Thursday, nobody plays on Thursday.

A dedicated server runs on a machine that is not anybody's game. It holds considerably more players, it stays up, and your base keeps producing whether or not you are connected. Palworld ships a dedicated server package that you can install through Steam alongside the game.

For any group that plays at different times, the second option is worth the setup. The whole appeal of Pals-as-workers depends on time passing, and time only passes when the server is running.

The character problem

This is the thing to know before you invest fifty hours anywhere.

Your character and everything on it belong to the world you played in. A single-player save and a dedicated server are separate worlds. Moving between them does not bring your character, your Pals, your levels or your base — you start again.

That is not a bug and there is no in-game feature that solves it. It means the decision about where to play should be made early rather than after a weekend of progress.

The practical advice: if there is any chance your group will end up on a dedicated server, start on one. Beginning in single player and migrating later means losing the single-player character, and discovering that at hour sixty is a genuinely unpleasant surprise.

Joining a server

Palworld's multiplayer menu has a community server list and a route for entering an address directly. Both work; the second is more reliable.

The list shows what the master server knows about, and it is a large and noisy list. Filtering it by player count and by name is the practical approach, and the search is more useful than the sorting.

When a community gives you an address, it will be an IP with a port. Take both. A host running several Palworld worlds on one machine has moved most of them off whatever the default is, and an address without its port fails in a way that looks exactly like the server being offline.

Some servers are password-protected. That is normal, and it usually means a community that has decided who is welcome rather than one hiding something. Communities that vet applicants tend to have far fewer problems with people demolishing other people's bases, and our guide to running a whitelist people actually apply to explains what a good process looks like from either side.

Expect the first connection to take a while. There is a world to fetch.

Reading a server before you commit

Palworld servers are configurable to a degree that makes two of them genuinely different games. The settings that change everything:

Experience and gathering rates. A server running multiplied rates compresses a hundred hours into twenty. Whether that is an improvement depends entirely on what you want, and neither answer is wrong.

Capture rate. The number of spheres a Pal costs is adjustable, and a server with a generous rate turns collecting from a grind into a hobby.

Damage multipliers. Both directions. Some servers make the world lethal and some make it decorative.

Base limits. How many bases a player or guild may hold, and how many Pals work at each. This is the setting that most affects what a long-term player can build.

Day length and whether Pals work at night. Quietly one of the most impactful settings on a server, because it changes how much production happens while everybody is asleep.

PvP. Most Palworld servers are co-operative. Where PvP is enabled, read the rules carefully, because the norms around raiding somebody's base vary enormously between communities.

A server that publishes its settings has done you a favour. One that does not is asking you to find out by playing. Our note on what makes a server listing trustworthy covers what we check before a listing appears here, and settings transparency is a reasonable proxy for how the rest of a server is run.

Guilds, and why they matter more on a server

On a shared server you will join or form a guild. Guild membership determines who can use your base's storage, who can interact with your structures and who counts as an ally.

Two pieces of advice from every Palworld community that has been running a while:

Do not invite people casually. A guild member can access what you have built. On a public server that is a decision, not a formality.

Agree base locations early. Palworld's base placement rules mean that somebody claiming a good area affects what everybody else can do nearby. Groups that sort this out on the first evening avoid the argument entirely.

Running your own

The dedicated server package is available through Steam's tools section, which makes hosting one from a spare machine straightforward.

Two things that surprise people who have run other game servers:

Memory demand grows with the world. A Palworld server's requirements are not fixed by the player count. Bases, Pals and built structures all cost, and a world four hundred hours in is meaningfully heavier than a fresh one with the same number of players connected.

It is not a game that needs a large slot count. Palworld communities that work tend to be small. A dozen people who know each other produce a better server than fifty strangers, and the hosting bill follows accordingly. Our notes on how many slots a server needs and game server hosting costs both apply here without much modification.

Take backups, and take them on a schedule. This is a game where a lost world is hundreds of hours of collection and building, and the loss ends a group's interest permanently.

Host near your players. Palworld is forgiving of latency compared with a shooter, but a server on the wrong continent is noticeable in combat, and our note on choosing a hosting region covers picking sensibly.

The first evening on a shared server

A few habits that separate a good start from a frustrating one.

Catch the working Pals before the fighting ones. New players collect whatever looks impressive. The Pals that transform a base are the ones suited to the jobs you actually need doing, and a mediocre creature that plants and waters is worth more for the first twenty hours than an impressive one that only fights.

Put your base somewhere flat. Palworld's workers navigate terrain, and they navigate it badly. A base on a slope produces a Pal standing motionless against a rock for an hour. Flat ground with resources nearby removes most of the game's frustrations at a stroke.

Build beds and food before you build anything clever. A base full of exhausted, hungry Pals produces nothing, and the fix is unglamorous infrastructure that new players skip in favour of production lines.

Ask what the server needs. On an established server, somebody has already worked out where the good areas are and which bosses the group handles together. Turning up and asking is faster than an evening of discovery, and it is how you meet people.

Do not build against somebody else's base. Palworld's placement rules mean adjacent bases interfere. Leaving room is basic courtesy and it prevents the commonest neighbour dispute on any shared server.

Problems you will actually hit

A Pal is stuck and doing nothing. Pick it up and put it down somewhere else. This is the single most common complaint about the game and the fix is almost always physical relocation.

Your base has stopped producing. Something upstream has run out, or a Pal that handles transport is unhappy. Check food and beds before you check anything clever.

You cannot find your friend's server in the list. Enter the address directly. Community list registration is unreliable and the direct route is not.

Your character is not on the server you expected. The character problem described above. Characters belong to worlds.

Performance falls as the base grows. Universal to the genre. The cost is in what has been built and how many Pals are working, rather than in how many people are connected.

Where else this goes

Palworld took the survival-with-creatures idea somewhere new by making the creatures useful rather than decorative, and the games around it approach the same space differently.

ARK: Survival Evolved and its newer version do taming at far greater depth, on servers with a much harsher social culture, and their community server scene is one of the oldest and best organised anywhere. Conan Exiles does building and thralls with a stronger PvP tradition.

Valheim is the gentler co-operative evening with better building and no creatures to manage. Soulmask and Enshrouded both sit in the same recent wave and both run dedicated servers well.

And if the automation is what grabbed you rather than the collecting, Satisfactory and Eco build factories in earnest, with no Pals to feed.

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JoinGG is a live directory of community game servers. Every listing is queried directly every fifteen minutes, so the player count you see was measured rather than reported by its owner, and each one carries a copyable connect address. Palworld servers are listed here, and every game on the site has its own hub. Player counts across every game are on the statistics page.