How to host a Palworld server on your own PC (complete guide)

You want a Palworld server for you and your friends, running your settings and your rules, up whenever you feel like playing. This guide walks you through every way to get one, including the completely manual route, and is written for people who don’t run servers for a living.

You have three options:

1. Rent one. Fastest to get going, and you keep paying for it every month you use it.
2. Build it yourself on a Windows PC. The only cost is electricity, but the setup is on you, and one step in the middle depends on your internet provider rather than on anything you can configure.
3. Use a guided platform that turns a spare computer into a managed server. That’s the thing we make, so treat the last section as the sales pitch it is.

Option 2 is what most of this guide covers. It’s also worth reading if you plan to rent, because knowing what the work involves tells you what you’re paying someone else to skip.

What you need before you start

Palworld is a lot lighter to host than something like ARK, both to download and to run. It’s still a real server program rather than a toy, but the bar is friendlier. Look over the machine you have in mind first:

• RAM: 8 GB minimum, 16 GB comfortable. A freshly started Palworld server with a few friends on it is fairly modest, often just a couple of gigabytes. The catch is that it creeps upward the longer the server stays up (more on that in Step 8). 8 GB is fine for a small group if you restart it daily. 16 GB buys you room to be lazier about that.
• CPU: anything from a gaming PC made in the last several years is fine. Palworld leans on a few fast cores rather than a huge core count.
• Disk: the server files themselves are small, around 5 GB. Leave 20 GB free anyway, so there’s room for updates, your world as it grows, and a backup or two. An SSD keeps restarts quick.
• Internet: run a cable from the machine to your router if you possibly can. For a typical friend group, ordinary home upload speed is plenty.

Running the server and playing on the same PC goes better here than in heavier games, though it still asks a lot of one machine. If there’s a second computer in the house, that’s the one to use.

Route 1: Rent a server

Someone else’s hardware, a web panel, and a server that exists about ten minutes after you pay.

What it costs: for Palworld, typically $8 to $20 a month depending on player slots. That’s real money over time. Two years of hosting is $190 to $480, which is often more than the spare PC you could’ve run it on is worth.

When renting makes sense:

• Nothing in the house can stay powered on, and you’d rather not buy a machine to fix that.
• The server is public, needs to be up at 4am, and you want a support ticket to file when it isn’t.
• You want to try Palworld hosting for one month and then stop.

The downsides: the monthly bill never ends, you’re often sharing hardware with other customers (lag at peak hours is common), and you’re limited to whatever settings the panel exposes.

That’s a reasonable trade for plenty of people, and if it sounds like your trade, you’re done here. Read on if the recurring bill is the part you don’t like.

Route 2: Run it yourself on Windows, step by step

Set aside an evening for your first time through. No single step is difficult. There are just a lot of them, and Step 6 can stall on something your router has no say over.

A note before we start: Palworld publishes a dedicated server for both Windows and Linux. This walkthrough uses the Windows one because it’s the most approachable if you’ve got a spare Windows PC. The Linux version exists if you’d rather go that way, but it’s a fiddlier project, and it can’t run server-side mods at all. More on that in Step 8.

Step 1: Install SteamCMD

SteamCMD is Valve’s command-line downloader for dedicated servers. The Palworld server is a free download, and the account you use doesn’t need to own the game.

1. Search “SteamCMD download” and take the developer.valvesoftware.com result.
2. Make a folder at C:\steamcmd and unzip it there.
3. Run steamcmd.exe once and let it update itself. When you get a Steam> prompt, type quit.

Step 2: Download the Palworld server

Open Command Prompt (press the Windows key, type cmd, press Enter) and run:

C:\steamcmd\steamcmd.exe +force_install_dir C:\palworld-server +login anonymous +app_update 2394010 validate +quit

That long number is the Steam app ID for the Palworld dedicated server. The download is several gigabytes, so go make coffee. When it finishes, your server lives in C:\palworld-server.

Step 3: Start it once to create the config

1. In C:\palworld-server, double-click PalServer.exe. A console window opens and the server starts generating a world. The first launch takes a minute or two.
2. Once it’s running, close that window to stop the server. You only started it to make Palworld write out its settings file.
3. The settings now live at C:\palworld-server\Pal\Saved\Config\WindowsServer\PalWorldSettings.ini. This is the file you edit to name your server, set a password, and change the rules.

If you’re happy with the defaults for now, you can skip ahead and come back to settings in Step 8.

Step 4: Let it through the Windows firewall

Nothing from outside reaches a Windows machine unless Windows is told to allow it. The server’s first launch usually pops an “allow access” box. Tick Private and Public, then Allow.

Missed the prompt, or clicked the wrong thing? Open “Windows Defender Firewall with Advanced Security”, go to “Inbound Rules”, choose “New Rule”, and allow UDP port 8211. That single port is how Palworld players reach your server.

Step 5: Test it from inside your house

Prove the server works on your own network before you involve the internet at all.

1. On the server PC, open Command Prompt and run ipconfig. Note the “IPv4 Address” (something like 192.168.1.50).
2. Start PalServer.exe again so the server is running.
3. On a different PC on the same network, launch Palworld, choose Join Multiplayer Server, and enter your server’s address and port in the box below the server list, like 192.168.1.50:8211.

Use that 192.168 address here, not your public one. Some routers won’t send a connection from inside the house back around to your own public address, so testing that way can fail on a server that’s working fine for everyone else.

Load into the world and the server itself is proven. The rest of this route is about opening a path for people outside your house.

Step 6: Port forwarding, so friends can join

By default your router drops traffic that arrives uninvited, which is exactly what you want it doing most of the time. A port forward is the one exception you write by hand. Anything arriving on port 8211 belongs to the server PC.

Router admin pages all look different, but you’re always doing the same four things:

1. Pin the server PC to one address on your network, so a reboot doesn’t move it. Look for “DHCP reservation” or “static lease”.
2. Open the port forwarding section. Some routers file it under “virtual server” or “NAT forwarding”.
3. Point UDP port 8211 at the server PC’s address.
4. Search “what is my IP” on the server PC to get your public address.

Your friends then type YOUR-PUBLIC-IP:8211 into Palworld’s direct-connect box, with the password if you set one.

If that worked: congratulations, you’re done, and you should feel good about it. Set a reminder to re-run the Step 2 command whenever Palworld updates (stop the server first), and skip ahead to Step 8.

Step 7: The catch nobody warns you about (CGNAT)

Step 6 fails outright for a lot of people, through no fault of their own.

Public internet addresses ran short years ago, so many providers stopped handing one to each home and now share a single address across a whole neighborhood. The name for that is CGNAT, carrier-grade NAT. Your traffic still gets out fine, which is why browsing and playing online feel normal. What can’t happen is a stranger’s game finding its way back to your specific house, and no router setting fixes that, because the traffic never reaches your router to begin with.

How to check: log in to your router and find the WAN or “internet” address it reports. Compare it to what “what is my IP” says. If they’re different, you’re behind CGNAT. An address starting with 100. on the router is also a giveaway.

Your options if you’re stuck:

• Ask your provider for a public address, sometimes sold as a static IP. It’s free with some, a few dollars a month with others, and off the table with the rest. One phone call tells you which.
• Send your traffic through a machine that has one, using a tunnel or relay service. It works, and it leaves you with a second piece of software to look after.
• Pick a platform that includes the relay, which is route 3 below. We built it because of this exact problem.

Those same three apply when the router isn’t yours to configure: dorm internet, a building-wide connection, or a household where someone else holds the admin password.

Our guide to why your friends can’t join walks the full diagnosis in order. It’s written around ARK, but everything past the port numbers applies here too.

Step 8: Settings and keeping it running

The server is up. A few things that make it livable long-term:

• Settings live in PalWorldSettings.ini (the file from Step 3). This is where you set your server name, a join password, an admin password, the player cap, and the rates for things like capture rate, XP, and how fast your Pals get hungry. Edit while the server is stopped. The file packs almost everything onto one long line, so change values carefully and keep a backup copy before you start.
• Mods: here’s one place the Windows route pays off. Pocketpair’s own docs are blunt about it: server-side mods only work on the Windows edition of the dedicated server, so a Linux setup can’t load them at all. Even on Windows it’s a manual job rather than subscribe-and-forget. You download a mod, drop its folder into Mods\Workshop\, switch it on in Mods\PalModSettings.ini, and restart. Mods also tend to break when the game updates, so be picky about which ones you run. Plenty of people stay vanilla and lean on the settings above instead.
• Updates: when Palworld patches, players can’t join until the server updates too. Stop the server, re-run the Step 2 command, start it again.
• Sleep settings: set the PC to never sleep (Settings, then Power) or your server will vanish the first time the machine dozes off. If it’s a laptop, also set the lid-close action to “do nothing”. This one takes down more home servers than anything else.
• Restart it regularly. This is the big one for Palworld. The server slowly uses more memory the longer it runs, and it has done since launch. Leave it up for a week and you’ll feel it as lag and rubber-banding, no matter how much memory the machine has. Restarting clears it out, so get in the habit of restarting once a day. More memory only delays the problem, it doesn’t fix it.
• Crashes: dedicated servers do crash now and then. Manually, that means noticing and starting PalServer.exe again.

So that’s route 2 end to end: an evening to set up, a daily restart to stay ahead of the memory creep, and a step in the middle that only works if your provider cooperates.

Route 3: The guided way

Here’s our pitch, kept short as promised.

Server Reforged runs route 2 on your behalf, on a computer you already own. You put Ubuntu Server on the machine (it’s free, and our click-by-click guide assumes you’ve never installed an operating system before), paste one command out of your dashboard, and from then on the machine takes its orders from a web panel. Creating the world, naming it, and changing the rates are all form fields instead of that one-long-line config file.

Networking is where the difference shows up. The server dials out to a relay we run and your friends meet it there, so nothing has to find its way into your house. There’s nothing to forward and nothing to change on your router, and CGNAT stops being a problem. Updates, crash recovery, downloadable backups, and the never-sleep settings are ours to handle. (Our dashboard’s mod tools are ARK-only for now, so Palworld runs vanilla on the platform today.)

It’s free while we’re in beta, with no credit card. When paid plans arrive they’ll cost well under what renting does, because you’re bringing the hardware. The getting started guide shows every step, and it takes about half an hour.

Which route should you pick?

• Rent when there’s no machine to spare, or when the server is public enough that uptime should be somebody’s job.
• Manual when you have a Windows PC free, your provider gave you a real public address, and the setup sounds like a fun evening rather than a chore. What you learn carries over to every other game server you ever run.
• Server Reforged when the hardware is sitting there but the evening isn’t, or when CGNAT has closed off the manual route. That’s the situation we built for.

Quick answers

How much RAM does a Palworld server need? Less than you’d think, at least at first. A fresh server with a few friends on it often sits around a couple of gigabytes. What catches people out is that Palworld’s memory use climbs the longer the server runs, so 8 GB is fine for a small group provided you restart it daily, and 16 GB gives you slack if you’d rather not think about it. Buying more memory delays that problem rather than solving it. The restart is the fix.

Can I host and play on the same PC? You can get away with it more easily than in heavier games, but a separate machine is still the smoother answer if you have one.

How many players can join a Palworld server? Officially, up to 32. That’s the cap Pocketpair supports and the standard default on a dedicated server. You can raise the limit past 32 by editing the config, and plenty of hosts do, but it isn’t officially supported and it leans harder on your hardware. For a home PC and a friend group, 32 is usually more than enough.

What does self-hosting actually cost? Your power bill, and not much of it. A desktop left on all month adds a few dollars at typical rates, and it only pulls real power when someone’s actually playing.

My friends can’t connect. What’s wrong? Retrace Steps 5, 6 and 7 in that order: local test first, then the port forward, then the CGNAT check. That last one is the answer more often than people expect, and it’s the only one you can’t fix from the router.

Can I add mods to my Palworld server? Only if it’s a Windows server. Pocketpair’s docs say plainly that server-side mods work on the Windows edition of the dedicated server and nowhere else, so the Linux build can’t load them. On Windows you download a mod, put its folder in Mods\Workshop\, enable it in Mods\PalModSettings.ini, and restart. It’s manual, one mod at a time, and mods often break when the game patches. If mods matter a lot to you, that’s worth knowing before you pick Palworld as your project. One heads-up: mod management on the Server Reforged platform is ARK-only for now, so Palworld runs vanilla there.