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, your rates, 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.

There are three ways to do it:

1. Rent a server from a hosting company. Easiest, but you’ll pay every month, forever.
2. Run it yourself on a Windows PC. Free (minus electricity), but you do all the setup, and there’s one networking catch that stops a lot of people cold. We’ll cover it honestly.
3. Use a guided platform that turns a spare computer into a managed server. This is what we build, so we’re biased, but we’ll keep the pitch short and at the end.

Route 2 is the heart of this guide. Even if you end up picking another route, knowing what’s involved will make you a smarter shopper.

What you need before you start

Good news: 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. Before you spend an evening on setup, check the machine you’re planning to use:

• 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 genuinely 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 makes load times and restarts much nicer.
• Internet: a wired ethernet connection to your router if at all possible. For a typical friend group, ordinary home upload speed is enough.

One more thing worth saying up front: hosting the server and playing the game on the same PC at the same time works better in Palworld than in heavier games, but it still asks a lot of one machine. If you have a second computer, a spare desktop or an old gaming PC in a closet is the classic setup.

Route 1: Rent a server

The zero-effort option. You pay a hosting company, they hand you a control panel, and your server exists within the hour.

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:

• You don’t have any spare hardware, and buying some doesn’t appeal to you.
• You’re running a big public community server that needs to be up 24/7 with support you can yell at.
• 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.

If that trade sounds fine, renting is a perfectly good answer and you can stop reading here. If the monthly bill is the part that bugs you, keep going.

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

This is the full manual route. Budget an evening the first time. None of it is hard exactly, but there are a lot of small steps, and one of them (port forwarding) depends on things outside your control.

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 a free command-line version of Steam that downloads game servers. You don’t need to own Palworld on the account you use here; the dedicated server is a free download.

1. Download SteamCMD from Valve’s official site (search “SteamCMD download”, the developer.valvesoftware.com result).
2. Make a folder at C:\steamcmd and unzip it there.
3. Double-click steamcmd.exe once. It’ll update itself and show a Steam> prompt. Type quit and press Enter.

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

Windows blocks incoming connections by default. The first time the server runs, Windows usually shows an “allow access” prompt. Check both “Private” and “Public” and click Allow.

If you missed the prompt: open “Windows Defender Firewall with Advanced Security”, click “Inbound Rules”, then “New Rule”, and allow UDP port 8211. That’s the port Palworld players connect on.

Step 5: Test it from inside your house

Before involving the internet, make sure the server works on your home network.

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.

If you load into the world, the server itself is working. Everything from here on is about letting people outside your house in.

Step 6: Port forwarding, so friends can join

Your router ignores unexpected traffic from the internet, which is normally great. Port forwarding is you telling it “traffic on port 8211 is expected, send it to the server PC.”

Every router’s admin page looks different, but the shape is always:

1. Give the server PC a fixed address on your network (look for “DHCP reservation” or “static lease” in the router settings) so it doesn’t change after a reboot.
2. Find the port forwarding section (sometimes called “virtual server” or “NAT forwarding”).
3. Forward UDP port 8211 to the server PC’s address.
4. Find your public IP by searching “what is my IP” on the server PC.
5. Your friends join by entering YOUR-PUBLIC-IP:8211 in Palworld’s direct-connect box, plus the server 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)

For a lot of people, Step 6 simply doesn’t work, and it’s not their fault.

Many internet providers no longer give each home its own public address. Instead they share one public address across a whole neighborhood, a setup called CGNAT (carrier-grade NAT). Behind CGNAT, port forwarding can’t work, no matter how correctly you configure your router. The traffic never reaches your router in the first place.

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:

• Call your ISP and ask for a public (sometimes “static”) IP address. Some providers do it free, some charge a few dollars a month, some flatly won’t.
• Use a tunnel or relay service. These route your server’s traffic through a machine that does have a public address. Workable, but you’re now maintaining one more moving part.
• Use a platform with a relay built in, which is route 3 below. This exact problem is the main reason we built it.

The same applies if you can’t touch the router at all (dorms, apartments with building-wide internet, a parent who guards the admin password).

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.

That’s the honest manual picture: an evening of setup, a bit of ongoing care, and a hard dependency on your ISP playing nice.

Route 3: The guided way

This is the part where we tell you what we built, and why.

Server Reforged does route 2 for you, on a spare computer, without the sharp edges. You install Ubuntu Server on the machine (a free operating system; our click-by-click guide assumes you’ve never done it), paste one command from your dashboard, and the machine becomes a managed game server. Creating the Palworld server, naming your world, and editing settings all happen in a clean web dashboard, no long config file to hand-edit.

The networking difference is the big one: your server connects outward to a relay we run, and your friends connect to that. No port forwarding, no router settings, and CGNAT doesn’t matter. Your friends can join no matter how your home internet is set up. Updates, crash recovery, backups you can download, and the “never sleep” settings are handled for you too. (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 the whole journey, and it takes about half an hour.

Which route should you pick?

• Rent if you have no spare hardware, or you’re running a serious 24/7 public community and want someone else on the hook for uptime.
• Manual if you’ve got a Windows machine, your ISP gives you a real public IP, and you enjoy this kind of project. It’s genuinely satisfying, and everything you learned here transfers to other games.
• Server Reforged if you’ve got the spare hardware and want the result without the evening of setup, or if CGNAT has you boxed in. That’s exactly who we built it 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 the honest answer is that 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? Electricity. A typical desktop running around the clock works out to a few dollars a month depending on your rates, and it only draws real power while people are playing.

My friends can’t connect. What’s wrong? Work through Steps 5 to 7 above in order: confirm it works on your own network first, then check the port forward, then check for CGNAT. The CGNAT check surprises more people than anything else in this guide.

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.