Palworld 1.0 Is Live — What Changed for Your Server

Pocketpair shipped 1.0 on July 10. The patch notes are 27 pages. Most of it is balance changes you'll never think about — but a handful of things directly affect how your server runs, and one of them has been quietly eating RAM since the update.

The map got bigger — and your server noticed

1.0 ships with Sakurajima, a new island that roughly doubles the total world area. That's the headline feature.

The consequence for server operators: more world area means more terrain loaded into memory, more Pals roaming at any given time, and higher baseline RAM usage even before a single player logs in. If your server was sitting comfortably at 3 GB of RAM usage before the update, expect that floor to be higher now.

This isn't a bug — it's the expected cost of a larger world. The question is whether your server has enough headroom.

The memory leak: what it is and why 1.0 made it worse

Palworld's dedicated server has a known memory leak. The server allocates RAM for each Pal, NPC, and world object it loads, and those allocations don't always get released cleanly. Over 24–48 hours of uptime, RAM usage climbs steadily.

The 1.0 map expansion made this worse. More world area means more Pals roaming more terrain, which means more allocations per hour. A server that used to become noticeably laggy after 36 hours might now hit the same threshold in 20.

Pocketpair is aware of the issue and hasn't patched it as of this writing.

Three settings to change right now

These are in PalWorldSettings.ini, under the [/Script/Pal.PalGameWorldSettings] section.

NpcSpawnIntervalTimeInSeconds Controls how often NPCs respawn at neutral camps. The default is 300 seconds. Set it to 600 to halve the respawn rate — fewer active NPCs means fewer live allocations sitting in memory.

PalSpawnNumRate Multiplier for Pal spawn density across the world. The default is 1.0. Setting it to 0.5 cuts the active Pal population roughly in half server-side. Gameplay still feels populated; RAM usage drops measurably.

ServerPlayerMaxNum Default is 32. If you're running a server for a six-person friend group, you're reserving resources for 26 players who will never join. Set this to your actual group size.

Recommended values for a small group (4–8 players):

Setting	Default	Recommended
NpcSpawnIntervalTimeInSeconds	300	600
PalSpawnNumRate	1.0	0.5
ServerPlayerMaxNum	32	6–8

Should you reset your world?

No — unless you specifically want to explore Sakurajima from a fresh spawn. Your existing base is fine.

Old saves load into 1.0 without issues. Sakurajima generates at the map edges, in chunks your world hasn't generated yet. If you've explored outward, the new island appears at the frontier; if you've kept to a home area, you'll discover it naturally.

A world reset is a meaningful choice. Don't make it for a compatibility reason that doesn't exist.

How to restart without losing your base

If the memory leak is already hitting you before this update's fixes help, see Why Your Palworld Server Gets Laggy for settings to apply now.

Before any major update, take a backup. In the Noogservers panel, the Backup button saves your current world state. This takes seconds and gives you a rollback point if anything goes wrong.

For the memory leak specifically, a nightly scheduled restart is more effective than any settings tweak. The server comes back in under 30 seconds, RAM resets to baseline, and players never see the degraded state that accumulates after a long uptime. Set the restart for 3 AM or whatever off-hours slot fits your group's schedule — the panel supports cron-style scheduling.