How to Adjust Difficulty Settings on a Palworld Dedicated Server

Palworld's dedicated server tools cover most of what you'd want, but one thing they don't quite handle yet is the official difficulty preset. If you spin up a server and try to flip from Casual to Hard, the game shrugs. The setting exists in singleplayer, but the dedicated server config does not currently parse it. The good news is you can still shape the experience by editing the underlying values directly. This guide walks through what those presets actually do and how to recreate them on a HolyHosting Palworld server.

What the official difficulties mean

Before diving into config files, it helps to know what each preset is doing under the hood. Singleplayer and official multiplayer servers ship with three modes that the community is already familiar with.

Casual. A laid back run. Resources are plentiful, capture rates climb, combat is forgiving, and dying carries no penalty. Nothing is dropped on death.

Normal. The middle ground. Drops are reduced, gathering takes longer, and Pals have more health. If you die you lose your gear on the ground, but your active party of Pals stays with you.

Hard. Bring a flask. You take more damage, gain less XP, capture rates fall, and wild Pals are scarcer. Dying wipes everything you were carrying, including your Pals, and you have to go reclaim it.

Why dedicated servers ignore the difficulty option

Dedicated server configs include a `Difficulty` field, but at the moment the game does not actually apply it. Pocketpair may wire it up in a future patch, however right now setting it does nothing. Instead, the practical knob most operators use is DeathPenalty, which directly controls what a player loses when they fall in battle. Combine that with multipliers for damage, hunger, capture rates and similar values and you can reproduce any of the official presets, or invent your own.

Editing the death penalty on your server

Once you know which experience you want to emulate, the change itself only takes a minute.

1. Open the HolyHosting control panel and choose Config Files at the top of the menu.

1. Select Palworld Game Settings and scroll until you find Death Penalty.

1. Set it to the option that fits your server. `None` keeps everything, `Item` drops only inventory, `ItemAndEquipment` drops gear too, and `All` is the full hardcore wipe including your Pals.

1. Adjust any other multipliers you care about, such as damage, capture rate or resource gathering, then click Save at the bottom.

A reboot of the server applies the changes. Player clients will pick up the new rules on their next join.

Build the difficulty that fits your group

There is no single correct preset for a dedicated server. Some communities prefer a relaxed sandbox where catching Pals is easy and death never stings. Others want a punishing world where every excursion is a calculated risk. Since the dedicated server lets you tune every value independently, you can mix and match. Casual loot rates with Hard combat damage, or Normal everything except a no-loss death penalty for newer players. Experiment, gather feedback from your group, and tweak from there.