How to Move Your Single Player World to Your Server

You started a world on your own machine, and now you want everyone to play in it. The world itself moves across, with your bases, your map progress and the Pals in your boxes. Player characters are the part that does not, and knowing that before you start saves a lot of confusion.

1Know What Transfers

• The world transfers. Bases, terrain changes, unlocked fast travel points and the Pals stored in your Palbox all come with it.
• Characters usually do not. Single player and dedicated servers store player data differently, so everyone, including you, normally has to create a new character on the server and start from level one.
• If that trade is not worth it, it is often less painful to start fresh on the server. See how to start a fresh world.

2Find Your Single Player Save

• On Windows, press Win + R, paste %LOCALAPPDATA%\Pal\Saved\SaveGames and press Enter.
• Inside is a folder named after your Steam ID, and inside that, one folder per world with a long name of letters and numbers.
• Open the one you want. It should contain Level.sav and LevelMeta.sav. If several look similar, sort by date modified and take the most recent.
• Close Palworld before copying anything, so the save is not half written.

3Back Up the Server World

• Log in to your game panel and click your Palworld server.
• Open Backups and take a manual backup. See how to create a manual backup.
• Go to Console and press Stop. Never swap save files while the server is running: it writes the world back out as it shuts down and will overwrite what you just uploaded.

4Replace the World Files

• Open Files and navigate to Pal/Saved/SaveGames/0.
• Inside is one folder with a long name of letters and numbers. That is your server world. Open it.
• You will see Level.sav, LevelMeta.sav and a backup folder.
• Delete Level.sav and LevelMeta.sav, then upload the two files of the same name from your single player world.
• Keep the server folder itself and its name exactly as it is. The server already knows which folder to load, so replacing the contents is far safer than adding a new folder.

5Start and Check

• Press Start and watch the console until it reaches Running Palworld dedicated server on :18003, with your own port.
• Join the server. You will arrive as a new character, but the world around you should be the one you built.
• If anything is wrong, stop the server and restore the backup you took in step 3.

Good to Know

• Everyone starts a new character. Tell your group before you do this, not after. People are far more relaxed about losing a character they knew they were going to lose.
• Community tools exist, and they are unsupported. There are third party save converters that claim to carry characters across. They can work, but a failure damages the world file itself, so only try one against a copy and never against your only save.
• Take a backup once it works. You now have a world that took real effort to move. Make a clean backup of it before anyone plays.

Finished

Your single player world is now running as a server and your group can join it. Set the world up for multiple players with how to change the difficulty, and make sure everyone can get in with how to join your Palworld server.