The short answer: Pocketpair's own recommendation for a dedicated server is 16GB of RAM. The longer answer depends on three things — how many players you host, how built-up your world is, and how you deal with Palworld's memory leak. Here's the practical breakdown, updated for 1.0.
The baseline numbers
| Server | RAM | Realistic use |
|---|---|---|
| Minimum | 8GB | A handful of friends, a young world, scheduled restarts |
| Recommended | 16GB | Pocketpair's official recommendation — comfortable for most groups |
| Heavy | 24GB+ | Long-running 32-player worlds with big bases and breeding programs |
CPU matters too, but differently than you'd expect: the Palworld server loves fast single-thread performance and uses only a couple of cores. A high-clock CPU with 16GB beats a many-core machine with slow cores. Disk-wise, plan roughly 20GB+ on SSD/NVMe — world saves grow with your bases.
Why "enough RAM" isn't a fixed number
A Palworld server's memory use isn't static. Three forces push it up over time:
1. World complexity. Every base, every assigned Pal, every storage chest full of items is state the server keeps hot. 1.0's endgame content makes worlds grow faster than early access did.
2. Player count. More concurrent players means more loaded areas of the map at once. A 32-player Saturday night session can load a multiple of what a 4-player weeknight does.
3. The memory leak. This is the one that surprises people. Palworld servers slowly accumulate RAM the longer they run — even in 1.0, even on oversized hardware. A server that idles at 6GB after a restart can be holding 12GB+ a few days later without anything changing in the world. We wrote up what actually works against the leak, but the headline is: schedule a daily restart. Headroom delays the problem; restarts solve it.
Matching RAM to your group
- 2–8 players, casual world: 8GB is genuinely fine if the server restarts daily. Without restarts, you'll feel it within the week.
- 8–20 players, established world: 16GB. This is the sweet spot and the official recommendation for a reason.
- 20–32 players, endgame bases, breeding farms: 24GB. At this scale you want the extra headroom so the between-restart drift never touches your peak hours.
One pricing note while you compare hosts: many providers price Palworld per player slot, so the RAM question gets tangled up with a seat-count bill. We price by resources only — every Connect Hosting plan includes all 32 slots (8GB, 16GB, or 24GB), so you pick by world size, never by how many friends you have.
What we run
Our Palworld plans map directly onto the table above: Starter (8GB) for small groups, Pro (16GB — the Pocketpair recommendation) for most communities, Beast (24GB) for packed long-running worlds. All three get NVMe storage, automatic 1.0 updates, and a daily leak-protection restart scheduled in your region's quiet hours.
