A Palworld server that won't start almost never needs the fix people reach for first. "Verify your files and reinstall" is the standard advice, and on the most common failure it does nothing at all — because the files were never downloaded in the first place.
Here's how to tell the failure modes apart, in the order they actually happen.
First: is it crashing, or did it never install?
These look identical from a control panel — the server flips to "starting", then stops — but they have nothing in common.
Look for this line in your console output:
Pal/Binaries/Linux/PalServer-Linux-Shipping: No such file or directory
If it's there, the server isn't crashing. The game binary isn't on disk. The install failed and the start command has nothing to run. On Linux hosts this usually surfaces as container exit code 127 — the shell's "command not found".
The other tell is size. A complete Palworld server install is several GB. If your server directory is sitting at a few hundred MB, the download died partway and nothing you do in the config will help.
The install failure most guides miss: IPv6
If SteamCMD reports something like:
Error! App '2394010' state is 0x2 after update job
…and the "install" finished suspiciously fast — under a minute for a multi-GB download — the cause is very often IPv6, not a corrupt download.
We found this on our own fleet in July 2026 and confirmed it with a controlled A/B test. The mechanism:
- The container has an IPv6 address available.
- Steam resolves Valve's content CDN to its AAAA record.
- It connects over IPv6 — which black-holes on TCP port 443.
- Steam does not fall back to IPv4. It just fails.
The giveaway is in Steam/logs/content_log.txt. You'll see failed to send manifest request and update canceled : Failed downloading … manifests (No connection), always against an IPv6 CDN address.
What made this so hard to spot: other games on the same machine install perfectly. Tools built on curl do Happy Eyeballs — they try IPv6, fail fast, and retry over IPv4 within milliseconds. Steam doesn't. On one of our nodes, 100% of Palworld installs failed while 152 BeamMP servers on the same box were completely fine. Everything pointed at "Palworld is broken" when the real answer was a network stack.
The fix is to take IPv6 away from the container's network so Steam only ever sees an A record. Note that forcing IPv4 precedence via /etc/gai.conf while leaving IPv6 up does not work — Steam uses IPv6 whenever the interface has an address at all.
If you're self-hosting under Docker, recreate the bridge network without IPv6. If you're on a managed host and installs keep dying at a few hundred MB, this is worth raising with them by name — it's a node-level fix, not something you can do from inside your server.
One debugging tip if you're testing this yourself: don't A/B with Palworld's own 5GB app. Steam throttles repeated anonymous pulls and you'll get misleading errors in both arms. Use a small app like the Steamworks SDK Redist (app 1007) as a clean discriminator.
Restart loop right after editing the config
If the server booted fine yesterday and started looping immediately after you changed a setting, it's the config — and specifically the single enormous OptionSettings=(...) line in PalWorldSettings.ini.
That line is one comma-separated list. A missing comma, an unmatched bracket or a stray quote anywhere in it can take out the whole boot. Undo your last edit, or restore a backup, and start again one value at a time.
Two things worth knowing before you edit that file by hand:
Palworld rewrites it on every boot. A config parser regenerates the OptionSettings line from environment variables roughly two seconds before the server starts. On a managed host, hand-editing the ini is usually futile — your changes are overwritten before the game ever reads them. The panel field is the thing that survives a restart.
Whole numbers are silently discarded on rate fields. This one costs people real gameplay rather than uptime. That parser only accepts float values with a decimal point. Set an XP rate of 2 and it's thrown away and falls back to 1.000000 — no error, and the panel still shows the 2 you typed. Write 2.0 instead. We found this on 31 of 33 active servers in our own fleet; one had been advertising 20x XP while serving 1x. It applies to XP rate, capture rate, spawn rate, work speed, day/night speed and egg hatching time. Player and guild counts are unaffected — it's only the float fields.
See the server settings guide for the full key list.
Settings ignored, admin password refused, Stop button dead
If the server does start but ignores every setting you change, and /AdminPassword insists no password is set, check for this file:
Pal/Saved/SaveGames/0/<WORLD>/WorldOption.sav
If it exists, Palworld reads its settings from there and ignores PalWorldSettings.ini completely. It usually carries a blank admin password, which also breaks RCON — and because most panels implement a graceful stop by sending a shutdown command over RCON, the Stop and Restart buttons quietly stop working too. People then use Kill, which skips the save.
Back the file up, delete it, restart. Your world is safe — that file holds settings only; the world itself is Level.sav plus Players/. Be aware that deleting it makes every previously-ignored setting apply at once, so check your rates first. Full detail in the admin commands guide.
Starts, runs a while, then dies
That's usually memory. Palworld's server accumulates memory over uptime, and a Linux host will OOM-kill the process without anything that looks like a game crash in the logs.
Pocketpair's recommendation is 16GB. If you're at 8GB with a built-up world, a nightly restart matters more than the RAM number — see how much RAM a Palworld server needs and the memory leak guide.
Won't start right after a game update
Two candidates, in order:
Mods. Anything built against the previous build will take the server down on boot. Move your mods out, confirm it starts clean, then add them back one at a time.
A half-applied update. If the server updated while running, or the update was interrupted, you can end up with mismatched files. A genuine reinstall is the right call here — this is the one case where it's the actual fix rather than a reflex.
Starts fine, nobody can join
If the process is up and stable, it isn't a start problem — it's networking. Palworld needs UDP 8211 for the game and UDP 27015 for the community server list. A server that runs happily but never appears publicly is almost always 27015.
The order I'd work through it
- Is the binary actually on disk? (
No such file or directory, exit 127, tiny install size) - If not — is the install dying over IPv6? Check
content_log.txt. - Did it break the moment you edited a setting? Revert it.
- Ignoring settings and refusing admin commands? Look for
WorldOption.sav. - Dies after running a while? Memory.
- Broke right after an update? Mods first, then reinstall.
- Runs but unreachable? Ports.
Most "won't start" threads jump to step 6 and never check step 1.
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