Palworld Dedicated Server Requirements

The official Palworld server requirements

Start with what Pocketpair publishes, because it is the number the game is tested against and it is stricter than most hosting pages admit:

Read the 8GB line carefully, because most hosting pages quote it as the requirement. Pocketpair's own words are that 8GB “is also bootable, but increases the possibility of server crashes due to out of memory”. The requirement is 16GB. The distinction matters more than it looks, because Palworld's memory use climbs steadily while a world is live — players build bases, capture Pals, and fill the map with objects — so a long-running 1.0 world sits far above where it started. If yours already dies after a few hours, the guide on why a Palworld server keeps crashing covers how to confirm it is the memory and what to change.

How much RAM does a Palworld server need in practice?

Official minimums are written for a single spec that has to cover every case. Sizing by player count is more useful, so the table below is how we allocate memory across our own hosting plans — our operational sizing, not Pocketpair's specification:

Every tier below 16GB sits under Pocketpair's official requirement, so it is worth being straight about why those tiers work on managed hosting and often will not on your own machine. Two things differ. The memory is dedicated — nothing else on the box competes for it, which is not true of a PC that is also running the game, a browser and Discord. And the server watches itself. Our Palworld image samples the server every minute and restarts it when it has stopped serving — no setting to enable — on top of a nightly restart you can schedule from the dashboard to hand the accumulated memory back before it reaches the ceiling. That second half is the important one: Palworld grows its memory use over a session rather than holding steady, and a four-player world with around 80 Pals commonly climbs from roughly 3GB to over 8GB inside four hours. A 5GB plan runs a four-player world comfortably with a nightly restart scheduled; left running untouched for a week, it would not. If you are opening a public server, expect long unbroken sessions, or you are self-hosting on a shared machine, take Pocketpair's number over ours and start at 16GB.

CPU requirements

Pocketpair recommends four cores or more. Beyond that count, per-core speed is what you feel: the simulation — Pal AI, base automation, and world physics — is sensitive to single-thread performance, so a modern CPU with good per-core throughput does more for tick rate than a high core count does. On a managed Flux plan the vCPU allocation scales with the plan tier, so a larger player cap comes with more CPU headroom automatically.

Which ports does a Palworld dedicated server use?

Two ports matter. Get these wrong and players cannot connect — this is the single most common reason a Palworld server does not show up.

• UDP 8211 — the game port. This is how players connect to the server. It must be open and reachable on your public IP. This is required.
• TCP 8212 — the REST admin API. Optional, used for remote administration: querying online players, saving the world, broadcasting announcements, and graceful shutdown.

On a Flux-hosted server these ports are exposed for you at deploy time, so there is no router or firewall configuration to do. If you self-host, forward UDP 8211 (and TCP 8212 if you want the admin API) on both your router and OS firewall.

Disk space and saves

The Palworld dedicated server files are a few gigabytes, and the save data grows with world size, base count, and player activity. Plan for enough headroom to hold the server build plus a growing world and a couple of backups. What matters more than capacity is the kind of disk: Pocketpair explicitly warns that low-performance storage can corrupt save data, which makes an SSD a correctness requirement here rather than a speed upgrade. Managed Flux plans include SSD/NVMe storage sized to the plan, and you can take on-demand backups and restore them with one click from the dashboard.

Network and uptime

A public server needs stable bandwidth and, ideally, DDoS protection — a real concern for any exposed game server. Self-hosting from a home connection exposes your IP and offers no protection. Every Palworld server on Flux includes DDoS protection at no extra cost and runs on a distributed network for 99.9% uptime — that is what decentralized Palworld hosting buys you over a single datacentre — so the world stays online without tying up your own machine.