Two and a half years is a long time to spend in Early Access, and Palworld has used every bit of it. Version 1.0, released July 10, 2026 as update 1.100.427, takes Pocketpair’s monster-collecting survival game out of Early Access for good, and it does so with patch notes running over 10,000 words, so long they nearly broke Steam’s character limit. Pocketpair calls it essentially a new game, and while that is marketing language, it is not far off the mark.
The update is free for everyone who already owns the game, and the base price did not increase at launch, a genuinely generous move given the scale of what is being added. It landed simultaneously on Steam, the Microsoft Store, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, and Game Pass, and the response was immediate: nearly half a million concurrent players on Steam alone, the game’s highest count since its original Early Access debut, with the total community now past 40 million players.
What’s New
The headline additions are substantial. Seventy-two new Pals, two new regions in Sunreach and the World Tree, a raised level cap of 80, thirteen new weapons, reworked Tower Bosses, wave-based base raids, and new Awakening and Mutation systems that give existing Pals more depth and build variety. The early game has been rebuilt around a reworked capture bonus and mission structure designed to get new players moving faster, and the progression ladder toward the endgame bosses feels considerably more purposeful than it did in Early Access. Multiplayer picked up welcome quality of life additions too, in-game voice chat, guild roles and permissions, and Discord linking, even though the previously rumored server clustering did not make it into this release, so a single dedicated server is still limited to hosting one world.
Existing saves carry over, though Pocketpair recommends starting fresh to experience the reworked story and progression as intended, and mission progress resets across the board to fit the new reward structure regardless of your save. One important practical note for anyone updating: back up your world first, and fully delete old Early Access mods rather than just disabling them, since leftover mod files have been confirmed to corrupt saves under 1.0.
Where It Falls Short
This is a genuinely massive update, and it shows some of the strain that comes with a release this large. Performance has taken a real hit for a lot of players moving from Early Access into 1.0, with shader compilation stutter on first loading new areas, VRAM usage climbing during long sessions, and multiplayer hosts running into desync and lag when too many Pals are active in a base at once. None of these are unfixable, and Pocketpair has already been patching quickly, but they are present at launch and worth knowing about before you dive in.
Console players, and Xbox One owners in particular, are feeling this more acutely. The Xbox One version is running last-generation hardware against a 1.0 update that leans hard on Unreal Engine 5’s more demanding features, and the result is a noticeably rougher experience than on PC or the newer consoles, longer load times, more frequent frame drops, and some of the same crash issues that plagued portions of Early Access still surfacing here. If you are playing on an older console, temper your expectations for how smooth this update actually runs.
There are also player reports of bugs that were largely absent in the final stretch of Early Access reappearing with 1.0, including some genuinely game-breaking ones in the first few hours for a portion of the community. This is common with releases this ambitious, but it is a real and immediate frustration for players who had a stable Early Access experience and are now troubleshooting crashes and save corruption instead of exploring the new content.
The Verdict
Palworld 1.0 is a huge, generous, and genuinely well-considered final step for a game that has already massively outperformed expectations. The new regions, the level cap increase, the reworked bosses, and the sheer scale of added content make this feel like the complete version of the game Pocketpair always wanted to make, and doing it as a free update for existing owners is the right call. The bugs, the console performance issues, and the rough edges that come with a launch this size keep it from being a flawless send-off out of Early Access, but they do not undercut what is otherwise one of the most substantial updates a survival game has delivered in years.
Palworld 1.0 is out now on PC via Steam and the Microsoft Store, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, and Game Pass. Free update for existing owners. Developed and published by Pocketpair.
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