How to stop your Palworld server without losing progress

To stop a Palworld server without losing progress, use Stop or Restart in the PlayNHost panel. The panel saves the world first, then asks Palworld to shut down with a 15-second countdown and the message The server is stopping. The world has been saved. The badge says Offline about 15 to 20 seconds later.

Stop the server

1. Open your server in the panel.
2. Click Stop. The badge changes to Stopping.
3. Wait until it says Offline. Do not click again while it is stopping.

Restart does the same save and stop, then starts the server again. The scheduled restarts use it too: How to restart your Palworld server with warnings.

What happens when you click Stop

1. The panel asks Palworld to save the world, the same as save in the Console. It does this because, in PlayNHost's tests on Palworld 1.0.5, the game's own shutdown did not save first.
2. It then asks Palworld to shut down after 15 seconds. Players see The server is stopping. The world has been saved.
3. Palworld stops. The Console shows REST API stopped and Shutdown handler: cleanup.

If Palworld is still loading its world and does not answer, the panel tries to save for up to 2 minutes. If it never answers, it stops the server anyway and says so in the Console: [playnhost] Palworld did not answer for 2 minutes (it was still loading its world), so it is stopped without a save. Nothing was played in that time, so nothing is lost.

Ways that can lose progress

• Kill ends the server at once with no save. Use it only when a server is stuck on Stopping: How to start, stop, restart and force-stop your server.
• /Shutdown and /DoExit typed in the game: Pocketpair's command list calls /DoExit a force stop. Use the panel's Stop instead.

Save without stopping

Type save in the Console (the game answers Complete Save), or run Save World on Quick Tasks: "Writes the world to disk now, without waiting for the next autosave." Palworld also saves by itself every 30 seconds by default.

After a crash

A crash skips the save, so the world is as it was at the last autosave. If something went wrong in the world, roll back with a snapshot: How to roll back your Palworld world to a snapshot.