Palworld: How to Restore Lost Save

There have been some reports of people not being able to load into their Palworld saves. This can be heartbreaking if you put a lot of hours in. What makes it worse is that there’s no official method of recovering saved files.

Some players have reported finding their own methods of trying to restore their lost saves. While these aren’t guaranteed to work, they’re worth a shot. The process can be a bit confusing, but as long as you stick to this guide you should be good!

How to Restore Lost Save

To try and restore lost save files, you need to replace some files around in the Palworld save directory. Keep in mind that this method works only on the Steam version of the game, as the Game Pass version works differently.

The game can be pretty buggy sometimes, which can be used to the player’s advantage as well. 

Locating your Palworld folder

To find the folder that contains Palworld’s save files, head to the Pal folder which is found in AppData > Local. 

Here, the “xyz” is a placeholder for your Windows Username. If you’re having trouble finding the AppData folder, we’ve got you covered. Press “Windows + R” to bring up the Run window. Enter “appdata” without quotation marks and press okay.

Just enter the Local folder, and then look for the “Pal” folder. Once inside the folder, you should see a folder called “Saved”. Inside this folder, there is another folder called “SaveGame”. You will now see a folder that has a name of some seemingly random numbers. 

This number represents your Steam ID, so it’s going to be different for everyone. 

Inside this folder is another folder with a random combination of letters and numbers. This is the folder that contains your saved file. You can look at the “Date modified” entry to determine which save file you need to restore.

Inside this folder is a backup folder. This folder contains a backup of your Palworld save. 

Re-opening the game

Now, open Palworld and create a new world. This is gonna be a temporary save file that we will replace with your old save. Once created, close the game and return to the backup folder. Copy the contents of the backup folder into the newly created save file folder. 

Be sure to copy the contents of the backup folder into the new save file folder itself, and not into the new backup folder. Place it in this folder of your newest save file. You can use the date-modified details to determine which one is the newest. 

Windows will prompt you and ask if you want to replace the contents, this is fine and you do have to replace them. 

Now when you load the save file in-game, you should find yourself back in your old Palworld. If this doesn’t work, then your file is likely corrupted. You can try this process again with a slightly older version of your saved file. 

Hopefully, this process helped you recover your lost saved files. The whole process has no guarantees. Keep that in mind when you try this process.

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