Palworld is a game that has recently taken the world by storm. A cross between ARK, Pokemon, and Rust, it's a survival game already set records on Steam. It's also a pretty intensive game that's hard to run, especially so on the Steam Deck. While it's marked as "Playable," performance out of the box is less than ideal. We've tested the game to find the most ideal settings you can play under, so you don't have to.

To change the settings in Palworld, go to Settings and Graphics on the main menu. You'll need to restart your game after changing some of these settings.

Can the Steam Deck run Palworld?

The short answer is yes

First and foremost, yes, the Steam Deck can run Palworld. It's certainly playable even out of the box, but it's at a pretty low resolution, and the graphics settings are arguably too high for it to run properly. You won't really get to play the game at high settings, and the best you'll get out of the box is a moderately playable medium preset in the graphics settings. This includes high graphics, medium view distance, and a 640x400 resolution.

With that, we tested a playthrough of the beginning of Palworld, constructing the workbench and a wooden club and capturing our first Pal. This is the same set of steps we did in every run throughout our testing to ensure that the performance was as reproducible as possible.

The performance at the default settings was borderline unplayable. With the 99% percentile of frame time coming in at 59.07 milliseconds and the 99.9% coming in at 122.99 milliseconds, users can expect 99% of frames to be above 17 FPS and 99.9% of frames to be above 8 FPS. It's not exactly a fantastic gaming experience. It looks good, but that's not good enough for a playable experience.

With that, I started to play around with the settings some more. I changed it to the low preset and decreased the anti-aliasing to FXAA, but kept everything else the same. This resulted in a better experience overall, but still left more to be desired.

This looks slightly worse but not noticeably so, and the performance was marginally better. The 99% percentile of frame time comes in at 47.50 milliseconds, whereas the 99.9% percentile of frame time comes in at 128.53 milliseconds. This works out to 21.05 FPS and 7.78 FPS, respectively, meaning that your overall experience will be improved, but performance will still be poor.

Palworld on Steam Deck: Best settings for performance, graphics, and battery life

It's hard to run no matter what

The game becomes decently playable when setting Palworld to the lowest settings possible across the board. The only gripe I have is the view distance is extraordinarily low, so I would maybe increase the view distance to medium and leave everything else as is. Otherwise, things on the floor that are very close to you won't be rendered at all.

The 99% percentile of frame time comes in at 30.82 milliseconds, whereas the 99.9% percentile of frame time comes in at 55.07 milliseconds. This comes in at 32.45 FPS and 18.16 FPS, respectively. I'm afraid this is as good as it gets for Palworld on the Steam Deck, though it's at least playable.

To sum things up, these are the best settings for Palworld on the Steam Deck.

With these settings, the game will play at 30 FPS or more nearly all of the time, and it's actually an enjoyable experience. It pushes the Steam Deck to its limit, and you can expect it to suffer as a result, but it works, and that's the main thing.

Get the best Palworld experience

If you'd like to play Palworld on the go with better performance, chances are you'll need to look at other gaming handhelds to do so. The Steam Deck is powerful, but games like these expose its weaknesses, whereas other, more powerful handhelds may do better. If Pocket Pair, the developer of Palworld, improves the optimization of this game, though, then it's very likely going to be one of the best Steam Deck games in the future.