You’ve got an old Palworld world sitting there with 90 hours in it, a base you’re weirdly proud of, and a Pal you spent an entire Sunday breeding. Now 1.0 is out and everyone’s telling you to throw it away.
Every article answering this question gives you the same non-answer: “it depends on your playstyle.” I want to give you something better, so I’m going to tell you exactly what carries over, exactly what breaks, and then frame the decision around the thing that actually matters for people our age, which is hours.
The two-second version
- Under 5 hours of gaming a week? Keep the old save. Fly straight to the new content.
- 10+ hours a week and you bounced off early access? Start fresh. 1.0 fixed the exact thing that made you quit.
- Big base, or a group you play with? Hybrid. Keep the old world as a vault, start a new one, move your favorite Pals across.
Now here’s the reasoning, plus the stuff nobody’s warning you about.
What Pocketpair actually said
John “Bucky” Buckley, Pocketpair’s Head of Communications and Publishing, put it to the community on Discord roughly like this: your saves don’t need wiping, “but you should” start a new character anyway.
That’s an unusual thing for a developer to say. Nobody wants to tell paying customers to delete 90 hours. He said it anyway, and the reason is that 1.0 rebuilt the low-to-mid game around a new progression curve. A maxed early access character walks straight past all of it.
Worth knowing, worth weighing. Not worth obeying without thinking.
Your old save is not locked out of anything
Let me kill the biggest misconception first. Sticking with an old world does not gate you out of 1.0 content.
Sunreach, the World Tree, all 72 new Pals, the Awakening system, Mutation breeding, the reworked tower bosses, the new weapons. Your existing character can reach every bit of it. There’s no version flag that says “sorry, early access peasant.”
What an old save costs you is the redesigned first 20 hours. That’s it. If you already played those 20 hours in a worse version, losing them again isn’t obviously a tragedy.
What carries over
Confirmed in the patch notes:
- Your player level. It doesn’t get reduced. Accumulated experience is auto-adjusted to fit the new level table, so you keep your standing even though the curve changed underneath you.
- Everything you own. Pals, bases, gear, stored items, breeding lines.
- Lifmunk Effigies. These became Pal Effigies in 1.0, and existing ones convert over.
- Your tower boss kills. Tower boss and tutorial missions auto-complete based on bosses you already beat. You don’t refight the ladder.
What resets, and why your quest log is about to look empty
This is the part that’s going to make people think their save corrupted, so read it before you load in.
Main mission and sub-mission progress has been reset. On every save file. Not just old ones. Pocketpair rebalanced mission rewards and reset progress to keep it fair, which is defensible, but it means you’ll boot up a 90-hour world and see a quest log that looks freshly wiped.
Your save is fine. Tower bosses and tutorials get auto-marked complete based on what you actually did. Everything else in the mission list goes back to zero so the new reward structure isn’t broken by people who cleared old versions of the same objectives.
Don’t panic and don’t delete anything.
What can actually break
Three real risks, in order of how likely you are to hit them.
Old mods will hurt you. Delete them. Not disable, delete. Old mod files sitting in the game folder still load at launch even after you’ve clicked disable, and they can make missions impossible to progress or corrupt a 1.0 save outright. If your save contains mod-exclusive Pals or items, understand that pulling the mod may make that content vanish or stop the save loading at all. Back up first, then strip the folder clean.
Saves from v0.7.3 or earlier can spawn you out of bounds. The world boundary moved in 1.0. Straight from the patch notes: if you continue on save data from v0.7.3 or earlier, you may spawn outside the updated boundary, and the fix is Emergency Escape in the Options menu. Know that it exists before it happens, and you’ll save yourself a panicked hour on a forum.
Coastal bases are the problem children. Coastlines and world boundaries both changed. Bases built right on the water in an old save are the most likely thing to end up glitched, floating, or partially outside the playable area. Offshore building is a 1.0 feature, so there’s real irony in old waterfront property being the thing that breaks.
One more subtle one. Pal spawn data from before 0.7.3 doesn’t fully carry over, so a base you sited around a particular Pal’s spawn may not do the job it used to.
Back up your world before you launch 1.0 for the first time. Ten seconds of copying a folder against the possibility of losing 90 hours. Do it even if you plan to start fresh.
How to actually back up your world
Everyone says back up your save. Almost nobody tells you where it lives. Close the game first, then:
Steam on PC. Hit Win+R and paste %LOCALAPPDATA%\Pal\Saved\SaveGames. Inside you’ll find a folder named after your SteamID64, and your worlds are in there. Copy the whole thing somewhere else and name it something you’ll recognize in October.
Xbox app or Game Pass on PC. Win+R and paste %LOCALAPPDATA%\Packages\PocketpairInc.Palworld_ad4psfrxyesvt\SystemAppData\wgs. Let cloud sync finish before you copy anything. Sort by Date Modified and the newest folder is the live one.
Dedicated server. Your world save sits in the server’s own directory, nowhere near your single-player saves. If you rent hosting, pull it down through the file manager or FTP, and don’t assume your host backs anything up. Plenty don’t.
PS5 or Xbox console. No folder access, so lean on cloud saves and accept less control.
There’s a nice safety net worth knowing about too. The world select screen has a Restore from Backup Data option, and the game keeps its own rolling backups. If a converted save loads badly, try that before you do anything drastic.
One thing not to expect: there’s no supported Steam-to-Xbox save transfer. The two versions store saves in formats that don’t talk to each other.
The hybrid nobody explains properly
Here’s the move most people should make, and it hinges on one piece of tech.
The Global Palbox is a level 3 technology. It registers Pals in one world and lets you withdraw them from a Palbox in a different world. Your prize breeding project is not trapped.
So: keep the old world as a vault and a museum. Start a fresh one for the rebuilt story. Once your new base can house and feed them, pull two or three veterans across. Workers first, since a good Handiwork Pal saves you more early hours than a good fighter does.
Two caveats that matter. The transfer takes a snapshot at the moment you copy, so level a Pal up before you move it if you want the better version. And it moves Pals only. Your base, your layout, your storage chests, all of that stays where you built it. There’s no moving a house.
So which one, actually
Time is the variable everyone else is leaving out. A fresh 1.0 run to the ending takes somewhere north of 30 hours even played efficiently, and 55 to 70 at a normal pace. That’s the real price tag on “just start over.”
Run it against your actual schedule.
Keep the old save if you get a few hours a week, you already know how the early game works, and what you want is the new stuff. You’re 90 hours in. Fly to Sunreach on Thursday. There’s no medal for replaying a tutorial you’ve already seen, and at five hours a week a fresh start means two months before you touch the content you booted the game up for.
Start fresh if you have real time to spend, or you played early access and drifted off without finishing. That drifting was the game’s fault. Early access Palworld had no story, no quest tracker, and no reason to keep moving. 1.0 has all three. Loading a maxed character skips past the fix.
Go hybrid if your base means something to you, or you’re the one who hosts for friends. Vault plus fresh world plus Global Palbox gets you both.
A note for groups. If you run a server for friends, the fairness argument is stronger than the solo one. Veterans with maxed gear alongside returners starting from nothing makes for a miserable first month. A clean wipe with everyone at level 1 on the same Saturday is the better night out. Back the old world up and shelve it.
The verdict
Your save is safe either way, so this isn’t a decision you can get badly wrong. It’s a question of what you’re buying with the hours you have.
Fresh save buys you a rebuilt game you’ve never played. Old save buys you the new half of a game you already know. Both are fine. The only genuinely bad outcome is starting a fresh world you don’t have time to finish, bouncing off at level 30 in September, and concluding Palworld isn’t for you.
Whatever you pick, back up the old world and clear out your mods before you launch. Then go look at your empty quest log and don’t panic, since I already told you that was coming.
Old world or fresh start? Come argue about it in the TAG Discord. Someone in there has 400 hours in a base they refuse to abandon and they will defend it.
