How To Get ‘Palworld Running On A Steam Deck

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Palword has taken the gaming world by storm, offering a new take on Nintendo's popular Pokemon series with timeless monster appeal. While you can play through Early Access on PC and Xbox, many Steam Deck owners are wondering if they can play on Steam devices. The short answer is yes, but the long answer is that you need to change some settings to make it smoother.

Does Palworld work on Steam?

Although it is not listed as "Steam Deck Playable", Paulward is listed as "Steam Deck Playable" on Valve's Steam Store front . This means that while it's technically playable, you'll need to configure various settings for it to work properly. Of course, you can download the game and start playing, but you may experience frame rate issues, stuttering and freezing.

How to make Palworld work better on Steam Deck

To make Palworld work better on Steam Deck, change some game settings to make things easier on weaker Steam Deck hardware. There are many recommended settings, but the ones I'll mention are the ones I personally use to play Paulwords on my Steam deck

Now, it's important to note that you won't get 60 FPS (frames per second) while playing Palworld on Steam. The game isn't optimized for this and the Steam deck isn't powerful enough. Some user mods, like the Steam Deck Essentials mod, set the base game lower than it supports, but you still won't get a stable 60 FPS. The module probably makes the visual quality too low , at least in my opinion.

I recommend getting a solid 30 FPS instead, and the above settings will make it on older Steam LCD decks. OLEDs will perform slightly better after Valve optimizes a few things in that model's hardware, but don't expect improvements that require tweaking. That said, I didn't limit the maximum FPS to 30 so the system could overclock as much as possible. Jumping to 45 or 50 FPS for certain sequences won't be a problem, but if you want a stable FPS that doesn't go up or down all the time, you can always limit it to 30.

Many others on Reddit suggest lowering the visibility. However, I found it very interesting to control with another five or six fps which gave me the visual appearance of grass, rocks and other objects while doing so. In over 10 hours of gameplay on Steam, as well as on handheld devices, I rarely dropped below 30 FPS. Sure, it might not be the peak of the game, but 30 FPS on Steam is still impressive for a new game.

With VSync and motion blur disabled, I'm trying to match the screen refresh rate and FPS at the same time as VSync. This can cause more problems than help in this case and motion blur makes the game look bad. You can turn it off to hide some low resolution changes if you want.

Please note that this setting does not prevent Steam Deck from experiencing graphical errors. Even if you run everything in low mode, the FPS can be dropped below 30. But I think this setting is still very playable, so the outlook for the game isn't too bad.

Common problems while playing Palworld on Steam

If you plan to play Palworld's Steam Deck, there are a few things you should know.

First, if you are playing on battery, you should wait an hour or two of playing before connecting. This game really drains the Steam deck's battery, and while the OLED has slightly better battery life, I recommend having a charger if you plan on playing on battery power.

Additionally, if you install CryoUtilities on your Steam deck, you can optimize the game to limit the amount of memory it uses. Optimizing Steam Deck performance is a complex process and requires the following documentation from the makers of CryoUtilities to get everything right. So if you're not comfortable doing that, it's best not to mess around. If you want to do this, you can follow this guide to set it up.

Steam Deck's Palworld performance will see some improvements when FSR 2 (FidelityFX Super Resolution) is enabled. But now DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) is the only option this game offers. There is an FSR mod that enables this, but it requires a few files for everything to work properly in the game. DLSS and FSR is a new upscaling system designed to deliver better frame rates by rendering frames at lower resolutions and then upscaling them to higher resolutions, using deep learning AI from Nvidia and AMD. This generally increases FPS and stability in modern games, but can reduce visual quality.

Also, Palworld doesn't work well with Steam Deck's virtual keyboard, which means you can't change world names or character names. No one has found a solution yet, so if it doesn't work properly, you'll have to use the name given.

Finally, Palword currently suffers from a major memory problem. This means that the longer you play, the more RAM it will use from your Steam deck. So, to avoid this particular problem, I recommend saving and exiting the game every few hours, at least until the developers fix it.

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