How to Run Palworld on Steam Deck
Palworld has taken the gaming world by storm, offering a new take on the timeless monster-catching fun of Nintendo’s iconic Pokemon series. While you can play the game on PC and Xbox through Early Access, many Steam Deck owners may also be wondering if they will be able to play the game on their Steam-enabled portable devices. The short answer is yes, but the longer answer is that you should change some settings to ensure a smoother experience.
Does Palworld work on Steam Deck?
Despite not receiving a “Great on Deck” rating, Palworld is listed as “playable on Steam Deck” on Valve’s Steam storefront. This means that while it is technically playable, you will have to tweak various settings for it to work properly. Sure, you can just download the game and start playing, but you’ll likely run into framerate issues, stuttering, and even freezing.
How to improve Palworld experience on Steam Deck
To make Palworld work better on Steam Deck, change some game settings to make it easier to run on weaker Steam Deck hardware. There are many recommended settings, but I’m going to list the ones that I personally used to play Palworld on my Steam Deck:
-
Vertical Sync: Off
-
Motion Blur: Off
-
Max. FPS: 60
-
Anti-Aliasing: TSR or TAA (neither hurts or helps framerate more than the other)
-
Viewing Distance: Average
-
Grass: Medium
-
Shadows: medium
-
Effect quality: Average
-
Texture quality: Average
Now, it’s worth noting that you won’t get 60 FPS (frames per second) on the Steam Deck while playing Palworld . The game just isn’t optimized for it, and the Steam Deck isn’t powerful enough either. There are already some custom mods, such as the Steam Deck Essentials mod , that tweak settings even lower than the base game allows, but even then you won’t get a consistent 60 FPS. This mod can also make the visuals too low quality, at least in my opinion.
Instead, I recommend aiming for a stable 30fps, and the settings above will achieve this even on an older LCD Steam Deck. OLED will likely have slightly better performance since Valve has optimized some aspects of this model’s hardware, but don’t expect significant improvements that are worth changing settings for. However, I didn’t cap the max FPS at 30 because I wanted the system to be able to exceed it where possible. If you let it rise to 45 or 50 FPS in some sequences, it won’t cause any problems, but you can always limit it to 30 if you want a completely stable FPS that never goes above or below that value.
Many Reddit users recommend setting the View Distance setting to Low. However, when I did this, I found the visual pop-ins of grass, rocks, and other objects to be too annoying to handle for the extra five to six frames per second they gave me. In 10 hours of gaming on the Steam Deck (all in handheld mode), I rarely dropped below 30 FPS. Sure, it may not be the pinnacle of gaming, but 30fps on the Steam Deck is still impressive for a new game.
I leave VSync and Motion Blur turned off as VSync tries to match the display’s refresh rate and FPS together. In this particular case, it may cause more problems than it helps, and Motion Blur simply makes the movement in the game look worse. However, you can turn it off to hide some lower resolution changes if you wish.
Keep in mind that these settings will not prevent you from experiencing graphical glitches on Steam Deck. Even with everything running on Low, it’s entirely possible that the FPS will drop below 30. However, I found that these settings are still very playable without the game’s visuals looking too terrible.
Known issues with playing Palworld on Steam Deck.
If you’re planning on playing Palworld on the Steam Deck, there are a few things you need to know.
First, if you’re playing on battery, you should only expect an hour or two of game time before you need to plug in. This game absolutely eats up the Steam Deck’s battery, and while the OLED should last a little longer, I’d recommend always having a charger handy if you plan on playing on battery.
Additionally, if you have CryoUtilities installed on your Steam Deck, you can configure the game to limit the amount of memory it is allowed to use. This is a complex process to improve Steam Deck performance and requires the following documentation from the creator of CryoUtilities to perform it correctly. So if you’re not comfortable doing this, don’t bother with it. If you want to do this, you can follow this guide to set it up.
Palworld’s performance on Steam Deck will likely improve with FSR 2 (FidelityFX Super Resolution) enabled. But for now, DLSS (Deep Learning Supersampling) is the only option the game offers. There are FSR mods that enable this, but they require some processing of in-game files for everything to work smoothly. DLSS and FSR are Nvidia and AMD’s respective names for new upscaling systems designed to deliver higher frame rates by rendering frames at a lower resolution and then using deep learning artificial intelligence to upscale them to a higher resolution. This often provides significant improvements in FPS and stability in modern games, but may result in some loss of visual quality.
Palworld also doesn’t play well with the Steam Deck virtual keyboard yet, meaning you won’t be able to change your world name or even your character name. No one has found a solution to this problem yet, so you’ll have to live with whatever names it gives you if you can’t get it to work correctly.
Finally, Palworld is currently experiencing a serious memory leak issue. This means that over time, as you play the game, it will take up more and more of your Steam Deck’s RAM. Thus, I recommend saving the game and exiting it every few hours to avoid problems with this particular issue, at least until the developers fix it.