Palworld's latest patch stops its capture chance boosting items making capture chances worse, and prevents your breeding Pals from being sent to a farm upstate forever

Palworld - A player stands in front of Zoe & Grizzbolt in their party
(Image credit: Pocketpair)

If you can cast your mind back to last week, you'll recall a Palworld bug that saw Lifmunk Effigies, which are supposed to increase your chances of successfully catching Pals, seemingly decreasing those odds instead. It was a minor scandal that saw players pull out their calculators to verify that—yep—their chances of catching Pals while using Lifmunk Effigies sure seemed to be some double-digit percentage lower than they were before.

But good news: our long Palworldian nightmare is over. As part of Palworld's 0.1.4.1 patch, released yesterday, Pocketpair says it has "Fixed an issue where, although the displayed capture probability increased when the capture power was strengthened with Lifmunk Effigies, the capture probability did not actually increase at all due to an internal processing bug."

So your Effigies will now do what they were put on this Palworld to do, rather than quietly hamstringing your chances. At least, I think they were hamstringing your chances. Pocketpair's patch notes just says they weren't increasing capture probability, not that they were decreasing it. It could be that the maths-filled player investigations of last week were just stumbling into purely natural bad luck and attributing it to their non-functioning Effigies.

Either way, it's solved. As are several other issues, at that. On top of the Lifmunk Effigy thing, Pocketpair has put an end to an issue that crash your game and corrupt your save data when the total number of Pals captured by the guild hit around 7,000. The studio also says that save data already broken by that bug should be able to load properly now.

I'll put the full patch notes below, but the final fix I want to call attention to is this one: "Fixed an issue where if a Pal that was manually assigned to a breeding farm went to sleep, it would not wake up forever." I appreciate this one for its delicate, almost parental phrasing, like your dad telling you the family dog has gone to a farm upstate. Your Pals should no longer go to sleep forever, or in other words, they should stop inexplicably dying when you manually assign them to a breeding farm.

Anyway, here are the notes in full:

Palworld update 0.1.4.1 patch notes

Major fixes

  • Fixed an issue where the game would always crash and save data would be corrupted when the total number of Pals captured by the guild reached approximately 7000.
  • In the previous patch, save data that had already been in this state (for servers, the server's world data) remained in a broken state that made it impossible to load, but after applying this patch it will be resolved and will load properly.
  • Fixed an issue where some weapons equipped by other players would disappear when a player used a grenade in multiplayer.
  • Fixed an issue where, although the displayed capture probability increased when the capture power was strengthened with Lifmunk Effigies, the capture probability did not actually increase at all due to an internal processing bug.

Base related

  • Fixed an issue where, although the displayed capture probability increased when the capture power was strengthened with Lifmunk Effigies, the capture probability did not actually increase at all due to an internal processing bug.
  •  Fixed an issue where no wood would drop when Pal at the base felled a tree.

Others

  •  Implemented countermeasures against some cheats and exploits.
Joshua Wolens
News Writer

One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.