Palworld Economy and Item Delivery
A currency and shop on Palworld: what UE4SS and PalDefender are for, how items are delivered, how players link their Discord accounts, and what auto-earn does not do here.
Palworld needs UE4SS and PalDefender first
Palworld has no console, no RCON that can hand an item over, and nothing in its own API that gives an item to a player. So the economy on this game rides on two things: UE4SS, which loads mods into the Palworld server process, and PalDefender, which exposes the interface the platform uses to deliver items and to read chat.
GameGrid installs both for you. The stack — UE4SS, PalDefender, the Admin Commands mod and ItemDumper — is checked and repaired on every Palworld server start, so a backup restore or a move to another host that loses a piece is put right by itself.
The one thing to know is the timing. The install runs alongside the start, and mods are only loaded when the game process launches, so a brand-new server generally has them active from its SECOND start. If deliveries are failing on a server you have only started once, restart it.
You can check and force this from Game Tools → UE4SS, which shows what is present and has an Install Everything button. You should not normally need it.
While the stack is missing, purchases are held rather than lost. They deliver once the mods are loaded and the player is on a running server; the platform keeps trying for 24 hours.
The general setup is in Setting Up Your Server Economy. This article covers what is specific to Palworld.
The item list
Economy → Shop → Scan Game Items builds the catalog from what your server actually has, in this order.
The item dump your own server wrote — the ItemDumper mod walks the game's item table and writes the real ids to logs/item-dump.json. This is the accurate list, and it is why installing UE4SS matters even if you never intend to use PalDefender's other features.
A bundled list of 2,451 vanilla items, used when your server has not written a dump of its own yet. It covers the base game and knows nothing about your mods.
Mod `.pak` files in Pal/Content/Paks/~mods/ and UE4SS Lua mods, for items your mods add.
So: start the server, let it come up, restart it once so ItemDumper is actually loaded, and then scan. Scanning before that gives you the bundled list rather than your server's own.
Re-scan after installing or removing a mod, and after a game update.
How delivery works
When a player buys something, the platform calls PalDefender on your server and asks it to give the items to that player, identified by their platform id.
The player has to be connected. PalDefender hands items to a player who is in the world; a purchase made while they are offline is held and delivered when they next join.
Delivery is confirmed by PalDefender's answer, so a green tick in the Transactions tab means the give was accepted rather than merely attempted.
The commonest hard failure on this game is PalDefender being on disk but not yet loaded, because the server has not been restarted since it was installed. Check the UE4SS tab, then restart. The next commonest is an item id from the bundled list that this server does not actually have — re-scan after ItemDumper has run.
Delivery states, retries and refunds are covered in Purchases, Delivery and Refunds.
Account linking
A player runs /link in your Discord server, gets a seven-character code by direct message, and types !link CODE in Palworld's in-game chat within ten minutes.
The platform reads that message out of the server logs, where PalDefender writes chat. That is why PalDefender has to be loaded, which means the server restarted since it was installed — without it there is no chat in the log to read and nothing happens, silently.
PalDefender's chat logging is what makes this work, and it is on by default. If someone turns it off in the Logging category of the PalDefender tab, !link, the Chat tab and the Discord chat bridge all stop together.
The whole chat message must be !link then the code and nothing else. Capitals do not matter.
The link stores the player's platform id — steam_ followed by their Steam ID for a Steam player, gdk_ for Xbox, ps5_ for PlayStation. That id is durable, so a link keeps working across sessions.
You can also link a player by hand from Economy → Links → + Add Manually, using their Discord user ID and their exact in-game name. Full detail: Linking Discord Accounts to In-Game Players.
The Chat tab on the Game Tools page is the quickest way to check the platform can see chat at all. If your players' messages do not appear there, !link cannot work either.
Auto-earn on Palworld
Four of the six rewards pay on Palworld: playtime, level milestone, daily login and Discord activity.
Playtime is paid per whole hour, measured from the connect and disconnect events the server reports. A 90-minute session pays one hour and carries the remaining 30 minutes forward.
Level milestone comes from the REST player list the panel already reads — the platform checks each player's level every minute and pays when it goes up.
Daily login is claimed by the player with /daily in Discord; Discord activity pays per message in your linked channel. Neither needs anything from the game.
No kill bonus and no death penalty. A stock Palworld server does not report kills or deaths through the REST API or the log, so there is nothing for the platform to pay on. Those two are not shown in your Auto-Earn settings, and /economy-earn refuses them with the reason rather than storing a number that could never pay.
To reward PvP or deaths on Palworld, use /award — by hand, or from your own tooling through the Customer API.
A player's first reading pays nothing by design: their level is recorded as a starting point, so adopting a server with high-level players does not pay out their whole history.
Event participation does not pay on this game. Nothing here raises an event the platform can see, so the control is hidden and the setting is stored without paying. It pays on Valheim, where a raid ending or a boss dying is something the server is told about. Use /award for event prizes here.
See Per-game economy support and Wallets, Awards and Auto-Earn.
Chat bridge
/chat-link #channel mirrors your server's in-game chat into a Discord channel. It reads the same PalDefender chat log as !link, so the same prerequisites apply.
The other direction — Discord into the game — goes through Palworld's own announce API, so a message from Discord arrives as a server announcement rather than as an ordinary chat message. It reads [Discord] <name>: <message>.
See Discord Chat Bridge.
Crossplay and mods
UE4SS, PalDefender, Admin Commands and ItemDumper are server-side only. Nobody joining installs anything, and Steam, Xbox and PlayStation players are all served the same way — provided their platform is ticked in Crossplay Platforms, which allows all four platforms by default.
Your own .pak mods in Pal/Content/Paks/~mods/ are untouched by installing or uninstalling UE4SS, and their items are picked up by the catalog scan.
See Palworld Mods and Palworld Game Tools.
Sharing an economy across servers
Two Palworld servers can share one economy so players keep one balance and one shop across both. It is on the Economy Overview tab.
A Palworld server cannot share an economy with 7 Days to Die, Minecraft or Valheim — item ids and delivery do not carry across games, and the panel will not offer the mismatched ones.