How to Become Admin on Your Palworld Server
Set an administrator password, authenticate in game, and use the panel's Console tab for admin work without exposing anything.
Setting the Admin Password
Before you can use admin commands in game, set an Administrator Password. On GameGrid, open the Settings tab, go to the Basic category and find Administrator Password. It is masked in the panel and in API responses.
It is blank by default - but not for long. The platform needs a credential to read your server's live player count and metrics, so if you leave the field empty the host agent generates a random one and writes it into the config on the next start. That means "blank" is not the same as "no admin password", and it is why you should set your own if you intend to use /AdminPassword in game.
Choose a strong one. Anyone who knows it can run admin commands on your server.
The administrator password is a different field from Server Password. Server Password restricts who may join; Administrator Password controls who may run commands. A server can have no join password and still have an admin one.
Click Save Changes and restart the server. Nothing in PalWorldSettings.ini takes effect while the server is running.
Authenticating In-Game
Once the administrator password is set and the server has been restarted, join as a normal player. Open the chat (usually Enter) and type:
/AdminPassword YourPassword
You will not see a confirmation, but admin commands now work for you. Try /ShowPlayers or /Info to verify - if they return information, you are authenticated.
Admin status lasts for the current session only. You have to re-authenticate every time you reconnect. Palworld has no admin list file for a dedicated server; access is entirely password-based.
Admin Work Without Being In Game: the Console Tab
The Console tab in the panel is the way to run admin commands on a GameGrid server without joining it. It sends them to Palworld's own REST API over the host's loopback, so nothing has to be exposed and there is no client to install.
Type commands there WITHOUT a leading slash: ShowPlayers, not /ShowPlayers.
What it accepts: ShowPlayers (or list, players), Info, Metrics (or stats), Settings, Save, Broadcast <message>, KickPlayer <id>, BanPlayer <id>, UnBanPlayer <id>, Shutdown, and Help.
Anything outside that list is written to the server's standard input instead, which on the headless Palworld build produces no readable reply. If a command silently returns nothing, that is why.
You do not need to set an Administrator Password for the Console tab to work - the platform writes one of its own if you have not. You DO need one for /AdminPassword in game.
RCON and the REST API on GameGrid
Both exist, and neither is reachable from outside the host. That is deliberate: each grants full control of a server to whoever holds its credential, and Pocketpair themselves warn against exposing the REST API.
The REST API is force-enabled by the platform on every start, on your allocated port + 2, bound to 127.0.0.1 with no firewall rule. The RESTAPIEnabled switch in Settings does not turn it off.
RCON is off by default and GameGrid does not manage it. Leave it off: PalDefender already occupies port + 3 on this platform, so enabling RCON can put two services on the same port, and the Console tab already does everything RCON would.
There is no host and port for you to point an RCON client or a curl command at. If you want to drive your server from your own tooling, use the GameGrid Customer API rather than the game's own interfaces.
If you are self-hosting instead, enable what you need, and reach it over a VPN or an SSH tunnel - never by opening the port.