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Needs review: This page has not yet been re-verified against Palworld 1.0. Steps, paths and tool versions may need adjusting. Palworld 1.0 vs early access.

Lua Modding in Palworld

Lua scripting is how you change Palworld’s behavior at runtime without cooking assets. It runs on UE4SS (RE-UE4SS): you write Lua that hooks the game’s UFunctions, reads and writes live objects, registers commands, and reacts to events.

This page orients you; the maintained, in-depth tutorial series lives on the official modding wiki (linked in Credits).

What you need

Section titled “What you need”
  • A UE4SS build for your Palworld version (UE4SS is rebuilt per game build - an old one may fail to load). See UE4SS.
  • A text editor. Lua mods are plain .lua files - no compiler, no Unreal Engine.
  • Basic Lua familiarity (variables, functions, tables). The tutorials below assume it.

The mod layout

Section titled “The mod layout”

A UE4SS Lua mod is a folder under UE4SS’s Mods directory with a scripts/main.lua entry point, and the mod is switched on in UE4SS’s mod list. The exact Mods path and enable mechanism depend on how UE4SS is installed for your setup - confirm both against your install before debugging “my mod isn’t loading”.

The core ideas

Section titled “The core ideas”
  • Hook a game function to run your code when the game does something (RegisterHook on a UFunction), then read or modify the parameters / objects involved.
  • Find objects at runtime (helpers to locate the first/all instances of a class) so you can operate on the player, world, or a Pal.
  • Call game functions to make things happen.
  • Log liberally to UE4SS’s console/log while developing - it is your main feedback loop.

Gotchas worth knowing up front

Section titled “Gotchas worth knowing up front”
  • Version sensitivity. Both UE4SS and the exact class/function names your script references can change between game builds. Re-verify names against your build rather than trusting a dated snippet.
  • Multiplayer / server context matters. Whether your code runs on host, client, or a dedicated server changes what is safe to do; design with that in mind from the start.
  • Callback lifetime is a real trap. Long-lived callbacks and delayed calls can be garbage-collected or fire at the wrong time; prefer patterns the community has found stable.

Credits

Section titled “Credits”

  • Follow-along Lua tutorial created and shared by null (im.null) - written to give the Lua side of Palworld modding a starting point, and later folded into the official wiki.

    Source: null - original message

  • Canonical tutorials: the Lua Modding category on the official Palworld Modding Wiki, kept current for the game.

  • General UE4SS Lua reference: see UE4SS.