Palworld is going quiet as Pocketpair takes an iron to its 'quirks and jank,' with full release planned for 2026

It's easy to forget amid the enormous success, Nintendo court cases, and that time its dev started a publisher, but Palworld isn't even really out yet. The game's been in early access since its release almost two years ago—1.0 remaining eternally on the horizon.

But that horizon draws nearer. In an update published today to Pocketpair's various social media channels to announce two main things: that it's resolved to put out Palworld's 1.0 version in 2026, and that doing that means there probably won't be any huge updates for the rest of 2025.

"Beyond just adding new content, there's a lot of cleanup that needs to be done before Palworld can exit early access," says Pocketpair community director Bucky in the announcement video. "It's no secret that Palworld has a lot of quirks and jank, and we want to take the time to properly address those before releasing the game. With that in mind, we plan to start this cleanup this year."

And then comes the bad news, though frankly I doubt anyone will be too upset about it, given what Bucky just said. "It means that things will be a little quiet from us for the rest of this year. It also means our winter update won't be as big as Feybreak was."

Feybreak was Palworld's 2024 winter update, and it was pretty humungous. It added a new island (that'd be Feybreak), new weapons, new mechanics, new resources, and a new type of Pals—predators dotted about the world who are pretty tough to take down.

So, you know, don't expect something like that again, because Pocketpair is beavering away at ironing out the bugs and quirks that—I have to imagine—big old updates like that bring along with them.

That's not to say there's no winter update, mind you. "We still do have a few surprises planned for our winter update this year, we just want to be transparent about where we're headed and the development of Palworld going forward," Bucky reassures. Pocketpair's also planning some "sneak peeks" of upcoming 1.0 content in the near future, which will hopefully sate ravenous players with a glimpse of the "truly massive amount of content planned for the 1.0 update."