Black map or locked fast travel after moving your world
PalworldTroubleshootingYour world is fine. Map exploration lives on each player's own PC; copying one file brings it back.
Palworld stores map exploration (fog of war) on your own PC, in a file called LocalData.sav, kept separately for every world or server you play on. It is not part of the world save, so it does not travel with your upload. When you join the new server, the game starts you with a blank map even though your character, base, pals, and fast-travel unlocks all carried over.
The fix is copying one file on your PC and takes about two minutes. Re-uploading the world cannot fix it, and no server-side setting or mod can either.
Fast travel looks confusing for the same reason: the unlock flags live in the world and migrated fine, but a statue you haven't rediscovered displays as locked behind the fog. Your progress is intact underneath.
Join the new server once
Connect and let the world fully load, then completely close Palworld.
Optional: pause Steam Cloud
Right-click Palworld in Steam, open Properties, then General, and uncheck Steam Cloud so it can't overwrite the file mid-copy. Re-enable it after you've confirmed the fix.
Open your save folder
Press Win+R, paste %LOCALAPPDATA%\Pal\Saved\SaveGames, press Enter, and open the folder named with your long Steam ID number.
Identify the two world folders
You'll see one folder per world or server, each named with a long string of letters and numbers. Your old world folder matches the folder you uploaded. The new server folder was created when you joined in step 1: sort by date modified, it's the newest.
Set up your undo
In the new server folder, rename LocalData.sav to LocalData.sav.bak. Don't delete it; that's your undo button.
Copy your old map in
Copy LocalData.sav from your old world folder into the new server folder.
Rejoin and check the map
Launch Palworld, join the server, and open the map. Your exploration and fast-travel points should be back. If anything looks wrong, delete the copied file and rename the .bak back; you're exactly where you started. Nothing in this process can affect the server or other players.
Game Pass stores saves in a different container format instead of plain files. The idea is the same, but you need a tool to extract LocalData.sav from the container. The community Palworld LocalData extractor handles this. If you're on Game Pass and stuck, contact us and we'll walk you through it.
The world you uploaded to Haptic almost certainly included your old LocalData.sav, and we preserve it with your world. It's inside every backup on your dashboard: open your server's Backups page, download a backup, unzip it, and use the LocalData.sav inside for the copy step. Or message us and we'll send you the file directly.
Re-uploading the world, in any format, any number of times: the fog was never in the world files.
Map reveal mods installed on the server: the fog is rendered from the file on each player's PC, so a server-side mod cannot clear it.
Server settings, more memory, restarts, or switching hosts: this is base-game Palworld behavior, identical on every provider.
LocalData.sav is per player. If friends played on your old co-op world, each of them has their own copy on their own PC and follows the same steps to restore their own map. One player's file cannot restore another player's map. If the map is still dark after the copy, send us a screenshot of your SaveGames folder contents on Discord and we'll identify the right folder, or pull your LocalData.sav out of your uploaded world for you.
