PSA: Effigies Seem To Decrease Your Capture Rate In Palworld (Update)

Those looking to up their catch rate in Palworld can now reliably seek out Lifmunk Effigies once more. Patch v0.1.4.1 includes a number of fixes for the smash hit survival/animal-catching game, including a bug that prevented catch rates from increasing. The patch is now live on both Steam and Xbox.

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In the patch notes for the latest build, Pocketpair described the issue as:

Although the displayed capture rate probability increased when the capture power was strengthened with Lifmunk Effigies, the capture probability did not actually increase at all due to an internal processing bug.

Though there was clearly an issue with the Lifmunk Effigies, Pocketpair’s notes run counter to what fans were suspecting: that the Effigies were lowering capture rates. Regardless, capture rate issues with Lifmunk Effigies should no longer be an issue.

As a reminder, Palworld features a bug report link right in its pause menu, which will direct you to this form.

Original story follows

On paper, Lifmunk Effigies, those green glowy statues you can find around Palworld’s map, are supposed to increase your odds of capturing a Pal. The problem, however, is that multiple users are reporting not only that these don’t seem to be working as advertised, but they actually seem to be making one’s capture rate worse.

It’s worth noting that while there’s some compelling evidence for this apparent bug, there are also some users reporting different experiences. Still, there seem to be enough folks suffering with worse capture rates after visiting Lifmunk Effigies that it might make sense to avoid these until a patch arrives.

The Lifmunk Effigy bug explainedDocumented in a 21-minute video by YouTuber Chalenor, game version 0.1.0.3 seems to dramatically decrease your capture rate upon visiting Lifmunk Effigies. How much? Prior to visiting the Effigies, Chalenor reported a 53% capture rate. After snagging all the Effigies, however, his capture rate plummeted to 37%. As Paul Tassi notes over at Forbes, “that’s not a margin of error.”

Still, as one user on Palworld notes on the game’s official Discord server, “the only way to [reliably] know for sure if effigies were negatively impacting catch rate would be to collect a huge amount of data that was as exact as possible.” And without a proper confirmation from Pocketpair (the developer has acknowledged bugs in the past), we mostly have anecdotal info to go by. Still, with a Reddit post discussing the problem as documented in Chalenor’s video now hitting 9.2 thousand upvotes, there are a lot of people reporting similar issues.

Kotaku has reached out to Pocketpair for comment.

How to increase your catch rate without EffigiesFor now it seems best to avoid Effigies until Pocketpair officially weighs in on the issue. Increasing your capture rate, however, is as easy as crafting better Pal Spheres. You can also freeze or electrocute Pals to increase your chances of capture.

Update 2/7/24 at 11:15 a.m. ET: This piece has been updated to reflect a recent patch to Palworld.