If you've been craving a game like Rust on your Steam Deck, Palworld is the perfect fit to scratch that itch with added Pals. It's a unique blend, reminiscent of Rust, Valheim, and Pokémon.

At present, the game doesn't run optimally on the Steam Deck, offering only 30 to 40 frames per second, with occasional dips, due to the lack of FSR implementation, only DLSS is available.

For the best gameplay experience, I've experimented with the settings and found a balance that works well.

Starting with the medium preset, I set the maximum FPS to 60, capped it at 30, turned off v-sync and motion blur, enabled TAA for antialiasing, set the view distance to low, and kept the rest on medium.

This setup offers the best compromise between graphics and performance. Lowering the shadows to low doesn’t yield a significant FPS gain but makes the game look a lot worse, so I advise keeping them medium even if you tweak down some of the other settings.

On the multiplayer side, the game performs pretty much the same as the single-player mode, with frame rates slightly improving at night due to less rendering.

Regarding the Steam Deck's performance, the game is quite demanding. The OLED model consumes around 24 Watts, translating to about 2.5 to 3 hours of gameplay. The LCD model pushes consumption to 27-28 Watts, capping at around 2 hours of playtime. Hence, it's not the most battery-friendly game for now, but future optimizations like FSR or FSR 2 could significantly improve this.