A conspiracy theory has been proven correct. Palworld has just issued a new patch on both Steam and Xbox, v0.1.1.4, where among a number of other fixes, they have addressed an issue with Lifmunk Effigies, where players are tasked to find dozens of them to increase their capture rate. After much theorizing about it not actually doing that, everyone has been proven right.
The patch has the following note, explaining what happened:
“Fixed an issue where, although the displayed capture 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.”
This absolutely lines up with my experience, where you’d be losing things like what should have been 50/50 coinflips 70-80% of the time, or Pals would break out of 85% capture rates at a weirdly high rate. On the higher end, throwing a Legendary ball at a Legendary Pal might show a somewhat okay % capture rate, but it would instead take dozens and dozens of balls to do anything.
However, I’m not even sure Palworld’s explanation is fully correct. There was testing that showed that the bonus wasn’t just not working, it may have actually been making capture rates worse. One video had a situation where a zero Lifmunk account had a 50% capture rate while a maxed Lifmunk one had a 37% capture rate on the same Pals with the same spheres thrown. So it may be even worse than what Pocketpair is describing here, and your capture rates may surge noticeably after this now, especially at higher Lifmunk levels.
This is such a bad bug it almost feels like players should be awarded materials somehow in the wake of it, as how many spheres were wasted on Pals that should have had much higher capture rates? But I don’t think the game is really set up to start randomly doling out materials like that (how would that work, exactly, they just throw it in a random base chest?), but yeah, it’s a lot of wasted effort to be sure. I actually stopped playing in part because of this, as if it was true, it was not going to be worth burning the time, materials and spheres on bugged capture rates. And as it turns out, that’s exactly what was happening.
So, feel free to head back out there and start catching. I am very curious to see how exactly this feels now compared to what it was previously, as I think it’s going to be a pretty big difference.
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