Pal Spheres are at the core of Palworld’s gameplay loop, since you use them to catch Pals to battle and put to work in your base. But what if other players could simply steal your hard-earned Pals in an instant with a special item?
In a recent Palworld update, an item called the Radar Sphere was discovered by dataminers, and it’s fully functional in the game’s code. It’s a Pal Sphere with one purpose: capturing another player’s Pals.
The datamined item description for the Radar Sphere reads: “A sphere that captures Pals when thrown. Though it has a low chance of success, it can forcibly capture another person’s Pal.” It has the same capture power as a Giga Sphere, meaning it has more than double the power of a basic Pal Sphere. The Radar Sphere isn’t currently available in Palworld, but that hasn’t stopped hackers from spawning them in.
In at least one clip shared to Reddit, a Palworld player noticed some of the Pals working in their base were being attacked, even though a raid wasn’t happening. They quickly fast-travelled back, only to see several players from a guild called “Team Rocket ALPHA” throwing Pal Spheres at their Pals and successfully catching them, even though they belonged to a player. After checking their Pal Box when the assault was over, the captured Pals were no longer there.
“All my Boss Pals were gone that were out,” Reddit user Ironmeme420 said. “I have no idea if those are NPCs or other players, but they look like other players to me. This was on an official server. Also to add they were not in my Pal Box anywhere after this incident occurred.”
Fans in the comments section quickly deduced the players were likely hackers using a hacked client to spawn in Radar Spheres on the public server they shared with the affected player. This let them use the unreleased item to steal other players’ Pals. And, since there is no PvP in Palworld yet, the player who had their Pals stolen couldn’t even defend them from the unknown assailants.
Radar Spheres are likely meant to be used in a specific context, like a potential PvP mode coming to Palworld in the future. Because the game is in early access and still has plenty of game-breaking bugs, hackers can take advantage of its current state and use Radar Spheres against other players.
There is currently no known fix for this issue, and it’s likely impossible to avoid if you play on public or official PC servers until Pocketpair fixes the issue. The developer did acknowledge the problem in a statement, saying a patch is coming soon but “it is currently difficult to completely prevent all cheating immediately.” If you want to avoid the same fate, your best bet is to play offline or only on servers with friends for now—unless you play on Xbox, which might be safe from these issues for the time being due to version differences.
