PSA: Palworld's Lifmunk Effigies are reducing your catch rate

New evidence suggests that a bug is causing Lifmunk Effigies in Palworld to reduce your catch rate rather than boost it

Update: This bug has been fixed in the latest patch, check out our Palworld patch notes for details on how the issue has been resolved. Continue below to see how the bug was affecting the game, and how fans discovered it.

Palworld may have had a successful launch drawing a lot of praise from most people who’ve played it, but the game still has a fair few major issues that the team is working on, and a new one has just been discovered, in which the Lifmunk Effigies may actually be decreasing your catch rate, rather than boosting it.

The Lifmunk Effigies are the glowing green statues you can find around the game world. If you collect enough you can sacrifice them to a Hero Statue to get a permanent increase to your catch rate. The problem is that many players didn’t think it was working.

What was initially thought to be the cause was a bug involving the Memory Wipe Potion. This potion is designed to reset all your Stat Points, letting you respec your character build, but it accidentally wiped away any catch rate boost you’d got too – with no way to get them back. This bug was fixed in the recent Palworld v0.1.4.0 patch notes.

However, players have still been reporting issues, and a recent experiment by Chalenor on YouTube has shown that the Effigies themselves might be the problem.

The experiment shows Chalenor going around and attempting to catch 100 low-level Pals with the base Pal Spheres. In one version they do it with the Lifmunk Effigy boosts, and one without. In a surprising result, the one with no boosts comes away with a catch rate of 53%, and the supposedly boosted version comes away with just 37%.

This isn’t ironclad evidence though, the trouble with random chance is it’s hard to know when you’re just getting unlucky, and some have argued that 100 wasn’t a big enough sample size. However, it lines up with anecdotal evidence from a large number of players who report that their actual catch rate doesn’t seem to be what’s displayed on the screen. It’s hard to tell with random chance, but we can report failing 90% and over catches more than seems reasonable.

It’s then a fair conclusion to draw that the Lifmunk Effigies are not working as intended, and are reducing your catch rate instead of boosting it. So, until this is fixed or the team at Pocketpair debunks the issue, we recommend you avoid giving your collected Effigies over to a Hero Statue.