Learning how to play Palworld on iPhone, iPad, and Mac is super easy once you get the hang of it, but it can be slightly confusing initially as there is no official native support.
Being sold as Pokémon with guns, Palworld is a survival crafting game about building bases, capturing creatures, and fighting big bosses. Given that fairly unique premise, it has already achieved over six million sales in just days after its launch. It’s still a game in early access which means it is lacking support for platforms like Apple. Luckily, there are a few methods to get the game working if you simply can’t wait for the full release.
Here is how to play Palworld on iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
How to play Palworld on iPhone and iPad
There isn’t a native way to run Palworld on Apple’s mobile devices just yet, but you can play it with nothing but an internet connection, a controller, and an Xbox Game Pass subscription.
How to play Palworld on iPhone and iPad via Xbox Cloud Gaming
The game does not yet work with touch controls as it is still in the Game Preview program. This means that it’s still in development and won’t have support for Xbox features like Achievements. Touch controls will likely be added in the future. Once you have grabbed a controller, you can play Palworld on iPhone and iPad with the following steps:
- Go to Xbox.com/Play and tap on the Xbox Cloud Gaming icon
- Find Palworld by typing it into the search bar
- Click Get Ready to Play
- Hit the Share icon and Add to Home Screen
- Open the Xbox Cloud Gaming app that popped up on your home screen
- Find Palworld and click Play
How to play Palworld on Mac
Though you could opt to stream Palworld to your Mac, there are a few ways to run it on your device locally, saving a little bit of that bandwidth for online play, and completely without an internet connection.
How to play Palworld on Mac via Crossover
As pointed out in the video above, you can run Palworld on Mac via Crossover. Essentially a compatibility layer that translated non-Mac games into one that can run on Mac, it recently received DirectX 12 support which means you can now run Palworld on it with no problems.
How to play Palworld on Mac via Whisky
You need Palword on Steam and have Whisky installed on your Mac. You also need to download Game Porting toolkit. After this, download and install Whisky and Game Porting toolkit, then pop it into the Applications folder. Once this is done, use Whisky to install Steam by clicking into the app and making a “bottle”.
After all of this, you simply have to open up Steam, install Palworld, and click Play.
To note - we unfortunately have not been able to test this and the Whisky method ourselves but there are videos of it working very well, as you can see above. Crossover does cost money, unlike Whisky, so it’s only worth doing if you want a more streamlined process.
One more thing… Very early access
Apple devices have gotten so much better at running all the latest games ever since the invention of the Apple silicon chip. Apple’s own game porting toolkit, Wine, and the raw power of the iPhone 15 Pro mean that they are capable of running many games otherwise assumed to not run on Apple devices.
With both the software needed to run it and Palworld being in early access, you have to assume some problems will pop up, like bugs, crashes, and technical issues.
Palworld seems to run just fine on both iPhone and Mac, but it won’t be as buttery smooth as a full title designed to be run on Apple devices.
