A new Palworld patch has fixed one of the game's most glaring issues, as Lifmunk Effigies will now correctly impact catch rate.
In Palworld update 0.1.4.1, released early today, developer Pocketpair said that it had "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." In other words, while collecting and cashing in the little green statues was supposed to make it easier to catch pals, in reality it did nothing at all.
That's not quite as bad as reports that Palworld's effigies actively hindered your efforts to catch Pals, but it's still not ideal. Thankfully, however, with today's Palworld update, the issue should be over, so you can return to the Anubis statues to cash in any lingering effigies without worrying.
Other fixes in Palworld update 0.1.4.1 further sure up attempts to stop the game from crashing if you and your guildmates have caught more than 7000 pals, stop Pals in breeding farms from going to sleep "forever," and prevent weapons from glitching out of existence if grenades were used in multiplayer. Pocketpair is also still looking into anti-cheat efforts.
It might be a relatively minor update, but Pocketpair made it clear in its first Palworld roadmap that the game's huge success would lead to a substantial amount more bug-fixing than it had initially planned for. The developer has been pretty quick to get new patches rolled out, however, so hopefully we'll start seeing some more gameplay-oriented updates pretty soon.