License and attributions

This page covers Palhelm’s license, the unaffiliated fan-project disclaimer, and the third-party data and assets Palhelm relies on. Several of these are fetched at run time rather than shipped, for licensing reasons; those distinctions matter and are called out below.

Palhelm’s license

Palhelm’s own code is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. The full text is in the LICENSE file at the repository root.

Unaffiliated fan project

Palhelm is an unaffiliated, fan-made tool. The Palworld name, game assets, and map imagery belong to Pocketpair. Palhelm is not endorsed by or associated with Pocketpair, and it is built to fit within their fan-work guidelines. Pal names and game concepts belong to Pocketpair.

Game-derived assets are not shipped

Two categories of art are derived from the game and are never bundled in the repository or the Docker image. Palhelm fetches them at run time into the data volume, on the operator’s own machine:

• Map tiles. The live map uses tiles from a third-party provider. The provider’s tile size, zoom range, bounds, and transform values are stored per dataset and preserved verbatim, because those values are what make the coordinate readout correct. scripts/fetch-map-tiles.sh downloads an operator-selected set of tiles into the data volume. Until tiles exist, the map screen shows a proper empty state.
• Pal icons. Pal preview icons are game-derived art. scripts/fetch-pal-icons.sh downloads them into the data volume. A missing icon falls back to an initials avatar, so nothing breaks if an operator chooses not to fetch them.

The map-tiles-and-icons page in getting-started covers these scripts in more detail.

The Oodle decompressor is not redistributed

The 1.0 save format uses Oodle compression. The Oodle decompressor is proprietary and cannot be redistributed, so Palhelm never commits it or bakes it into the image. It is downloaded once at first save parse into the data volume and verified against a pinned SHA-256 before use, or supplied by the operator. See the save parser page for the details.

Third-party attributions

PalCalc, MIT

The Discord bot’s Pal knowledge cache is built from PalCalc, which is MIT licensed. PalCalc supplies the canonical Palworld 1.0 roster and breeding matrix, along with expanded mechanical fields such as stats, work suitability, and learnsets. The bot records the source name, version, and license alongside the cached data. PalCalc’s partner-skill field is unpopulated in the pinned release, so the bot does not claim to have that data.

The bot also uses a pinned mechanical dataset that states MIT in its own README but ships no standalone license file. Because of that gap, the bot deliberately excludes that dataset’s descriptions and artwork, keeps only the mechanical fields, and retains source provenance.

The CC BY-SA knowledge corpus

The bot’s general Palworld knowledge summaries are adapted from The Palworld Wiki and are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. The summaries are condensed and reworded for the bot, and each stored section keeps its source page URL, revision id, retrieval timestamp, source label, and license. Only this adapted corpus is offered under CC BY-SA 4.0; Palhelm’s own code stays under Apache-2.0. This corpus is runtime data and is not included in Palhelm distributions. The full attributions, including the specific source pages, are in bot/THIRD_PARTY-NOTICES.md.

Map tile transforms

The map’s coordinate transforms come from the tile provider’s published dataset metadata and are preserved verbatim. As noted above, the tiles themselves are fetched by the operator and are not shipped.