How to Capture Your Palworld Ending With a Facecam Overlay

If you want to record the final moments of your Palworld save with your face visible in the corner, you don't need anything fancy. I do this all the time for my own Lets Plays, and most of the headaches come from people rushing through the setup without understanding where things actually break. You need OBS Studio (free, download from obsproject.com), a working webcam, and Palworld installed. That's it. The common mistake people make is trying to use NVIDIA ShadowPlay or Xbox Game Bar for this because they think it's simpler. Those tools don't composite overlays the way OBS does, and you'll end up with either no facecam or a blurry mess depending on your resolution settings. Set OBS to 1920x1080 output resolution. Match your desktop to that same resolution. Run Palworld in borderless windowed mode, not fullscreen exclusive. Fullscreen exclusive mode causes black screens inside OBS sources sometimes, and it's a pain to troubleshoot when you're two hours into a boss fight.

The Setup Process

Open OBS and add a Game Capture source. Name it something you'll remember like "Palworld." In the source properties, make sure you're capturing the specific window, not the entire screen. Window capture is cleaner and has less overhead than screen capture. If Palworld doesn't show up in the dropdown, run it first, minimize it, then come back to OBS and refresh the source. Add your webcam next. Video Capture Device source, select your camera, set the resolution to match what your camera actually outputs, not what the dropdown says it can do. A lot of webcams lie about their capabilities in OBS. Check the actual feed at full resolution before you commit to anything. Position your facecam in the bottom right corner at about 30 to 40 percent of the total screen height. Anything larger looks amateur hour and anything smaller is pointless. Add a simple chroma key or remove color effect if your background isn't clean enough, but honestly most of the time a decent webcam against a plain wall is fine without any filtering.

A Specific Problem I Ran Into

During my third Palworld playthrough, I hit the final boss and noticed the facecam completely froze while the gameplay kept recording. The output file had three minutes of frozen facecam over continuous gameplay audio and video. I spent an hour digging through forums before I figured out the issue was my webcam's hardware autofocus conflicting with OBS's frame pacing. The fix was switching to manual focus on the camera and disabling the auto-exposure feature in the camera software itself. After that, zero issues across multiple sessions. If you're seeing this kind of behavior, check your camera settings before you blame OBS. The Palworld ending sequence is roughly 5 to 8 minutes depending on your choices. Make sure you start the recording before you trigger the final cutscene. There's no in-game replay for the ending, and once it plays through you've committed your save. I recommend creating a manual save right before the final battle starts so you can reload if something goes wrong with the recording. Set your recording format to MKV, not MP4. MKV is more resilient to corruption if OBS crashes or your computer freezes mid-record. You can remux to MP4 afterward through Media -> Remux Recordings in OBS. I've lost three recordings to corrupted MP4 files over the years and never looked back.

Common Pitfalls and What Actually Happens

Here's the part most guides skip. When you record at 1080p with a facecam overlay, your bitrate needs to be high enough to handle both the game and the camera feed. Set your bitrate to at least 6000 Kbps, ideally 8000 if you have the bandwidth. At lower bitrates, the facecam detail compresses badly and ends up looking pixelated, especially if you're moving around much. The game itself can handle 6000 fine, but the overlay adds complexity to the encoding. Another issue that catches people off guard: Palworld's performance drops significantly in the late game. If you're running at 60 frames per second earlier in the session but dropping to 30 during the ending, your recording will look inconsistent unless you're capping your frame rate manually in OBS. Go to Settings -> Video and set your FPS output to 30 flat. That way the final recording is smooth throughout even if your actual FPS fluctuates. Audio is usually fine since Palworld handles audio capture well through the Game Capture source, but double-check your audio tracks are balanced. Game audio and mic audio should sit around the same decibel level. I usually set my mic to peak around -12dB and let the game fill in the rest. If your mic is too loud you'll drown out the ending music and voice acting, which ruins the final product.

Post-Processing Options

Most people who record this way don't edit the footage heavily. The raw recording is usually good enough for YouTube uploads. If you want to trim the beginning and end, DaVinci Resolve (free version) handles this in about 10 minutes for a recording of this length. Avoid overly aggressive filters on the facecam. People tend to over-sharpen and make the overlay look worse than it would naturally. If you have a better camera than a standard webcam, like an older DSLR with a clean HDMI out and a capture card, the quality difference is noticeable but not dramatic for this use case. A $150 webcame like the Logitech C920 or C922 performs adequately for this purpose and the setup is significantly simpler. The whole process from launching OBS to hitting record on the Palworld ending typically takes about 10 minutes of setup. If you're doing it right and the recording finishes cleanly, you're looking at maybe 15 minutes of post if you trim it. Far faster than trying to re-record through a problematic fullscreen capture or debugging why your ShadowPlay overlay didn't stick.