First you'll want to go to this site and do steps 1 and 3 (personally I didn't do step 3 and it works for me)
https://rentry.org/7fix
Install explorer suite and then open it (specifically cff explorer)
go into your local files for palworld and then navigate to the exe file for palworld
(palworld > pal > binaries > win64)
In here you're looking at "Palworld-Win64-Shipping.exe", drag and drop this file into your explorer suite window and click no if a popup appears asking about loading only the first 40mb
when you are in navigate to: Import directory > Kernel32, in the window that appears find a row that says "CreateFile2", double click this and rename it to "CreateFileW"

next you will need to get dxvk and vkd3d, you can get them here:
https://github.com/HansKristian-Work/vkd3d-proton/releases
https://github.com/Sporif/dxvk-async/releases

you will need to check which version you need to use by checking your gpu's driver version, you can check this here: https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/wiki/Driver-support

I personally used the 1.10.3 version of dxvk and 2.6 version of vkd3d, you will also need to install 7-zip zstd as vkd3d uses an odd compression format that the normal version of 7-zip is incompatible with, you can find the releases of this software here:
https://github.com/mcmilk/7-Zip-zstd/releases

unzip dxvk and vkd3d and use the x64 files, inside both folders you will find .dll files, you will need to copy these files over into: palworld > pal > binaries > win64

finally go into the properties of palworld on the steam launcher and in the command line argument type in "-dx11"

once this is done you should be able to launch the game on windows 7, 8, 8.1 or other operating systems

no one cares how "out of date" these operating systems are, keep seething lmao