How to Install Soulmask and Join a Server

Every survival game eventually turns into a job. You have the base, you have the workshops, and now somebody has to stand at the smelter feeding it ore for two hours. Soulmask's answer to that is the reason it exists: somebody does. It just is not you.

You knock an enemy tribesman unconscious, you bring him back, you win him over, and then he works. He mines, he farms, he cooks, he tends the furnaces, he stands on the wall with a bow. He has his own aptitudes and he is better at some jobs than others, so you find out what he is good at and put him there. Build a big enough base and you are running a settlement that keeps producing whether you are in it or not.

Listings for it collect on the game's hub.

The mask, and what it actually does

The other half of the premise is stranger and takes longer to sink in.

You wake up wearing an artefact that is not a hat. It is what keeps you going, and it lets you leave one body and take another — including the bodies of the people you recruited. Your progress lives with the mask rather than with the flesh carrying it around.

The practical effect is that "your character" is a role rather than a person. The tribesman you recruited for his talent with a spear can be the one you are actually playing during a fight, while your usual body stays home doing something else. Death stops being the wall it is in most survival games, because the mask persists.

It also reframes recruitment. Every NPC you convert is both a worker and a potential body, so the ones with unusual aptitudes are worth going out of your way for.

Getting it installed

It is a paid Steam game and it has spent time in early access, which is worth holding in mind: systems have moved, and they will move again. The game's own patch notes are the authority on what is currently in it, not a guide.

Install it from your Steam Library and let it complete. The files land under steamapps/common in your Steam library folder, in a directory named for the game. If Steam itself is new, the Steam beginner's guide covers the account and security side.

It is a reasonably demanding game once a settlement is built, for the same reason every survival game is: a lot of individual objects and a lot of independent characters doing things. A base with thirty working NPCs and several hundred placed structures asks more of a machine than the opening jungle does.

Learn the recruitment loop offline first

An hour or two in a private world will teach you the parts the tutorial glosses over. How to knock somebody out rather than kill them. What happens after that, and how long it takes. Which jobs need what building in place before an NPC can do them. Why your first recruit stands around doing nothing.

That last one is the classic new-player complaint and it is almost never a bug. An NPC without the right station, the right tools or the right materials in reach has nothing to do, and the game expects you to work out which of those is missing.

Doing that diagnosis in front of a server full of people who solved it weeks ago is less pleasant than doing it alone.

What a server changes

Multiplayer here is co-operative settlement building with a competitive option, and which of those a server is running is the first thing to establish.

On a PvE server, other players are neighbours and trading partners. The competition is over territory, over the good spots and over the scarce resources, and it is resolved by talking. Large clans build genuinely impressive settlements, and the social layer is most of the appeal.

On a PvP server, everything you have built is a target, and so are your NPCs. Losing a base means losing the workforce that made it function, which is a harsher outcome than losing walls. Any PvP community will have rules about raiding hours and offline protection, and those rules are more important to read than the server description.

The settings a server owner controls shape the rest:

• Harvest and experience rates — the difference between a settlement in a weekend and a settlement in a month.
• NPC behaviour while nobody is online — whether your workforce keeps producing when you are asleep. This is the setting that decides whether the game rewards logging in daily or lets you play at your own pace.
• Building limits — how much one player or clan can place. Servers cap this because performance depends on it.
• Decay — what happens to unattended structures. On any long-running server, find out before you go on holiday.
• Raid windows — on PvP servers, the hours during which bases can be attacked.

A community that publishes all of that is telling you it has thought about it. One that publishes none of it is telling you something too.

Finding and joining a server

The multiplayer option on the main menu holds the browser, with the usual filters and the usual habit of listing more empty servers than populated ones.

The list here is queried from outside the game, so a listing reflects the number of people actually connected rather than the number the server would like you to believe. For a game still building its community, that is worth more than a name at the top of a sorted list, and finding a server worth staying on makes the general argument.

To join by address, use the direct connection option and paste the whole thing — including the port after the colon. A host running several worlds on one machine cannot give them all the default port, and the numbers before the colon on their own will find nothing. This is the single most common cause of a server that appears to be offline and is not.

If a server rejects you, work through it in this order: a password you were not given, a whitelist you are not on, a version mismatch after an update. The third one resolves itself when the owner restarts; the first two need a conversation.

Living in somebody else's world

A few things that only become apparent after a week on a shared server.

Your NPCs are visible assets. A settlement with a large, well-equipped workforce advertises itself. On PvE that earns you visitors and trade. On PvP it earns you attention.

Positioning matters more than in single-player. A base near the starting area gets neighbours, help and traffic. A base four biomes out gets solitude and a long walk back for anything you forgot.

Specialisation is worth organising. A clan where one person handles farming, another handles smithing and another handles the fighting gets further than four people all doing everything badly. This applies to your NPCs too, and it is the game's actual strategic layer.

Server population and slot count are not the same thing. A world sized for a hundred with twelve people in it feels empty. Our writeup on how many slots a server needs covers why owners get this wrong, and it is worth reading before you commit to a place.

Combat, briefly

The fighting is more involved than the genre average and less demanding than a dedicated action game.

Stamina governs everything. Attacks cost it, dodging costs it, blocking drains it under pressure, and running out mid-fight is how most deaths happen. Weapon types have distinct movesets rather than being reskins of each other, and the difference between a spear and a heavy blade is a difference in how you approach a fight rather than a damage number.

Enemy tribesmen are the interesting opponents because they fight back properly and because you often want them alive. Knocking somebody out rather than killing them requires the right approach and a certain amount of restraint, and it is the skill that feeds the entire settlement system.

Animals are the other half. Some are worth taming, some are worth avoiding, and the ones that look harmless in a jungle rarely are.

Your first week on a server

A rough order of operations that will save you some frustration.

Find somewhere to settle that is not on top of somebody else. Establish the basic crafting stations before anything ambitious. Get your first recruits early rather than trying to do everything by hand — the game is balanced around having help, and playing it as a solo grind is playing a harder game than the designers intended.

Then work out what the server's community actually does. Some servers have trading conventions, some have shared projects, some have a clan that runs most of the map and is happy to take newcomers. Asking in chat on your first evening puts you ahead of a week of solitary mining.

And find out the raid and decay rules before you build anything you would be sad to lose. This is the advice that appears in every survival guide on this site because it is the mistake everybody makes once.

Problems

Your NPCs stand around doing nothing. Missing station, missing tools, missing materials, or a job they are not suited to. In that order.

A recruit will not join. The conversion process has requirements and takes time. Killing them by accident during the knockout is the other common cause.

Performance drops in your own base. Large numbers of placed objects and active characters. Consolidating storage and reducing decorative clutter helps more than any graphics setting.

You died and lost your gear. Standard for the genre. What you have not lost is your progress, which is the point of the mask.

Everything you built is gone. Check decay settings and raid rules before assuming malice. On a long-running server, absence is the commonest killer of bases.

The server is on a different version to you. Steam updates you automatically. Server owners update when they choose. Waiting is the fix.

Nearby

Soulmask sits in the crowded middle of the survival genre and its nearest relatives are all listed here. Conan Exiles is the closest comparison — thralls doing the work, a harsh setting, and a mature server scene with well-established conventions. ARK: Survival Evolved does the same trick with tamed animals instead of people. Myth of Empires shares the settlement-and-workforce ambition at a larger political scale.

For gentler versions of the co-operative building loop, Valheim and Enshrouded both do it with less cruelty attached, and 7 Days to Die does it with a scheduled siege instead.

The thing Soulmask does that none of them quite manage is let you walk away from the tedious part and have it happen anyway. Once you have a settlement that runs itself, going back to a game where you personally have to stand at the furnace is difficult.

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JoinGG is a live directory of community game servers. Every listing is queried directly every fifteen minutes, so the player count you see was measured rather than reported by its owner, and each one carries a copyable connect address. Soulmask servers are listed here, and every game on the site has its own hub. Player counts across every game are on the statistics page.