The Soulmask 1.0 July Update landed on the live branch this week, and it is the biggest rework of the game's building system since 1.0 shipped. Patch #16 on July 23 dropped a brand-new Building Mode, a reworked HUD, and a full Quest interface overhaul. Patch #17 on July 28 followed up with material-refund and pitched-roof fixes, plus a Public Test Branch that is now open to everyone with no access code required. Here is what changed, what is coming next, and what dedicated-server admins should do about it.
The New Building Mode
Before the July update, the Soulmask build loop was: run back to a crafting station, queue up dozens of components, wait, then carry the stack over to your build site. The new Building Mode replaces that round-trip with a single [B] hotkey while any building hammer is equipped.
Pressing [B] opens the Building Module Selection panel. Every category is listed on the left (Thatch, Wood, Stone, Blackstone, Nightstone, Sandstone, Boat, and more). Hover any piece and the tooltip shows the exact raw materials required plus a live "what you actually have nearby" counter that pulls from your inventory and every storage box in range. If the resources are there, you build on the spot. No crafting queue, no carrying, no interruption.
Wildcard Studios has been careful to say this is not replacing the old system. Planning Mode, Infinite Build Mode, and the classic inventory-first workflow are all still in the game. You can still have tribesmen mass-produce component stockpiles or assign them to build entire structures. Building Mode is the "I have the materials right here, just let me place it" path that the game was missing.
Patch #16 Highlights (July 23)
Beyond Building Mode, Patch #16 rewrote large parts of the UI and dropped several quality-of-life upgrades:
- Reworked HUD and a reworked Quest interface, both long-standing community requests.
- Power Ropeway - Support (High) building added; ropeway placement now previews connection lines and auto-links to nearby ropeways after construction.
- Small Farmland for cramped bases.
- Training Dummies now have a training-plan settings interface so tribesmen actually improve the proficiencies you want.
- Giant Elephant Deck now supports building-part construction (floor placed first as support). Not enabled in PvP for now.
- Siege Ballistas, Rockbreaker Turrets, and Ship Cannons operated by tribesmen now prioritise enemy player turrets in fights.
Small quality-of-life win worth calling out: the Construction Hammer can now open the building interface directly and pull materials from nearby storage boxes to build, which is the same "reach into everything nearby" logic that makes Building Mode click.
Patch #17: Building Fixes and 100% Material Refunds (July 28)
Yesterday's Patch #17 is a cleanup pass that fixes the rough edges players hit in the first five days after the new build system went live:
- Uncrafting Table now returns 100% of materials on any building item you dismantle. This is the change base-shufflers have been asking for since launch.
- Pitched roofs could not be placed under certain conditions; fixed.
- Bee Pupae can now be placed into Feed Troughs (the miss caught players who tried to automate their apiary).
- Crew members bound to a ship will now only look for seats on that ship when resting, which stops the "half your crew wanders off during a voyage" bug.
- Barbarian invasions will no longer include enemies that operate Crossbow Towers, closing a difficulty spike that punished new bases.
- Conversion Furnace now supports Herbs, Cinder, Gypsum, and Mineral Oil.
- Various fixes for the Glorious Hymn Mask's Searing Ray damaging ships, incorrect statue placement, wrong bait art in the Reindeer handbook entry, and Onyx Scarab of Doom crafting.
Between the two patches, the build side of Soulmask is in the best shape it has been all year.
The Public Test Branch Is Now Open (No Password)
The bigger structural change buried in this update is that the Public Test Branch (PTB) is now fully open. No access code, no beta signup, no key request. To join:
- In your Steam library, right-click Soulmask and open Properties.
- Go to the Betas tab (Steam now labels this Game Versions & Betas).
- Under Selected Game Version, pick publictest - Public Test.
- Close the panel and let Steam pull the branch.
The PTB currently hosts the Red Crystal Primordial system, an experimental take on Mask affixes where "Primordial" Red Crystals grant unusually powerful unique abilities and stack in combinations that meaningfully change your combat and survival playstyle. A dedicated traveling merchant exclusive to the PTB sells Primordial Red Crystals directly, so testers can skip the farming and jump straight into combining builds.
For dedicated-server admins, this is a real workflow shift. You can now spin up a second Soulmask server pointing at the publictest branch, invite a handful of players onto it for a week, then roll findings back into your main-branch server before each stable patch lands. That is how Rust and Valheim admins have run staging for years and it just became viable for Soulmask.
What Is Coming Next: The "Golden Sands" Major Update
Wildcard Studios also used the Midsummer Deal announcement to preview what comes after the summer patch cycle: the mist-shrouded regions of the "Golden Sands" world are about to reveal themselves. No firm release date yet, and Wildcard was clear this is the last sale window before the major update, which puts it somewhere in the August-to-early-autumn range. Expect a full content drop rather than another patch: new terrain, presumably new mask abilities to slot into the Red Crystal system, and a reason to bring old servers out of storage.
Base game is 20% off and the Shifting Sands DLC is 10% off from July 25 to August 1 if you or your community are looking to jump in ahead of the next drop.
What This Means for Your Server
If you run a Soulmask dedicated server, three concrete things to do this week:
- Roll the July Update on your main server during a low-traffic window and back up your
Saved/folder first. Patch #16 rewrites the HUD and Quest interface files; a rollback without a save backup will strand any players mid-quest. - Consider spinning up a
publicteststaging server now that the branch is open. Even a small 3-slot instance is enough to catch mod incompatibilities, Steam Workshop breakage, and the odd new-crash-on-your-map before you push a patch to your production world. - Warn your players about the Uncrafting Table change before they go on a demolish-and-rebuild spree. The 100% refund is a huge quality-of-life win, but it also means someone can grief a shared base in seconds. Lock uncrafting to admins if that is a concern on your server.
The Steam Workshop mod scene should be mostly compatible since the additions in Patch #16 are new systems rather than reworked existing ones, but any mod that touched the HUD or Quest interface is worth testing on PTB before you push it live.
Host Your Soulmask Server with DoomHosting
Running Soulmask on your own PC works for a small tribe, but once you cross a handful of players or want the server up 24/7 across time zones, a dedicated host makes more sense.
DoomHosting's Soulmask servers run on dedicated Ryzen 9 hardware with full FTP access, DDoS protection, one-click Steam Workshop mod installs, and 24/7 support. Startup is instant, you can switch between the Default Public Version and the publictest branch from the panel, and pricing scales per gigabyte of RAM instead of per player slot so a 3-person tribe pays for 3 people, not a 20-slot ceiling.
If you already run Soulmask elsewhere and the July Update is your excuse to switch, our team will move your world for you.
The building overhaul is Wildcard's biggest quality-of-life swing in months. Getting your server on the new patch cleanly is the small piece of work that unlocks the good stuff.
