You Made It Happen: 1 Million Copies & a Brand-New Way to Play!

For any game, 1 million copies is an incredibly important milestone — and this one means even more to us, because we reached it alongside our 1.0 launch. Thank you. Every single one of you made this possible!

Throughout this journey, so many players have continued to support us, and we're deeply grateful.

As we've said before, Soulmask still has a lot of issues that need to be addressed, and we're working as hard as we can to improve the game, step by step. So now, let us share what's coming next —

Over these past few days, we've been blown away by the creativity pouring out of our community and the Steam Workshop. But we've also received some honest feedback from newer players:

"Can I just build freely from the start? I love the ships, but surviving and growing a tribe feels like way too much to deal with!"

So we built an entirely new way to play — Casual Mode is now live in the latest update!

This mode is designed for everyone who wants a more freeform sandbox experience: a stress-free world with a dedicated creation menu. If you want to explore everything Soulmask and Shifting Sands have to offer without pressure, create your own unique structures or ships — this mode might be exactly what you're looking for.

Here's what it includes:

• Creator Menu & Infinite Construction: A new Creator Menu has been added to the main menu, along with an Infinite Construction Mode button. You can spawn any item in any quantity at any time, or freely build any structure without consuming materials in Infinite Construction Mode.

  

  We've also removed all ship-building part count limits, zone restrictions, and building height limits. Build your grandest creations without boundaries.

• New Difficulty Settings: This is meant to be a lower-pressure experience — faster leveling and resource gathering, with relatively lower enemy damage.

• Reduced Death Penalty: In this mode, items are no longer dropped on death, so you can explore the world freely without fear.

• Increased Tribe Size Cap: The caps for ships, tribesmen, and animals have been significantly raised. This may be one of the best ways to build the most massive army or clan you can possibly imagine.

• Freer Blueprint Usage: As long as you enable Infinite Construction in the Creator Menu, you can freely spawn any ship blueprint regardless of its size!

• A More Relaxed Survival Experience: Most survival-related consumption mechanics and equipment durability costs have been removed. Buildings no longer decay, letting you focus purely on creative building.

• Fully Revamped Tutorial: A smoother onboarding flow that helps you understand the core mechanics faster, with far less clutter.
  *Note: The updated tutorial will also appear in Management Mode.

• Updated Starter Ship: In this mode, you'll begin with a brand-new Egyptian-styled leisure cruiser — yes, the very one you've seen in our dev logs! Use it as a style template to build your own Egyptian-themed airship.

  

Of course, we're still actively tackling existing issues. Here's a quick rundown of what we've recently improved:

We've been reworking humanoid boss encounters to be more player-friendly, with adjustments based on the mode you've selected:

• Humanoid boss combat difficulty now dynamically adjusts based on your game mode.

• Humanoid enemies will no longer repeatedly spam ranged throwing weapons.

• Under default settings, boss and elite HP no longer scale up based on the number of followers or teammates.

• Reduced certain boss AoE attack skills that were causing tribesmen followers to die too quickly.

We've also improved several UI interactions:

• The keybind for skipping tutorials has been changed from End to Left Shift, so players with non-standard keyboards can now skip tutorial sequences without issues.

• You can now manually dismiss tutorial markers by pressing X.

• Updating tribesman revival and progression info is now simpler and more streamlined.

• Certain important chests (such as the starter gear chest in the prologue and key mask acquisition chests) now have a highlighted edge glow to make them easier to spot.

Finally, we quickly addressed several critical gameplay issues:

• Mod incompatibility crashes: The game will now display a warning pop-up for incompatible mods and automatically disable them. Once a mod has been updated by its creator, you can re-enable it from the main menu.

• Ship shield blocking area access: Ship shields now have a longer activation delay after being placed. We've also optimized the gaps between shields and adjusted the sizes of different shield types to ensure they don't block player movement.

• Tribesmen in the Training Ground will no longer starve or die of thirst while training.

We know these fixes only address a portion of the issues you've raised. Now, let's talk about our plans going forward.

Yes — we will be making major improvements to the UI and the early-game experience for new players. Please note that the following is our general plan; we'll share more details soon. But we want to give you a clearer picture of where Soulmask is headed.

Tutorial & Quest Improvements:

As we mentioned in our previous post, we care deeply about every new Chieftain's early experience. After reviewing a large volume of feedback from new players, we've decided to start with improvements to the guidance system and main quest line:

1. We'll be adding a proper quest log interface, ensuring every quest can be reviewed and tracked in detail — so you'll never lose track of a quest just because you skipped it once.

2. On top of that, we'll restructure the categories for main quests and tutorial quests, giving you a more intuitive sense of your progress: what you should prioritize learning and completing, and what your mid-to-long-term goals should be.

3. We'll significantly rework the early-game flow, weaving Soulmask's world-building, airships, tribesmen, and tribe mechanics into the experience more naturally — so you can ease into this world more smoothly.

UI Improvements:

UI interaction has been one of the most frequently reported issues. This time, we're tackling it in phases with a comprehensive overhaul:

1. First, we'll address the most obvious pain points as quickly as possible — such as filtering craftable items by tech level, and further optimizing inventory sorting and filtering. This should deliver a noticeable quality-of-life improvement for item management and crafting, especially in the early game.

2. We deeply value every new Chieftain's experience. As a survival-building game with many interconnected systems, it's easy for newcomers to feel overwhelmed when entering Soulmask's world for the first time.

This is exactly what we're setting out to fix — Soulmask's overall UI is about to undergo a significant overhaul. We're already designing a full interface redesign with one clear goal: consolidate Soulmask's various systems, reduce information overload, and present everything through a clean, modern, and visual interface in a logical, step-by-step way.

This won't happen overnight, but we'll make steady progress and keep you informed every step of the way.

Upcoming Content:

For post-launch content across both Shifting Sands and Soulmask 1.0, beyond the upcoming Burning Highlands and Floating Islands regions, you can also look forward to: new masks, more recruitable mechanical units, brand-new bosses, and most importantly — a completely rebuilt character build system.

We'll be sharing a full roadmap soon so you can get a clearer picture of our update schedule. And just like during Early Access, as updates approach, we'll provide detailed breakdowns of new features and gameplay — including all the improvements mentioned above.

At this milestone moment of 1 million copies, I want to sincerely thank every one of you reading this for your continued support. Please believe us — the Soulmask journey is far from over. We'll keep improving this game to deliver a survival experience unlike anything else out there.

I'm Maggie, and we'll be sharing regular development updates going forward. See you again soon!