Soulmask Guide: Advanced Tips and Tricks

Soulmask is not a game that holds your hand past the first few minutes. Campfire Studio built something that blends open-world survival, base building, and tribe management into a system that rewards patience and punishes bad early decisions. Mess up your base placement, ignore your tribesmen, or skip the tutorial, and you will spend hours undoing mistakes that were completely avoidable. This guide covers everything a new player needs to know, pulled from hands-on experience with the game.

Where should you build your first base?

The starting forest area feels like a natural place to set up camp, but it is one of the worst spots you can pick. According to the NoobFeed beginner's guide, the starting zone is hard to leave once you are settled, which creates a bottleneck that slows your progression significantly.

Instead, run west as soon as you get your bearings. You want to build near three things: a portal, a water source, and a tribal camp. That area also has mines nearby, which are important for gathering the resources you need to progress. Proximity to a portal alone is worth the extra travel time to get there.

Best early base location

How do you level up fast in Soulmask?

Here is something most new players miss: combat is not the fastest way to gain experience early on. Chopping trees, mining stones, and working at crafting tables all award experience points. You can even craft items while moving through the world and still receive XP for it, according to the NoobFeed guide.

For map exploration, find a scout camp and mark it by pressing V. Then reduce a scout's health until you can press E to interrogate them. This reveals the surrounding area on your map while still leaving discoveries for you to find organically.

Your main character has skill caps: 60 for production skills and 90 for combat skills. Other characters you recruit can have higher caps, and you can possess them when you need access to a specific skill set. If a tribesman's name appears in red, they are Legendary quality and extremely valuable.

How do you recruit tribesmen?

Recruiting tribesmen requires reaching 500 Recognition Points with them. Feed them broth or soup to build that relationship. You do not need to stand next to them the entire time; leave them on the ground and go do other things, but feed them a little before you leave. If you are inside a village, placing them in a bed accelerates point gain.

Once a tribesman hits 500 points, recruit and deploy them so they follow you. Always bring tribesmen along when exploring. They are strong fighters, and using the same ones repeatedly builds their skills over time.

Tribesman recruitment meter

Mounts, animals, and getting around

The world in Soulmask is large, and covering it on foot wastes time. Get an Alpaca as soon as possible. You can find them in tribal camps. Pick one up and tell it to follow you back to your base.

To ride an Alpaca, you need a saddle crafted at the Armor Forging Table. Your followers do not need their own mounts; they will teleport behind you if you move fast enough. Animals behave the same way. Mounts are also safe during PvE encounters and will not be attacked.

When using a portal, dismount before entering. Tell your mount to follow you, and it will pass through the portal with you. To give water to animals, equip a Water Bucket as a tool and press E near a trough. For your tribesmen's food, build a Dining Table and stock it so they feed themselves automatically.

Alpaca saddle crafting menu

What is the best approach to combat and gear?

Crafting your own gear early on is often less efficient than raiding camps for it. Legendary bronze armor can be found on leaders inside ancient ruins, and you can farm these leaders repeatedly by saving and reloading the game. After each reload, redeploy your tribesmen because they stop following you when you load a save.

For the Ancient Ruins Dungeon, which you can access after reaching level 35, follow the cliffs from the portal until you find a cave on the right side. Clearing this dungeon and defeating its three bosses unlocks the ability to revive fallen tribesmen. Bring Hammers or Gauntlets for the enemies inside, as those weapon types deal effective damage in that dungeon.

How do you manage your base efficiently?

Building upgrades are handled by pressing E on a building and selecting the upgrade option. For work tables specifically, upgrades go through the Building Workshop.

If your tribesmen are standing around doing nothing, check whether you have placed a resource marker on the map by pressing R. With a marker set, they will travel to that location, gather resources, and sort them into chests back at base automatically.

Tool maintenance is easy to automate. Build a Repair Bench and set it to auto-repair. Tribesmen will deposit broken tools into a designated chest, and a worker assigned to the bench will fix them and return them. Set the durability threshold you want for repairs so the system runs without your input.

Auto-repair bench settings

Survival habits that actually matter

A few smaller habits separate players who struggle from those who progress steadily:

• Skip public servers early on. Play solo with your own settings so you can adjust them freely without waiting on others.
• Your starting mask does not matter much. The perks at the bottom are the only real difference between masks, and you will find better ones long before those perks become relevant.
• Follow the in-game tutorial guide. Soulmask's tutorial is genuinely different from other survival games and will walk you through recruiting your first group of tribesmen and finding ruins.
• Save manually and often. The auto-save is not always enough, especially before dungeon runs or major crafting sessions.
• Enable the setting that spawns your items at your respawn point on death. This saves you the trip back to retrieve your body.

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