Somebody in your Discord has posted a screenshot of a pyramid they clearly should not be standing in front of yet, and now three people are asking when the server gets it. That's roughly where every Soulmask community has sat since 18 August, when CampFire Studio pushed the first Public Test Branch build of Beyond Gravity and let people loose in Burning Highlands early.
Short answer: not yet. There's nothing in the control panel you can flip to change that, either. The longer answer is the useful one though, because there's real prep worth doing with the few weeks we've probably got left, and most of it is the sort of thing that's tedious on a quiet Tuesday and impossible on the morning a major update drops.
What CampFire has actually said
Beyond Gravity is the name of the major update, and Burning Highlands is its headline. The studio has been consistent about what it is: the final region of the Shifting Sands map, "featuring a new boss encounter, vast new areas to explore, and the region's ultimate Mask". That line is from the 90-Day Overhaul Plan dev log posted on 5 June, back when the studio laid out three months of monthly themed updates (June for balance, July for building, August for the UI) with this region as the thing waiting at the end of all of it.
That same post says the update is "currently planned for September". September, with no day attached. So treat any specific date you see quoted in a Discord thread as somebody's guess. The studio hadn't narrowed it as of the August overhaul report on 23 August, and was still being cheerfully coy about the whole thing: the region stays "a little mysterious" for now, apparently.
Across the June, July and August posts, four things have been described officially. Three new Masks, drawn from buried Egyptian deities. A new Ancient Guardian boss, built to fight in a faster and less predictable style than the previous ones. Burning Highlands itself, framed as the homeland of the Sand Bandits. And the payoff to the long-running question of what the Sun God actually is, and why the world floats at all.
What's on the test branch right now
Everything in this section is test-branch content. It will change. CampFire said as much in the post, warning testers they might clip through the world into "a mysterious bottomless void", which is the kind of honesty I appreciate.
The changelog adds Burning Highland as a new area in Shifting Sands. Inside it: an Ancient Dungeon, Holy Ruins, Pyramid Ruins and a Pyramid Ruins Dungeon. There are also Floating Island Ruins, and a second Pyramid Ruins Dungeon over in Starfall Fields. Three Masks arrive (Enforcer, Shadow Hunter and Desert Overlord), and several existing Mask and module drops have been shuffled between dungeons, so old loot routes will need relearning.
Outside the new region there's a Mastery learning feature on the Training Ground, a Water Vapor Collector and a power-free Floating Foundation. There's also a "Gene Recovery" ability on X. It restores all your health when you're severely injured or feigning death, runs a 60 second cooldown, and is disabled in War Mode. The rebuilt two-tier main menu and the new Tribesman Work Assignment matrix are in there too, though those are really August's UI overhaul arriving rather than Beyond Gravity content.
One naming oddity worth flagging, because it'll scatter your search results: the changelog writes it "Burning Highland", singular, while every dev log calls it "Burning Highlands". Same place.
The catch: there is no test server build
This is the part that matters if you host. The patch notes won't tell you.
The Public Test Branch is a branch on the game, Steam app 2646460. The dedicated server is a completely separate Steam application, "Soulmask Dedicated Server For Windows", app 3017310, and that one has exactly a single branch: public, last built on 6 August. There's no test branch on it. No beta, nothing to opt into, nothing hidden behind a password.
So there is no Beyond Gravity dedicated server build in existence at the moment, at LOW.MS or anywhere else. That's not our panel being limited. CampFire hasn't published one. Our Steam Update pulls that same public branch, and Soulmask has no branch selector in Service Settings. There's nothing for us to point your server at even if you asked nicely. I'd rather say that plainly than have someone open a ticket expecting a switch we can throw.
If you want to walk Burning Highlands before stable, it's the test client on your own machine, solo. Right-click Soulmask in your Steam library, open Properties, then Betas, and pick the public test entry from the dropdown. One catch: you'll need the Shifting Sands DLC to load any of the new content. That stopped being a free claim back in May, so it's a purchase now if you skipped the launch window.
Check which map your server is on
Do this one today. A DLC region catches people out every single time, and this is the cheapest possible thing to get wrong.
Burning Highlands is part of Shifting Sands. It is not being bolted onto the base map. Your server launches with one map baked into its command line, and the two are separate worlds: Level01_Main is the base game, DLC_Level01_Main is Shifting Sands.
Open Commandline Manager in the LOW.MS Control Panel and you'll see which one you're on. The predefined lines we ship for Soulmask are Default, PVE, PVP, Shifting Sands PVE, Shifting Sands PVP, Default Shifting Sands, and a pair of cluster lines. If yours doesn't say Shifting Sands, September will come and go and your players won't find a single new pyramid. That's not a bug. It isn't something an update fixes, either.
Switching maps is not a settings tweak. It's a different world with its own save, so your existing settlement stays exactly where it is rather than travelling with you, which is the sort of thing people discover about ninety seconds after clicking the dropdown on a live server with forty players' worth of buildings on it. Plenty of communities run a second server for the desert instead. That sidesteps the whole problem. If you do plan to move, read our save location guide first and get the current world off the box before you touch anything.
What I'd do in the meantime
Take a backup you've actually tested. Cloud Backup in the control panel gives you a manual snapshot on demand, and I'd take one now and pull a copy down to your own machine rather than trusting a single stored snapshot, not because ours tend to fail, but because a backup nobody has ever restored is a hope rather than a backup, and the morning a major update lands is a rotten time to find out which of the two you actually own.
Keep your own copy of GameXishu.json. Soulmask's settings file isn't exposed through Configuration Files on our panel, so File Manager is the way in, or SFTP on port 8822 if you're pulling the whole save down. Grab it now, while things are calm. If any of your tuned rates get reset or renamed by the update, a local copy turns a painful evening into a five minute diff.
Assume your mods break. Soulmask mods here don't run through Mod Manager. There's a Mods field in Service Settings that passes IDs onto the command line, and not every predefined command line actually includes it, so mod loading is fiddlier than it looks even on a quiet day. A region-sized update breaks mods by definition. Come back up vanilla for a few days. Re-add them once the authors have caught up, and if mods are load-bearing for your community, raise a ticket before the update rather than after.
Know which knobs are yours. The backup interval lives in Service Settings and runs from 300 to 900 seconds. The world save interval doesn't sit on the customer side of that screen. If you want it changed ahead of the update, that's a quick ticket.
Still tuning rates while you wait? Our server settings guide and the configuration reference both cover the pinyin key names in that file, still the single most annoying thing about administering this game.
When it does land
Our Steam Update pulls the public branch, so the update reaches your server the same way every other Soulmask patch has. Worth knowing: on 6 August the game build and the dedicated server build went out four minutes apart. CampFire keeps the two in step on release day, so you shouldn't be stuck waiting a week on a server binary while your players are already patched and asking questions.
I'd still hold off for an hour or two on the day if your community is large. Let the first wave find the crashes.
New to running one of these, or spinning up a second Soulmask server for the desert map? The getting started guide walks through it, and troubleshooting covers the usual post-update failures. If something goes sideways when Beyond Gravity does land, open a ticket and we'll dig into it with you rather than pointing you at a forum thread.