I've been following Soulmask since its early access days, and honestly, 1.0 landing on April 10, 2026 feels like a different game. CampFire Studio shipped it alongside the free Shifting Sands DLC, which adds a whole new desert biome and questline. If you've been on the fence about setting up a dedicated server for your group, this is the moment.
This is a practical guide to hosting a Soulmask server – what hardware actually matters, the real trade-offs between self-hosting and paying someone else to deal with it, and how to pick a plan that won't leave you scrambling for resources two weeks in.
What Makes Soulmask Different
Soulmask isn't just another survival crafting game with a multiplayer checkbox tacked on. The core hook is the tribesman system – you recruit AI-controlled NPCs, each with their own personality drawn from a pool of 871 unique Talents, Masteries, and Likes. These tribesmen work your production lines, guard your settlement, craft items, and level up their own skills over time.
That's what makes a dedicated server basically mandatory for any serious group. Your tribesmen keep working while you're offline. Production lines keep running. The settlement doesn't freeze the moment the host alt-tabs. For a game that's fundamentally about building a functioning society, 24/7 persistence isn't a luxury – it's how the game is meant to be played.
The Three Game Modes
Soulmask 1.0 introduced three distinct modes, and they play very differently:
Tribe Mode is the flagship experience. Full tribesman recruitment, automated production chains, settlement management at scale. This is what most communities want, and it's the most resource-hungry mode because every recruited NPC is an active AI entity consuming CPU cycles.
Survival Mode strips back the tribe management for a more traditional survival feel. Fewer AI entities means lighter server load, so you can pack more players onto the same hardware. This is the mode I'd recommend for larger PvP-oriented groups who care more about the survival loop than NPC logistics.
Warrior Mode is combat-first. Raiding, PvP, martial skill progression. Server demands sit somewhere between the other two depending on how much building happens alongside the fighting.
One important caveat: dedicated servers currently only support Survival Mode. CampFire Studio has said the other modes are coming, but for now, if you're setting up a private server, you're running Survival. Keep an eye on patch notes for when Tribe and Warrior Mode get dedicated server support – that'll be a big deal.
Why Self-Hosting Is Harder Than You Think
I'm not going to pretend self-hosting is impossible. It's not. But Soulmask makes it genuinely painful compared to lighter games.
The server process needs roughly 11-12 GB of RAM just to start, and that grows as the world develops – more structures, more explored terrain, more tribesmen. The widely-cited recommendation is 16 GB total system memory, and from what we've seen, that's about right for a small group. A larger community will push past that.
Then there's the CPU situation. Soulmask's tribesman AI is heavily single-threaded. Each NPC runs pathfinding, task logic, need calculations, and skill progression every tick. Multiply that across dozens of tribesmen and multiple players, and you need fast cores, not just more cores. An older Xeon with 24 threads won't keep up with a modern Ryzen running at 5+ GHz.
Beyond the specs, there's the operational stuff. Residential internet means asymmetric bandwidth, dynamic IPs, port forwarding headaches, and the occasional ISP-level UDP throttling that'll make your players rubber-band. Your server goes down at 3 AM when the process runs out of memory – nobody's fixing it until you wake up, and your community's world is frozen the whole time.
If you're a sysadmin who enjoys that kind of thing, go for it. I've done it myself. But for most people running a community server, the time and frustration cost outweighs the savings pretty quickly.
What Actually Matters in a Host
Not all hosting is equal, and Soulmask's specific demands make some providers a better fit than others. Here's what I'd prioritise:
RAM With Room to Grow
This is the big one. A Soulmask server that starts fine on 10 GB will creep toward 12-14 GB as players build settlements and recruit tribesmen. You want a host that lets you upgrade RAM without migrating your server or losing your world. Getting locked into a fixed allocation is asking for trouble with this game.
CPU Generation
Ask what CPUs they're running. If they can't tell you, that's a red flag. Soulmask's tribesman AI needs modern high-clock processors – a Ryzen 7950X or 9950X makes a noticeable difference over older hardware. Some hosts offer CPU upgrade options for games like this that benefit from guaranteed single-thread performance, and for Soulmask specifically, I think it's worth it.
Backups That Actually Protect You
Soulmask worlds represent serious time investment. The game has its own built-in backup system, but those backups write to the same disk as the server – a disk failure takes everything. You want your host running automated cloud backups to separate infrastructure. This should be included, not an upsell.
DDoS Protection
Any public server is a target eventually. This should be standard, full stop.
Support That Knows the Game
Soulmask is still niche compared to Minecraft or ARK. When your server won't start after an update, or performance tanks because someone recruited 40 tribesmen, you need support staff who understand Soulmask's quirks – the pinyin config keys in GameXishu.json, the Engine.ini tuning, the tribesman AI bottlenecks. Generic "is the process running?" support won't cut it.
How to Pick a Plan
Soulmask supports up to 70 players per server, though the default is 20 and most communities run well below the cap. Rather than prescribing exact specs (which depend on your game mode, play style, and how aggressively your group recruits tribesmen), here's how I'd think about it:
Small group, casual play (under 10 players): Start with a base plan and the default RAM. You'll be fine for early and mid-game. Monitor memory usage as your world grows and upgrade if it starts climbing.
Active community (10-20 players): More players means more tribesmen, more settlements, more world state to track. Budget for a RAM upgrade within the first month, especially if you're running Tribe Mode once it hits dedicated servers.
Large server (20+ players): You'll want to start with extra RAM and seriously consider a CPU upgrade option. At this scale, the tribesman AI load and base complexity demand real resources.
Check our Soulmask pricing page for current plans and slot tiers. Prices and specs change, so I'd rather send you there than quote numbers that might be stale by next week.
Getting Your Server Running
The actual setup process through a managed host is quick – pick a plan, and you'll have a running server within a few minutes. The real work is in configuration:
- Set your server name, admin password, and player slots through the control panel
- Choose your game mode and PvP settings
- Tweak gameplay settings – resource rates, day/night cycle, tribe rules
- Share connection details with your group
For the full walkthrough with screenshots, we've got a dedicated Getting Started guide that covers everything from initial setup through admin commands. If you want to dig deeper into configuration, the Server Configuration guide covers GameXishu.json and Engine.ini in detail.
Steam Workshop mod support is available too, which opens up a lot of customisation once the modding scene matures around the 1.0 release.
My Take
Soulmask at 1.0 is genuinely one of the more interesting survival games out there. The tribesman system gives it a strategic layer that ARK and Rust just don't have, and the Shifting Sands DLC shipping free alongside launch is a good sign for the game's future.
If you're going to play it seriously with a group, get a dedicated server. The persistence alone changes the game fundamentally – your settlement becomes a living thing that evolves whether you're online or not. Self-host if you enjoy the ops side of things, but for most people, a managed host that understands the game's specific demands is going to save you a lot of headaches.
We host Soulmask at LOW.MS and I'm obviously biased, but the things I'd tell you to look for – upgradeable RAM, modern CPUs, cloud backups, DDoS protection, and actual game knowledge in support – are the same things I'd want regardless of provider. If you run into trouble, our troubleshooting guide covers the common issues.