Soulmask Airship Guide - How To Stop Walking And Take To The Skies
Trudging through miles of hostile desert on foot is a miserable experience that you can thankfully completely bypass.
The sheer scale of the map is intimidating, and relying entirely on your own two feet is a great way to waste hours of your actual life. The Shifting Sands DLC introduced a proper vehicle system, but the game makes you jump through several agonizing hoops before you are allowed to touch the steering wheel. You start with miserable rafts and eventually work your way up to literal flying machines.
The progression path here is incredibly resource heavy, and it forces you into a brutal boss encounter that will likely wipe out your entire NPC squad. If you are tired of staring at sand dunes and want to dominate the skies, I can walk you through the exact process of constructing a seaworthy vessel and strapping an anti gravity engine to it.
Constructing Your First Boat
Before you can fly, you have to learn how to float. Open your tech tree menu and track down the Basic Ship node. Unlocking this gives you access to a Thatch Boat.
Do not get excited yet. The Thatch Boat is effectively a bundle of sticks tied together. It is barely functional and only useful for crossing narrow rivers without drowning. To build something you can actually live on, you need to purchase the Shipbuilding Technique node. This gives you the blueprint for the Small Wooden Boat, which serves as the foundational frame for all of your future vehicular experiments.
Assembling The Parts
You cannot build a ship in your pockets. You need to drop a Building Workbench and start queueing up the necessary components.
You need the Small Wooden Boat frame itself, a Small Wooden Boat Stern Rudder, a Small Speed Sail, and a Small Airship Helm. These parts demand a massive stockpile of basic wood, ropes, and hides. Do not farm this manually. If you know how to increase your tribe limit, assign your followers to gather these resources while you focus on the actual construction.
Once you place the frame in the water, snap the rudder, sails, and helm into place. You can build standard structures on top of your boat, but space is highly restrictive. I highly recommend using Wooden Deck Flooring pieces because they snap as 1x1 tiles, making it much easier to optimize your limited square footage.
Unlocking The Airship
Sailing is fine, but the ultimate goal is verticality. The Airship Technique node is sitting in your tech tree mocking you, and it is firmly locked behind a massive reptile.
You cannot just farm wood and expect to build a flying machine. You have to travel to the pyramid located in the Barren Sandland region and defeat the Sobek Crocodile boss. This is not a casual encounter. If you show up wearing primitive rags, you are going to get eaten. You need to know how to get bronze, copper, and tin so you can forge proper armor and weapons for yourself and your followers. Arm your AI companions heavily, because most of them are going to die acting as a meat shield for you during this fight.
Raiding The Pyramid
Once the crocodile is dead, do not instantly run away. You must skin the boss carcass. Doing so drops a set of keys that allow you to unlock the door to the actual pyramid structure.
Head inside the pyramid and start looting. You will find a terminal that allows you to upgrade your mask, but more importantly, you will find several chests stuffed with premade airship parts and Power Crystals.
Assembling Your Flying Machine
The game tells you that you need to reach Awareness Strength 30 to officially unlock the Airship Technique node. That is true if you want to craft the parts yourself, but you do not need the node unlocked to actually use the parts you just looted from the pyramid.
You do not build a dedicated flying frame. You literally just slap high tech thrusters onto the Small Wooden Boat you built earlier.
Managing Your Fuel
To achieve lift off, you need to install a Marine Anti Gravity Skid, Small Wings, and a Small Anti Gravity Engine onto your wooden hull. Once everything is bolted down, interact with your ship's helm.
The engine runs exclusively on Power Crystals. One crystal provides roughly twelve real time hours of flight, which is incredibly generous. You can ascend and descend using your jump and crouch inputs. As you fly around raiding airship camps and ruins, you will naturally stockpile more crystals to keep the engine running. Just remember to keep a Construction Hammer in your cargo box. Navigating the skies can get messy, and you need to know how to repair weapons and buildings on the fly so your anti gravity engine does not plummet back down to the dirt.
