Posted on 31st Aug 2026
| 3 Minute Read
Soulmask: Beyond Gravity is now live, and Shifting Sands finally has the endgame it was missing. This last major chapter of the DLC opens the Burning Highlands beyond the golden desert, where Sand Bandits have taken over the final pyramid and parked a huge warship above it. You can push through their defences from the ground or use a Mask to take to the air, board the ship and bring the fight inside.
The route through the Burning Highlands runs across a new Ancient Dungeon, pyramid ruins and a Holy Ruins complex linked to four surrounding dungeons. Each has its own mechanisms to solve before the central portal opens, with Divine Punishment waiting underneath it all on a transforming mechanical throne while poison gas slowly takes over the arena.
Three new Masks give you different ways to deal with those fights. Shadow Hunter improves movement and dodging while summoning spectral cats in Mimicry, Ruler of the Barren Sands gets faster and more dangerous as your health falls, and Enforcer uses gravity waves, short spatial jumps and crowd control to pull groups of enemies off the ground. They are not three versions of the same upgrade, so there is a proper reason to build around whichever one suits the way you play.
All of that leads back to the mystery hanging over Shifting Sands from the beginning. Collecting the 14 Divine Crystal Fragments lets you rebuild the Core Module and carry it into Floating Island, where the so-called Sun God is revealed as the Central Core behind the map's strange weather and anti-gravity effects. The battle that follows throws gravity and space around the arena and closes out the DLC's main story.
Once anti-gravity stops being a mystery, your clan can actually build with it. Floating Foundations need no power and can hold a settlement above the desert, while the Mist Collector supplies water without relying on a river or well below. Official prebuilt blueprints have also been added to Building Mode, map regions now show exploration progress, the Training Ground can teach Masteries and hammers have proper combo attacks. Floating Foundations and the new Gene Recovery ability are both disabled in War Mode, so PvP groups cannot assume every new tool carries across unchanged.
Patch 17 includes a client update, so server owners should update before everyone reconnects and make sure the server and players are on the same version. The official notes do not call for a fresh save, but taking a backup first is still sensible when a long-running Shifting Sands world or a mod list matters to the group.
You can read the Beyond Gravity launch post and the full Soulmask 1.0 Patch 17 notes on Steam. If your group is heading back into Shifting Sands, our Soulmask server hosting page has the current setup options.
