SoulMask - Automation for Dummies

[Dthblade]

Hi there,
Did you buy this game and get tired of doing all the crafting things yourself when all you want to do is go out and do literally anything else?
Well do I have news for you, in this guide I’m going to tell you how to set up automation so you can do just that. It’s super easy. And oddly enough how you are supposed to be playing. Neat right?
But, DTHBLADE I don’t want to read this eminent wall of text…
well too bad, if you didn’t want to read you shouldn’t have come to the forums. 😊 also, I just spend a good deal of my time writing this up for YOU the perfect stranger, so the least you could do is not whine about answering your questions.
Thanks fam.

1) Place your storage, doesn’t really matter what kind, you have a lot of options for storage boxes and filtering of items and all that jazz, but none of that really matters in this case as long as you:
a. Have storage placed in range of crafting tables, also easy pathing for AI is something to consider here, do not build cramped spaces. It may work for you, but AI can get stuck on each other and objects and break your workflows. So watch for this and expand accordingly.
b. Have the required crafting materials in them
c. This is the important part “Allow everyone to operate” – this applies to water wells, outhouses, etc. too. For those resource types/needs. If you see your tribe is all red on water odds are your well is not “unlocked” for everyone to use. I don’t know why that’s not on by default, shrug. ( I have also seen this turn off after server reset so keep that in mind)
2) Place your crafting bench you want to do automation on be that a grinder or excavation pit etc.
a. Once placed you need to go into the “open craft” menu then press “P” to assign a caretaker, this is very important, and the game just so happens to order your tribesmen in the order of highest level in that skill for the table you are using first. Neat.
b. There are some exceptions here while you can manually plant crops in a field and manually set an unlimited work order on your tribesmen to “wild collect” things this sucks and most people probably came to this post because they don’t want to do exactly that… Anyway, automation of a more intelligent design does become available once you unlock the granary, excavation pit, breeding farm, collection yard, and logging yard, at ~awareness 25+ depending on your tech point distribution. These options also allow you to specify specific materials to collect (in work tab of your tribesmen you can freely adjust them as long as you are in range to manage work ~120m or so) and offers a 60m radius for them to do the work vs the 30m radius using the base “wild collection” work option. You also get additional storage with these workstations too as an added bonus.
3) Once you have done the storage stuff and the workstation stuff, now you are ready to set up a repeating work order or just more effectively manage work orders.
a. This is the part where you no longer have to ideally do any more manual crafting yourself (if you don’t want to) or go get materials yourself from whatever damn box you put it in, but can’t remember and can’t be bothered to look through the 40 boxes you have… like ever again cause reasons.
b. Go into your crafting bench of choice, click on whatever recipe you want to craft then right click and use the option “add to planned queue” or alternatively press “D” on the keyboard, this single action will do the following:
i. Adds the thing you selected to be crafted 1 time as soon as the caretaker of said bench is available to grab all the needed components from storage then then follow up with crafting said thing. All you have to do is wait for it to finish.
ii. If you at this point want to make more than 1 of them just hit the + sign or edit the number to the desired amount!
c. But what if I want to make 300 of this compost or whatever all the time, but don’t want to keep doing this all the time?
i. Well good news, once you have the item queued up just press the gear or cog icon below the cancel craft button. From here you can specify the amount of the item you want to make and how frequently you want to make it.
ii. Bad news here folks, you may have to do math or something for some things to prevent bottlenecks and shortages, but on the up side you only have to update this and scale things as your operation changes or grows. As long as you have dedicated storage and your tribesmen can access it you can have a warehouse of crap and over produce so you have stock on hand.
4) Now you only need to sit back and wait for profit, and all of the things you want will be crafted and dealt with by your minions. As you progress in the tech tree you will find more things you need to add and set up this way and at the same time as you progress you can likely remove things you no longer need or use as well. If everything goes to plan your tribe will be auto producing more then you need to survive and they can be totally autonomous for long periods of time.
a. Wait you said long periods and not indefinitely?
i. Well yes, right now there is no way for tools to be auto repaired so you have to do this yourself. If you make a lot of them and allow tribe to take from the box, you can postpone this for quite some time. Higher grade tools have higher durability too.
ii. You COULD alternatively set up an auto job once you have animal pens producing plenty of bone to make new bone tools at “X” amount per day and then have them drop broken tools automatically. This would work, but does require you to have quite a bit of stuff already set up to do this. And while this is somewhat wasteful resource wise it is something you can account for and automate in the long run. But this likely will not be enough to automate collection of materials that need higher level tools.
iii. Currently logistics and repair are the 2 main factors that are limiting full base automations right now. Most everything else can be automated with planning.
5) All done you should now know how to replicate this across all crafting stations and your tribe can now do all the things while you are a way. Congratulations on learning automation in Soulmask.

Troubleshooting automation issues and general questions.
1) Why isn’t my dude building this linen or whatever yet?
a. First check the steps to automation above, be sure that all of the storage chests where materials are stored are available for use to the tribe, then make sure that your crafter is assigned to the table, if both of these check out and you have all the raw mats needed, check the workers work list and see where this work is in their priority list. This is important as the work order is what determines the priority something will be done. You may need to move work orders around to get things just right or alter the priority. Sorry, some thinking on your part may be involved here.
2) My dude is slacking off and not doing anything, why wont he get to work!!!
a. Well, I’m sure your boss wonders the same thing every time you go on break/lunch/go home for the day. 😊
b. If you find that when you press “I” and go to your clan tab, and you see they are on work break this is totally normal. They will typically do this to recover resources and mood using available food and drink etc. while using straw mats or benches and chairs in your camp.
c. If, however, they show IDLE then you need to check and make sure that they have stuff to do or any work assigned. Odds are they do not and this is why you see them idle. This isn’t a bad thing though; you don’t want your combat folks or replacement main characters to be part of your automation pipeline so that you can get back to doing that thing you want to do without having to offload their work to other tribe members.
d. If they show on work break indefinitely odds, are they are missing some resource to do more work or there is a hang in the pipeline somewhere. For crops a lot of times you need to go back and select a new crop type or something or maybe they need more compost etc.
3) My dude keeps wandering off to other nearby bonfires, what do?
a. I had this same problem early on, I resolved this by making sure all my boxes that had stuff they needed in them were available to them for access as noted in the first step, also you may not want to build bonfires and the like so close to each other to prevent this behavior. In my case my well was locked and all my dudes kept going to my tribe mates well that was unlocked at his camp. This was a problem because they were now out of range of their work station they were assigned and were stuck idling. Prudent planning may be needed on your part here.
4) General info about order of operations for NPCs.
a. If you craft something by queuing it up and then change the order of the things you have queued while someone is working on them, they will stop what they are doing, put the resources back up and then come back check the recipe and then go get the resources for the new job you made as their new priority.
5) I do not suggest locking down your crafting tables or preventing any movement of items from storage (save maybe your one personal storage or something maybe) so that your automation pipeline can always run without your intervention. For example, locking down your workbench so tribemates do not move things from them to their appropriate storage will only end up clogging things up. But if you need to do that to sate your OCD or something, well you do you.
6) I have run out of queue space, SEND HELP!!!!
well, the easy solution would be to build another table or crafting resource and set it up again as above and you will have more queue slots now, ideally the devs will add more queue slots for this at some point since ongoing daily crafts are a thing... but for now you can just keep adding more crafting tables for more queues and no one can stop you. except for invaders...

Well, that’s all I have for now,
if you made it this far and learned something, then thank you for reading and hope you will spread the word. Automation is the future!
If you made it this far and didn’t learn anything, well I guess this guide was not for you ☹
If you plan to whine about stuff in the comments and didn’t read the post or have anything useful to contribute, well I guess that was always an option too. Shrug.

May add more stuff later or as questions come in, or things in the game change.

PS don't feel like formatting to this look nicer as it will likely be ignored or get buried in other posts within the day. sorry.

[Lucifer]

The automation system is pretty neat; however, I have discovered it’s better to possess the tribesman and do the work manually for the most part because they benefit from mask upgrades boosting skill gains while possessed and you earn awareness xp. The automation is better suited for mid to late game after you have capped a tribesman’s skills and earned the awareness you need.

[Dthblade]

Originally posted by Lucifer:

The automation system is pretty neat; however, I have discovered it’s better to possess the tribesman and do the work manually for the most part because they benefit from mask upgrades boosting skill gains while possessed and you earn awareness xp. The automation is better suited for mid to late game after you have capped a tribesman’s skills and earned the awareness you need.

for the most part i agree with you but only if you want to "minmax" proficiency stat growth fast, not everyone plays the same way, but this game was designed to have you set up automation and given the amount of posts with bad info i felt it was time to clear things up and provide guidance.

that said however, i do find that really no matter what stage of the game i am in right now i am shuffling my dudes in and out of work tables and replacing them for better peeps or ones with higher caps and i already have to waste time sleeping in bed and idling for other things, id rather spend more of my time playing and letting the automation do the lvling for me even if it is slower in some cases.

either way you always can set this up and control the NPC after building your queue work then enter the table and press "space bar" to start crafting from queue, you will want to leave them from time to time to let them put stuff away or get more materials as needed if you don't want to do that part yourself.

your mileage may vary

that said if you want to afk grind a lot of awareness exp find a NPC setup a kiln and load it up with ALL THE BRANCHES then set up automation to make charcoal at 999 every hour or something. then leave for a while and come back, only really need to check periodically for food and water needs. you can also idle on the MC and just get exp for everything for existing but at like 1 per second. using coefficient sliders you can change this if you are on private server as admin or SP etc.

[BluntedJ]

Appreciate you fam! Great tips for the newly initiated.

[leonneddr]

Originally posted by Lucifer:

The automation system is pretty neat; however, I have discovered it’s better to possess the tribesman and do the work manually for the most part because they benefit from mask upgrades boosting skill gains while possessed and you earn awareness xp. The automation is better suited for mid to late game after you have capped a tribesman’s skills and earned the awareness you need.

Only two reasons to do this. First as Dthblade said to min/max production. In my opinion not worth the time investment unless its some super rare mat thing you are trying to eek out most of.

Second reason is to push proficiency exp for something. May be worth it to do so for levelling your Armour/Weapon crafter ASAP. Again not worth the time investment for me. You can set them to production while you run around levelling combat skills for the Thrall you want to use for fighting and to gather things from mobs/chests/dungeons as well as farm resources etc. That is where your time is better spent than min/maxing crafring yourself. That and I find it ultra boring. The game loop has to be engaging, immersive and fun. Grinding away manually at a bench for me is not any of those things. The Devs made it clear the purpose of Automation is so you can focus on doing the "fun things".

Now if min/maxing and doing things just so is your bag, fill your boots!

[Dthblade]

Originally posted by leonneddr:

Originally posted by Lucifer:

The automation system is pretty neat; however, I have discovered it’s better to possess the tribesman and do the work manually for the most part because they benefit from mask upgrades boosting skill gains while possessed and you earn awareness xp. The automation is better suited for mid to late game after you have capped a tribesman’s skills and earned the awareness you need.

Only two reasons to do this. First as Dthblade said to min/max production. In my opinion not worth the time investment unless its some super rare mat thing you are trying to eek out most of.

Second reason is to push proficiency exp for something. May be worth it to do so for levelling your Armour/Weapon crafter ASAP. Again not worth the time investment for me. You can set them to production while you run around levelling combat skills for the Thrall you want to use for fighting and to gather things from mobs/chests/dungeons as well as farm resources etc. That is where your time is better spent than min/maxing crafring yourself. That and I find it ultra boring. The game loop has to be engaging, immersive and fun. Grinding away manually at a bench for me is not any of those things. The Devs made it clear the purpose of Automation is so you can focus on doing the "fun things".

Now if min/maxing and doing things just so is your bag, fill your boots!

I will give you a third reason:
being able to leave your base for long periods with ZERO interaction and know that all your dudes will be perfectly fed/watered/happy when you get back in 3 weeks...

some of you may not see the long term uses of this if you are a daily player but i had a buddy on my server that didnt log in for 1 day and all of his dudes died. mine were totally oblivious that i was even gone, and were still cranking out everything i wanted to stock up on each day.

your mileage may vary as will your needs. but im lazy so i like setting this up once and forgetting i have to do anything else after, save minor adjustments as i progress.

[KondaBuddy (Live)]

Originally posted by Lucifer:

The automation system is pretty neat; however, I have discovered it’s better to possess the tribesman and do the work manually for the most part because they benefit from mask upgrades boosting skill gains while possessed and you earn awareness xp. The automation is better suited for mid to late game after you have capped a tribesman’s skills and earned the awareness you need.

Yes I agree until their maxed lvl than its auto everything no more manual

[Dthblade]

Originally posted by KondaBuddy (Live):

Originally posted by Lucifer:

The automation system is pretty neat; however, I have discovered it’s better to possess the tribesman and do the work manually for the most part because they benefit from mask upgrades boosting skill gains while possessed and you earn awareness xp. The automation is better suited for mid to late game after you have capped a tribesman’s skills and earned the awareness you need.

Yes I agree until their maxed lvl than its auto everything no more manual

The main thing to keep in mind for this is that while they are doing anything, even if you're there or not, they are going to be leveling up. Sure doing everything manually is more efficient to level them up faster, but this post was under the assumption that you are aware of that in the first place.

Having the automation in place is more for ease of mind and quality of life for you, the player as opposed to grinding up your minions as fast as possible. Its meant to be a more hands-off approach to managing your tribe so that again you can go off and do whatever it is that you want to do instead of grinding hours away of your life. As always, doing things manually that way will be far more efficient for the purpose of speed lvling, but that wasn't my goal in this use case. Again, your mileage may vary

Also for everyone that gave community awards for this. Thank you. I'm glad that my time and effort that I spent on this was valuable to you.

[arti_llery]

Love the automation in game. Still need to work out some setups.

I rarely craft anything myself, unless I need something right this moment and craft it in inventory. Mainly a random tool I forgot to grab before leaving base.

I will have to check out the options. Just got this recently and it's been fun so far.