Soulmask Gameplay Settings Guide

Soulmask has a number of settings that can be tweaked to adjust the balancing of the game based on personal preference. This document attempts to describe what these settings do and how to adjust them.

How to Change Settings

Settings can be changed within the game or by editing files outside the game.

In-Game (Recommended)

How settings are adjusted depends on whether you are playing a local game or connecting to a dedicated server.

Local or Hosted Game

A local game is when someone creates a new save from within the game and loads it. This includes single player and multiplayer games. In multiplayer, only the person who is hosting the game is able to change gameplay settings.

When you are creating or loading a saved game, you will see a screen similar to this.

Selecting a game difficulty will set all of the gameplay settings to values that the game developer has preconfigured. Pressing the “Advanced Settings” button will open the coefficients menu where you can adjust settings individually.

NOTE: In a local game, you can only change settings from the main menu. If you attempt to adjust them while the game is loaded, the changes will not take effect.

Skip to the Coefficients Menu section of the document to continue.

Dedicated Server

In order to access the gameplay settings on a dedicated server, there are a couple things you need to know.

• The admin password for the server. This can be configured by your server host.
• How to access the in-game console. The console will appear as a thin black bar at the bottom of your screen where you can type commands. By default, this can be accessed by pressing the grave/tilde key (`) or the minus key on the number pad (-). If neither of these works for you, it is likely due to the configuration/locale of your keyboard. You may need to do some research on the topic.

From the in-game console, enter the following command, replacing password with the admin password for your server.

gm key password

If entered correctly, the admin menu will open, which should look similar to this.

Locate and press the “Open coefficient settings” button, highlighted in the image above. The will open the coefficients menu, which is pictured in the section below.

Coefficients Menu

Whether you are playing a local game or a dedicated server, using the steps listed above will lead to this menu where you can adjust individual game settings.

Categories

You will see there are several categories of settings listed on the left. Pressing these will filter the middle section of the screen to only display settings in that category. Selecting “All” will display all settings.

Sliders

In the center of the screen are the slider settings. These settings have numerical values. Some of them allow entering decimal digits while others only allow whole numbers. There are two ways to set these settings.

1. Adjust the position of the slider using your mouse to select from predefined values, or
2. Click on the numeric value directly and type in a specific value.

Note that some values might allow you to set them outside of the listed range by entering them manually. However, most will not allow this. In order to test whether a value is accepted, you need to close and reopen the coefficients menu.

Toggles

On the right side of the screen is all of the toggle settings. These are settings that can be switched on or off.

NOTE: Settings changes take effect immediately as you change values. So be careful if you are on a live server with other players.

File Editing

Another way to adjust gameplay settings is by editing a file outside of the game. The location of the file depends whether you are playing a local game or connecting to a dedicated server.

Local or Hosted Game

A local game is when someone creates a new save from within the game and loads it. This includes single player and multiplayer games. In multiplayer, the settings file only exists on the host player’s computer.

If you want to edit an existing save, skip this step. Before the settings file will exist for a save, you must first create the save from within the game.

1. From the main menu, select “Solo/Friends”.
2. In the menu that opens, enter at least a game name. You may also enter other information as desired.
3. Change the difficulty at least once. Each difficulty has its own settings file, and changing to a difficulty in the menu is what creates the file. Leave it set to your desired difficulty after changing it at least once.
4. Return back to the main menu to ensure changes have been saved. You do not need to load into the world.

TIP: I recommend installing a decent text editor that supports json before continuing. There are many good ones to choose from, but two popular examples are Visual Studio Code (not to be confused with Visual Studio) and Notepad++. While it is possible to edit json files in Windows Notepad if you prefer, it will not be as good of an experience compared to third party text editors.

Each saved world has its own settings file. To locate the settings file, follow these steps.

1. Open the following folder. You can copy and paste this directly into your start menu or into the address bar of an existing folder window.
   

   %localappdata%\WS

2. Inside this folder, you should see a folder named after your personal Steam ID. It will be a series of numbers. Open this folder.
3. Now open the folder named “2646460”, followed by “AutoGames”. Inside this folder will be separate folders for each world you have created.
4. If you have multiple saved worlds, follow these steps to locate a specific one based on the name you assigned to it.
   1. Open the folder for saved world and open the file within named “game.json” using any text editor. (If you have file extensions hidden, it may appear as only “game”.)
   2. Check the value of the “NickName” property to see if it matches the name of the world you want to adjust.
   3. If the name matches, then you have found the correct folder, if not, repeat the steps for each folder until you find it.
5. Within this folder will be a settings file for each difficulty. Files only exist if you have selected a given difficulty for that save at least once. You will want to edit the file for the specific difficulty you have selected in game.
   1. GameXishu_0.json = Casual
   2. GameXishu_1.json = Easy
   3. GameXishu_2.json = Normal
   4. GameXishu_3.json = Hard
   5. GameXishu_4.json = Master
   6. GameXishu_5.json = Custom

Once you have the file open, skip to the Editing the File section to continue.

Dedicated Server

By default, dedicated servers store the settings file within the server install directory within the following folder.

WS/Saved/GameplaySettings

If the server is remotely hosted, you will need FTP access or something similar to access the settings file. The path may differ depending how things are configured.

Once the folder is located, there should be a single file within named GameXishu.json. This is the file you want to edit. Open it in your text editor of choice.

NOTE: The server may overwrite changes to the settings file if it is running. You should stop your server before making changes to the file, and do not start it back up until after you have saved your changes. If you want to minimize server downtime, copy the file and make your changes to the copy. Then when you are ready, stop the server, replace the original with your copy, then start the server.

Editing the File

It is recommended that you first create a backup copy of your settings file before making any changes. If you make a mistake with the formatting of the file, the game will not be able to read it which may result in the whole file getting reset to default values.

Once you have the file open in a text editor, you may notice that it contains three repeated sections labeled 0, 1 and 2. Each section contains a full set of all available settings. It is unclear which section the game uses in which scenarios, so it is recommended that you make the same changes to all three sections of the file.

Here are the first few lines of the file as a reference so you know that you have located the correct file.

{
"0":
{
"ExpRatio": 1,
"CaiJiDiaoLuoRatio": 1,
"FaMuDiaoLuoRatio": 1,

The names of settings are written in Chinese using a phonetic alphabet. In the Gameplay Settings tables, each setting will include the name of the setting as it appears in the game (in English) as well as how it appears in the file. This should allow you to figure out what you want to change in the file.

Make sure your save is not loaded in the game (or dedicated server) when editing the file as it may overwrite your changes. Changes will take effect the next time the save is loaded.

Settings

You can find a list of all gameplay settings here: Gameplay Settings