New Pioneer? Start here
You pick a build, you take it into a dungeon, and the dungeon drops the gear that lets you build something better. Everything else in Soulbound feeds that loop.
This page walks through the loop first, then the systems that keep it turning: contracts, live events, commission cosmetics and the base you build with what you bring home.
Soulbound has no single character level, so progress is not a bar you fill. You theory-craft a build, you find out what it can clear, and the drops decide what you build next.
Pick a weapon archetype and pull from more than a hundred swappable ability paths and the skill trees behind them. Tank, healer, damage or something in between is your call, and you can respec instantly when it does not work.
Gather the materials, forge the gear, and spend power cores on permanent upgrades to the weapons and abilities that build leans on. Quests and the vendors fill whatever you cannot make yourself.
Take it in solo or with up to two others. Relics you pick up mid-run bend the build further, mobs arrive in storms, bosses escalate through phases, and dying costs you the bag you carried in.
Set pieces and materials come out of the run. Some finish the build you went in with, and some open a build you could not run before.
Why the loop holds up
Because respeccing is instant and abilities swap freely, a run is cheap to experiment with. You can take the same dungeon three times with three different builds in an evening and learn something each time.
Dungeons drop their own sets, so the piece you want has an address. You are not waiting for a system to hand you progress, you are picking the run that holds the thing you need and working out the build that clears it.
Three routes feed the same build, and most sessions use all three. What you gather becomes what you forge, what you quest for fills the gaps, and what you cannot make you go and take.
Mining, foraging, farming and fishing feed Crafting, which turns raw material into metal bars, refined fabrics and synthesised components at a Forge or a Manufacturing Table.
Gearforging then turns those components into real weapons and armour at a weapon or armour station. Both skills unlock better recipes as they level, and some guild contracts pay Gearforging experience directly.
Crafting at an overworld facility makes the item but pays no skill experience. The stations in your own apartment do.
Chapter 1 runs as a linear main storyline with side quests hanging off it, and quests are where abilities, teleports, storage and account-wide unlocks come from as well as gear.
Read the markers before you walk over: a gold exclamation mark means a quest is ready to take, a silver one means you do not meet the requirements yet, and a gold question mark means you can turn one in.
The rarest gear is not craftable. Dungeons drop their own sets, so once you know which piece your build is missing you know which run you are doing tonight.
Dungeon chests also hold upgrade material, which is what turns tonight’s run into next week’s build.
The part that compounds
Geodes from mining, living essence from foraging, dungeon chests and your own crafting all fuse into power cores at Dr. Fritz’s Lab in Arcadia. Advanced cores need a level 2 Manufacturing Table, which means the stations you built at home are gating your ceiling.
Spend those cores on a weapon or an ability and the upgrade is permanent. More importantly it widens the relic pool, so the dungeon starts offering you buffs it was never going to offer before. Ability relics only appear once that ability is unlocked, at ability level 3 for your first, 5 for your second and 10 for your third.
Relics themselves are temporary. Kill things and clear objectives to fill the Relic XP bar, pick one of three when it fills, stack them for synergy, and lose the lot the moment you walk out. The permanent half is the upgrade. The run is where you find out whether it was the right one.
When the build is ready
Raids sit at the top of the dungeon list and take parties of up to five, which is where a build stops being a solo experiment and has to fit alongside four other people.
The Abyssal Raid does not appear in the DungeonFinder. You walk to its own entrance, and it runs weekly.
The tutorial takes about twenty minutes and ends with you standing in Virelda, the home city, with money in the bank and your first dungeon already cleared.
Soulbound is a paid Early Access game on Steam for Windows. Your account is created from your Steam account when you launch, so there is nothing to sign up for and no password to remember.
You start on introStreet in the middle of a protest. Walk into the Soul Link station, link in, and you arrive in Dreamscape as a Pioneer.
Jayden teaches you mining in the Arcadia mine and Arthur teaches you farming at Beginner’s Bay. Earn fifty gold, buy a sword and armour from Finnley, then clear the five rooms of the Tutorial Dungeon.
Virelda is your hub. Bank your loot, walk into the Pioneer’s Guild, take your first contracts and pick up the main questline.
Contracts, events and the vendors are how you fund the next build without grinding the same dungeon into the ground.
Every day
The Task Manager stands above the bank vendor in the Pioneer’s Guild in Virelda. She hands out contracts, which are short jobs built out of things you were going to do anyway, like mining five iron, catching five fish, cooking a dish or clearing a hundred enemies with a specific ability.
You can hold five at a time, and each one pays experience into the skill it belongs to, plus gold and a Guild Rewards Cache. Skills gate what you can equip and craft, so contracts are the cheapest way to open up the next build. If the jobs on offer do not suit you, pay fifty gold to refresh the board.
Contracts are listed per region. Virelda and Everdune have their own boards.
While they are running
Open the event button beside the minimap to see what is running now and what is coming. Most events are cumulative, so every player’s contribution fills one shared progress bar and a ranking tracks what each person put in.
When the bar fills or the timer ends, rewards land in your mailbox scaled to what you contributed. If the bar never fills, nobody gets paid, so it is worth showing up.
Running recently:
Events pay two currencies, and both of them buy sets you cannot get any other way.
This week
Credits come mostly from the one-day challenges, the daily dungeon quest and event items. Spend them at the Weekly Vendor in the Pioneer's Guild, where a full seven-piece set costs 100 Credits and single pieces go for ten to twenty.
This month
Medals come mostly from the weekly challenges and take longer to gather. Spend them at the Monthly Vendor next door, where the eight-piece monthly set costs 100 Medals.
Both vendors rotate. When a set leaves rotation it does not come back, so buy the pieces you want while they are on the shelf.
Power in Soulbound is the sum of five axes that advance separately, which is why a short session still moves something forward.
Dungeon drops, crafting, quests and achievements. Gear decides your damage, your survivability and what your build can do.
Mining, fishing, foraging, farming, cooking, combat and the rest level by being used, and contracts pay straight into them. Skills gate what you can equip, craft and gather.
Power cores, fragments, residues and essences buy permanent boosts to your weapons and abilities, and open relic paths inside dungeons.
The main questline, achievements and allegiances hand out abilities, teleports, storage, mounts and shortcuts that stay with the account.
The crafting stations you build at home keep their own experience and make you better at what they produce.
Where the loot goes
Every player gets an apartment in Virelda, reached through the keypad beside the building. You decide who gets in, from nobody at all to friends only to the whole server, and you decorate it with the furniture and stations you have crafted or collected.
Stations are not just decoration. The ones you place level up as they produce, they can be rented out to other players and earn gold while you are offline, and farming plots keep growing between sessions. Apartments come in four sizes, from Small up to Penthouse, and the size decides how much you can fit inside.
Once you have gold to spend
Doors out in the world can be attached to your apartment, which puts your shop and your stations on a street other players walk down. Look for an entrance tagged Open, activate it, and pick a term of seven or twenty-eight days.
Rent is quoted per day and paid up front in gold, and the Virelda locations ask for materials as well. You can turn on auto-renew so you do not lose the spot, and renewal opens in the final day of the term.
If you only have half an hour, this is the order worth doing things in.
| When | What to do | What it gets you |
|---|---|---|
| Every log in | Collect the permits waiting for you, take five contracts from the Task Manager, and clear the daily dungeon quest. | Skill experience, gold, caches and Commission Credits |
| The main event | Pick the dungeon that drops the piece your build is missing and run it until it does. | Set pieces, materials and the next build |
| Between runs | Bank what you gathered, forge the piece you can make yourself, and fuse power cores for the ability the build leans on. | Craftable gear and a wider relic pool next run |
| While an event runs | Put a session into whatever is live, whether that is the fishing spot off Neo-Tilus or the Abyssal Raid. | Credits, Medals and event lootboxes in your mailbox |
| Each week | Spend your Credits at the Weekly Vendor before the set rotates out. | The seven-piece weekly cosmetic set |
| Each month | Spend your Medals at the Monthly Vendor. | The eight-piece monthly cosmetic set |
| Whenever | Bank your materials, upgrade a weapon, place another station at home, and check whether a door you want has come up for rent. | Permanent power and gold that arrives while you are offline |
Soulbound: Online is in paid Early Access on Steam for Windows. Buy it, launch it, and you are running your first dungeon twenty minutes later.
The step by step walkthrough of the tutorial and your first hour lives on the community wiki.
See the set on sale right now, piece by piece, with what each one costs.
Every item, recipe and drop table the community has catalogued so far.
