THE SILKSONG IS REAL

[fluid star]

My random thought was because it's the only platform that uses this mechanic and I just think it would have been cool if we had a puzzle or two that used such platforms.

Just seems weird it was a one-off bit in a shortcut.

[dreamy scarab]

it's a little like the moving clawline anchors late in act 2

[fluid star]

Which you ||don't even need to use, since you can pogo off the cogs||. I suppose though.

[dreamy scarab]

yeah. just speculating about the kind of section they might've drafted and ended up redoing

[wanton bone]

Holy shit, TAS is already done with (act 2) ||The High Halls gauntlet fight.|| That's so much faster than I expected for it to get worked out.

[rose granite]

There are a few things here and there that you'd expect to lead to something bigger, but where it was either not planned or cut an I'm not sure which.

Another more example would be ||Gilly, who never really had much of consequence except dialogue and then being kinda involved in one quest in that their doll was stolen.||

[fathom shadow]

Yea the moving platforms could have been a really neat gimmick for deep docks.

Different speeds and sizes of platforms, unique rail shapes.

[dreamy scarab]

Man, I completely forgot about ||Gilly||. Someone mentioned running into them so I triggered that interaction, and at some point I forgot about looking for them

[elfin ravine]

they have like three interactions, and it's not much substantial

[dreamy scarab]

We can't prove they aren't in every scene

[fluid star]

Five, for what difference that makes.

[fervent sand]

Art by bairentuofeiqiu

[dreamy scarab]

Credits! ||Meemaw|| down!!

(act 2 tool) ||saw circlet|| absolutely shreds in that fight

[fluid star]

I will point out that she is ||Grand Mother, two words, Silk||, not ||Grandmother, one word, Silk||.

[dreamy scarab]

that's a unique and interesting point, whose lore implications I'll have to consider, however

[rose granite]

There are a few more I think, but the only one that borders on important is ||post skarrsinger where they have some contemplative dialogue with Hornet. A lot of the ant stuff felt a bit odd in the sense that you feel how a lot of their stuff was cut, and what remained didn't quite fill out the void left behind.||

Something that has felt a bit odd with Silksong, having now finished it, is that expansive as the world is (and again the backgrounds are genuinely some of the most gorgeous art I've seen in any game), the development of the game is similarly also felt as there are seemingly ideas or concepts that seem missing; something was once there or meant to be but is now no longer.

||I will say that they did manage to execute that beautifully with Lost Verdania, even if the boss fight was unexpectedly short, but yeah it's an odd sensation.||

It's not that there was some immense crunch or so, but rather so many ideas born over the years that their remains seem to still linger throughout. A kind of hauntology in a sense.

[dreamy scarab]

I just discovered something funny. If you accidentally leave Thief's Mark on during a boss fight (like, say ||meemaw rematch||) then you'll get a grand total of two rosaries when they die (||slash transition to phase 2||)

[umbral canyon]

the game has tons of weird mechanics that show up just one time tbh

like ||punished hornet in the slab||

[rotund magnet]

A few things feel like holdouts from earlier versions of the game, ||wisp thicket|| especially

[hidden flame]

I wonder what the 0 Wish% runs will we like?

[tawdry thunder]

Good game

Really addicting, as far as this kind of game goes

I had to look up a couple of things at the the there, the last like 4% or so. No way i ever would have found them on my own

[autumn kettle]

hell yeah

what'd you end up missing?

[tawdry thunder]

A few mask shards and spool halves

Which was annoying because there was no way to know what i had already collected lol

[autumn kettle]

makes sense, yeah

surprisingly, i ran into all the spools naturally, but iirc i missed a mask shard or two

[tawdry thunder]

I thought i had too until i collected the last mask fragment and saw that the full mask remained on my UI instead of being blank

I was stuck at 99% and it took me a minute to realize my spool was indeed blank

[autumn kettle]

lol

rip

[thick urchin]

Saw someone try to pacifist run, ended up convincing themself that tool only counts, proceded to demonstrate that team cherry clearly made Tool Only JUST BARELY possible.

[umbral canyon]

is every boss defeatable with 2 full sets of architect tool casts only?

that's crazy

[hot mango]

Question (and act 3 spoiler): ||Gully, or whatever the girl in the Hunter's March that hides is named... was she real? Or just a puppet/elaborate disguise of Gurr to lure Hornet into his trap?||

[tawdry thunder]

||gilly is real, she has some pretty sad interactions after you kill the ant Queen. I talked to her a couple times after i killed gurr so i don't think it was a puppet situation||

[tulip nest]

34 hours in, I have made it to act 3

good lord, I am bad at Video Games

[autumn kettle]

ooh, where does she show up later?

[hoary tulip]

that's uh

really fast

[hot mango]

OHHH I just realized, act 3 spoilers: ||Her name is NyLETH because LETH serves her||

[autumn kettle]

?

[brave flower]

||their name is seth, and no||

[hot mango]

.... I'm up late again

friggen case studies

[tulip nest]

The speedrun for beating the whole thing is 30 hours, I barely made it into act 3 just now

Mind you I did collectathon a fair bit

[hoary tulip]

I got there like hour 45?

[autumn kettle]

i finished 100% at like hour 48

[vagrant spruce]

i also got to act 3 around then, and i think like 40-45 when i got 100%

[hoary tulip]

well

I'm slow

[inland wave]

I very recently beat the last bit around 75h and I'm around 95%? Granted I am The Slowest and also prone to "oop Silksong was on while I ran to the store" so uhh

Also a lot of "oh enemies have multiple needolin songs"

[fluid star]

I mean, technically, but there's a clear difference in the quality of "||shows up once||" between a single 5 second ride on a unique platform and an ||entire section of the map that could take a few hours to clear||.

[safe yew]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDPyXfuOcak ACT 3 FINAL BOSS SPOILERS, which is why i've de-embedded the link entirely for safety. in any case, final boss fight but hornet is invisible

[south marten]

Cursed knowledge

low% completion percentage is <5%

If I did my routing right, it's 1%

But it might be 2%

Bosses aren't percentage (except Bell Beast, fuck you no fast travel), ||double jump and glide|| aren't percentage, Simple Keys aren't percentage

||Wall jump|| is percentage, and the maybe second percentage is ||Silk Spear||

[autumn kettle]

is needolin skippable?

i haven't watched any low% runs

[south marten]

For any%, yeah

The bits where it forces you to take it out don't need it

[autumn kettle]

...huh

so you can just

do exhaust organ

and ignore it?

fucking wack

[south marten]

It's only required in Act 3

[south marten]

❌

Cross Stitch is percentage

[autumn kettle]

ah true

how do you summon last judge without needolin?

does it just

[south marten]

You have to do ||clawline-less Mt Fay|| into ||Wisp Thicket||

[autumn kettle]

give you a forced prompt?

ah

well, you wouldn't do mount fay, but i know what you mean

or, oh

you would because ||wings|| aren't %, right

[safe yew]

is ||double jump|| not a percentage?

[autumn kettle]

so you just get kidnapped from marrow

[autumn kettle]

because it's a cloak, nope

[safe yew]

huh

[autumn kettle]

neither cloak upgrade is %, i assume because hornet uh

starts with a cloak

[south marten]

Unless someone figures out a way into ||Wisp Thicket|| without ||Faydown Cloak|| (which is not percent), you need to enter through there and do ||Mt. Fay|| because ||Needolin and Cross-Stitch|| are

[autumn kettle]

yeah, that's a neat route

sounds pretty painful

[south marten]

Mhm!

low% TE is actually easier, because ||Needolin, Clawline, and Quick Step are required for Act 3||

[safe yew]

it's like it's some king of, path of pain...

[autumn kettle]

king of nothing

king of no one

[south marten]

Minimum bosses is also a funny route

Only 9, 10 if you're bad at a glitch

(5 or 6 for bad ending)

• Moss Mother
• ||Cogwork Dancers||
• ||Trobbio or Last Sinner or you do the glitch||
• ||Lace 2||
• ||Grand Mother Silk||
• ||Three of the four heart bosses||
• ||Lace 3||

And another that I'm forgetting

[safe yew]

||sigmas and gronk for the diving bell, iirc||

[south marten]

Oh shit forgot them

No another Act 1/2 boss

[autumn kettle]

||do you not need father of the flame for wisp thicket entrance?||

[south marten]

Nah

[autumn kettle]

||so you have one act 2 barrier boss no matter what||

[safe yew]

||nah you can skip burning man entirely||

[south marten]

Ough

[autumn kettle]

is it not that far west?

huh

[south marten]

Girlfriend is kicking me to go to sleep

Goodnight

[safe yew]

rest well

[autumn kettle]

z

oh

[safe yew]

i am now tempted to come up with silly nicknames for as many bosses as is viable

[autumn kettle]

is ||groal|| skippable?

bc otherwise he's mandatory for TE

||and also, your dreamers are set in stone bc khann requires both conchfly bosses||

||unless you can get into sands without that entrance with a glitch?||

[safe yew]

no skips for ||frog|| on youtube far as i can see

[autumn kettle]

||and then seth guards nyleth||

[autumn kettle]

||so your TE bosses, unless you can glitch out of some of em I'm not aware of, are:

• moss mother
• cog dancers
• lace 2
• groal
• silk
• seth
• nyleth
• karmelita
• clover dancers
• mario bros
• lace 3
  ||

[vagrant spruce]

it's forced minimum 2% unless you can skip all % movement abilities, ||you're forced to get 1% from killing lace 2 and acquiring a silk heart|| (AFAIK there's no way around this unless you're including OOB glitches or w/e)

[autumn kettle]

which is 11, assuming you can glitch past trobbio

[vagrant spruce]

i'm also pretty sure you can't do ||cradle|| without ||cling grip||? ||there are some large vertical sections, and wings will work for some but i'm pretty sure that first climb is impossible wings only||

[autumn kettle]

can you kill yourself on any spikes there to get a cocoon boost?

[vagrant spruce]

so that would put the limit at firmly 2%, no way around it, there's no other options to get you in there sans glitches

[vagrant spruce]

nope

[autumn kettle]

shame

[vagrant spruce]

timestamp from the low% wr as of rn ||https://youtu.be/cT54hBcfw5g?t=5199||, the vertical section shown right after the room transition i think is impossible with wings only

[autumn kettle]

gotcha

[vagrant spruce]

also, wait, your math is also off here - ||you can't do mt fay clawlineless w/o sharpdart, which requires both needolin & is a percentage itself||

[autumn kettle]

nah, someone solved that one i think

[vagrant spruce]

ah, yeah, i remember seeing that one the other day now - ||airstalling with phasmium injector|| or something

[autumn kettle]

wait but that's also %

[vagrant spruce]

.... true! and therefore is more %, but fewer bosses

ah -- that skip actually costs much more percent, i double checked, it takes 4% -- ||reaper crest, flea brew, plasmium injector, silkspear (for bell beast, without it you can't get out of the slab, you're softlocked)||

[autumn kettle]

makes sense, yeah

[vagrant spruce]

so i think you're still firmly stuck at the 5% low% record there is rn - ||

• cling grip for a bunch of things, nobody expects this to be skippable
• you can't avoid lace 2's silk heart
• you need needolin to get into either one of the intended entrances to citadel (it's a scripted check for both, you cannot guess lucky in mist to get through)
• cross stitch is gained from killing phantom, last judge requires silkspear+silk heart 1
• clawline is required to do the citadel melody bits, unless you find a way to get double jump w/o any % besides cling grip||

[inland wave]

I feel like speedruns are a whole world I simply don't understand, bums me out AGDQ seems fun

[thick urchin]

Once you reach the archetect, they swapped over to the sawblade hoop sckirt. The problem was getting out of Act 1

[tawdry thunder]

end of game spoilers

||why did grandmother silk go to such lengths to protect lace after they were swallowed by the void? lace implied that she was more or less neglected after she was created, and by all accounts grandmother silk seemed like she was a pretty brutal dictator. she drove the weavers out of pharloom, she hunted down what few remain just to suck their silk out, and overall seemed like a pretty heartless tyrant. im not sure why she would have a change of heart over a daughter who herself suggested that she wasnt loved. im wondering if maybe i missed an important bit of context for this?||

[hoary tulip]

||her daughter was dying in front of her, that very much changes things||

[thick urchin]

Also, "Heartless" can be a front for "Desperate"

[autumn kettle]

||lace is also a child in a few respects, and "thinks her mother doesn't love her" isn't "her mother doesn't love her"||

||especially when the mother is uh. kind of a huge dickhead that doesn't know how to show love||

[umbral canyon]

||i'm not sure Silk was directly responsible for hunting down the other weavers tbh, i assumed it was the citadel bugs taking it upon themselves to sustain silk's coccoon rather than her direct wish. But I'm still not totally clear on how much control silk had over the haunted bugs directly

As for lace's neglect, she was kinda obsessed with lace and the idea of a 'loyal child', so it made sense to me as a kind of caring-in-a-toxic-way relationship?||

[hoary tulip]

||g'ma silk might be the worst ever but it doesn't mean she lacks maternal instincts, also just because her children were born largely mortal doesn't mean it didn't break her heart to see Phantom unspool and die, considering she sent her as far away as she plausibly could so that she wouldn't have to watch one of her own children wither and perish||

[tawdry thunder]

mmmm interesting insights

[umbral canyon]

||assigning specific actions to silk is a bit weird in this respect since she is asleep(?) through most of the game as well, like did she spin lace while she was asleep?||

[tawdry thunder]

||i, too, am unclear on just how much control GMS (lol) had over the haunted bugs. hornet made several references to them being controlled, but also she was sleeping, so?? curious||

[hoary tulip]

||I've mostly taken it to be the case that a God being "asleep" is different than them being completely incapable of taking action so much as being restricted to only certain ones like manipulating the Haunted and possibly weaving Lace and Phantom(?)||

||with a fully-awakened Silk being a VERY different proposition to anything we've seen her hand at work in prior||

[umbral canyon]

||yeah, radiance manifested the infection while also being 'not present' in a similar way||

[tawdry thunder]

||a god's dream can be a deadly thing 🧘||

but yeah this all kind of aligns with my own thoughts on the matter. i gotta read more about ||phantom since i kinda blasted through that particular encounter and dont recall a ton of side lore about her. i think better understanding her deal will help me understand lace's relationship with mrs. silk||

[hoary tulip]

||a lot of Lace's resentment towards her mom is explained by Phantom lore||

[tawdry thunder]

sick!

good to know

[umbral canyon]

||there's an area in the exhaust organ with a needolin memory of phantom, it should be on youtube if you don't wanna trek back for it||

[tawdry thunder]

i 100% missed that! i do not mind trekking back at all

thanks!

[green bone]

|| Phantom seemed to be far more neglected than Lace was, which is interesting ||

[tawdry thunder]

||yeah thats kinda what has me scratching my head about the events of act 3. gotta dig more into it, im clearly missing some context||

[hoary tulip]

Phantom lore spoilers: ||it’s interesting to me to speculate on whether the way Phantom got treated was because Silk was genuinely heartbroken by the prospect of one of her precious children dying and wanted to put as much distance between herself and that process, or if Silk just did not regard her as a true child and treated her as a failed experiment||

[inland wave]

||One to wish her waking. Better a daughter born frail, than them.||

[umbral canyon]

||yeah in many ways phantom reminds me of eva more than anything, i always read her as a 'failed child' rather than a tragically doomed one. although idk what her actual failure was tbh||

[tawdry thunder]

||woah, just read a really interesting theory, which is that hornet was kidnapped in the first place specifically so that her silk could be used to fortify lace and keep her from fading. i reeeeally like that||

[hoary tulip]

||We know what Lace concluded, but Lace also was ultimately so precious to Silk that her mother literally sacrificed her life and fought tooth and nail just to cling to the hope of seeing her daughter survive||

Silksong sure is a game about how far mothers will go for their children huh

[umbral canyon]

hollow knight was about deadbeat dads and silksong is about toxic moms

[hoary tulip]

tax evasion is a crime, Vergil Pale King

[inland wave]

I want to know why the ||First Sinner|| is.. that. For knowing a truth.

[hoary tulip]

||She rejected Silk when she learned that the Weavers are not, in fact, divine angels, but Pharlids uplifted through Silk using her silk on them||

[tawdry thunder]

||the first sinner is described as having "raged" against the silken lie. i took that to mean a rebellion of some sort, though whether this was a theological rebellion or violent rebellion i cannot say||

[inland wave]

||Cursed by silk, cursed with silk! Cursed to know, the sin, the truth.||

I'm thinking it was more a Cult Decision, once it got rolling they kind of took some concepts to an extreme

[hoary tulip]

||"The truth" is that the Weavers were literally just some bugs that Grand Mother Silk forcibly reconfigured into her priest caste of servants||

[inland wave]

I just wonder how much of this is what ||Silk|| intended, would she have treated the weavers like this, or is it all ||The Chorus lost in the sauce Weavers made||

She seems to genuinely care for her creations, but unfiltered Godliness might just be a bit too much

[tawdry thunder]

yeah thats a big question im asking myself

id like to think that ||its equal parts blind devotion on behalf of the clergy and GMS subconsciously driving their actions through haunted thread. or at least, for a while it was, until we showd up and their minds were basically all but obliterated by that point||

[inland wave]

I'd love to see a timeline

Did they know what a nightmare Pharloom would become

[hot mango]

Secret in The Slab Spoilers ||Headcanon about First Sinner- the reason she challenges Hornet isn’t because she was a Heretic or Imprisoned. She wanted Hornet to accept the Truth and her strength. But she knew the Truth- and because of that Truth, she refused to give up her power just because Hornet was a Weaver. She knew being a Weaver wasn’t special, and therefore wasn’t enough for her.||

[tawdry thunder]

||i like that, i also got the strong sense that we were being tested more than anything||

||we know that the act of binding another is absorbing their consciousness entirely and subsuming into your own, but there is probably great risk that you could be subsumed yourself. first sinner probably wanted to make sure that if we did end up binding grandmother silk that we wouldnt just be absorbed by her on accident||

||orochimaru rules, basically||

[wanton bone]

We see this with the radiance and the moths as well. I think higher beings tend to just have... bad reactions to no longer having unquestioning worship. Or at least the class of like... ||Progenitor dream beings. Wyrms and root beings seem to be a little more stable on that front.||

[tawdry thunder]

i think its really interesting that gods (or godlike beings) in the HK universe have a compulsion to be worshipped

almost like they cant control it

very cool flavor!

[rose granite]

There does seem to be a general instinct to rule and commune, which Hornet seems to feel as well much as she is dealing with it too, but similarly there's the question of whether we are exposed to the ones that make it a genuine problem.

A higher being that's interesting to contemplate IMO is Unn

[hoary tulip]

the pale beings are strange

[umbral canyon]

yeah NPCs like the ||mask maker also talk about how domination is the inherent nature of higher beings, so that tracks||

[tawdry thunder]

hornet struggles with two irresistable compulsions throughout the game:

1. to dominate the minds of lesser bugs. to be worshipped. to be divine, and to hold power
2. to pet the fuzziest bugs she meets

[hoary tulip]

God-Hornet sitting on the fuzzy puppy throne

no cost too great for ouppy

[rose granite]

Mm, mayhaps controversially ||but I think we see this a decent amount with Hornet still where she does take others into her being, as per Eva who does so willingly. She does seem to do so out of necessity, mourning it, but she still has the instinct for it.||

[inland wave]

||ogh red memory my beloved||

||prove you are more weaver than wyrm, little one||

[rose granite]

||Lol, I was thinking more about the crests actually.||

[inland wave]

||just the Instinct of Gods talk has me thinking about it||

[fluid star]

This is tangential to the ongoing conversation, but I wonder what I absorbed differently, since I assumed ||the Weavers weaved before Silk interacted with them at all. Something about their weavenests just had a sense of precursor ruins, instead of Pharloomian ruins.||

[inland wave]

||and the way the White Lady binds herself, too||

[rose granite]

||But in much she seems to take after her sibling in the little ghost, since that one does show a void that isn't malicious.||

[hoary tulip]

||nah, Silk created the Weavers, the First Sinner's dream cutscene lays this out pretty explicitly||

[rose granite]

||The first sinner cutscene is quite explicit about the timeline||

[inland wave]

||How long did they exist before the Pharloom plan. They were down in the damn Abyss, their technology is crazy||

[wanton bone]

I think the ||weave nests are weaver man caves to hide out in and figure out a plan while the citadel stuff spiraled out of control||

[rose granite]

||Also, mask maker and phantom remain my favourite NPCs I feel. Love those lil guys.||

[autumn kettle]

||atla's rune harp lays out explicitly that it's something like that, yeah||

[inland wave]

||love the Eldritch class of: Other , for the mask makers. Not gods, not angels, they're.. something||

[autumn kettle]

||the text is something like "this is deep enough that she can't see us"||

[rose granite]

||Which I think is the right way to classify them.||

[inland wave]

The Weaver buildings in Pharloom itself are a lot more shriney

And also.. maybe.. graves? I think?

[vernal stone]

Yeah they're like ||hiding places slash survival bunkers||

[tawdry thunder]

my understanding of the timeline is something like:

||1. Grandmother Silk uplifts pharlids into weavers||
||2. GMS + Weavers establish a silk-based religion, rewarding higher caste with immortality and lower cast with eternal slave labor||
||3. Weavers rebel against GMS because shes either too much of a tyrant for them to tolerate or because they realize their entire existence is a lie. either way, they isolate and eventually peace out to other realms (in one of the weaver dens you can find a map of different paths out of pharloom, like an underground railroad of sorts)||
||4. I believe the Weavers also put GMS to sleep around this time?||
||5. Clergy continues to run the religion with the absence of Weavers and the hibernation of their god. Silk immortality experiments become more and more extreme. All the while (i believe) theyre being subconsciously controlled by GMS, whose silk infests all of them||
||6. over time everyone becomes mindless, haunted husks completely dominated by GMS's intent. whether she is directly controlling them or whether their actions are mere symptoms of her imprisonment, i can say. i believe the latter||
||7. hornet shows up, child of one of the long exiled weavers, to fuck everyone up||

[hoary tulip]

||mostly corrrect but 2 and 3 are actually the same points and with one major misunderstanding; the Weavers' big rebellion was putting Grand Mother Silk to sleep with the Silksong (roll credits!) and then uplifting the other bugs of Pharloom and indoctrinating them into a religion of perpetuating that song so that she'd stay asleep forever; all the experimentation and nonsense the Citadel gets up to later is in pursuit of making the song truly eternal||

[tawdry thunder]

||so the weavers were initially the only sapient bugs in pharloom, up until they put GMS to sleep?||

[hoary tulip]

ye

[tawdry thunder]

interesting!

[elfin ravine]

||I personally theorize that Hornet was kidnapped to become a vessel for Silk, and that that's also what the other Weavers that got brought back were for ||

[hoary tulip]

||this is why Pharloom is a kingdom so riddled with musical instruments, specifically bells, that there's literally entire veins of bells buried in the earth; Pharloom has been a machine to keep GMS asleep for an untold eon of time||

[vernal stone]

||I think that Weavers and not GMS are the focal point of Pharloom's religion yeah and that it primarily exists to keep GMS asleep
The only religious texts you can find that reference any figures at all are praying to icons of named Weavers||

[autumn kettle]

||sapient, not necessarily||

||we don't know how the ants play into this||

||but the only intelligent bugs in power, yeah||

[vernal stone]

I figured that ||kidnapping Weavers is something that the Citadel came up with on their own after the Weavers left, for immortality silk and to keep the bog cocoon in shape||

[hoary tulip]

||oh, yeah, there are technically faithless intelligent bugs around as well, that were kinda just chilling presumably until the Citadel suborned them||

[tawdry thunder]

||like the green prince!||

[autumn kettle]

||yeah, there have been three civilizations that we know of other than the weavers, in pharloom's vicinity||

...okay, that one's not a huge spoiler, but oops

[vernal stone]

Like ||The Weavers all really wanted to get far away after setting up Pharloom to keep their mom asleep so bringing them back was probably not their idea||

[hoary tulip]

||it's unclear whether the Citadel's Weaver-kidnapping was inspired by Silk or their own initiative, I think it was Silk directing that after the Haunting set in properly||

[autumn kettle]

||the ants, whatever khann's kingdom or species was called, and verdania||

[wanton bone]

||4 right? The stilkin, ants, coral, and verdania?||

[hoary tulip]

||mostly because Hornet says straight up that the bugs she fought which caged and kidnapped her were possessed husks and not fighting of their own initiative / by their own trained skills||

[autumn kettle]

||oh yeah sorry, the stilkin too||

[tawdry thunder]

i guess my only question is, ||if the weavers successfully put grandmother silk to sleep and established the citadel to keep her asleep, why leave?||

[autumn kettle]

thanks for the correction

[hoary tulip]

||they could not permanently kill her.||

[vernal stone]

Also possible ||it's just that I don't know that we really ever see anything else that directed and purposeful from the Haunted, especially if it requires them to leave Pharloom||

[hoary tulip]

||they directly state this, they foisted the duty of keeping mom asleep forever on someone else and then ran away to try and create a weapon capable of slaying a God||

||Hornet is that weapon||

[vernal stone]

But if she says that you're probably right and I just forgot it

[tawdry thunder]

||its in the journal entries for one of the veiled enemies||

[elfin ravine]

it's the choir enemies with the bell staff IIRC

[rose granite]

||For mother still slumbers, and her dreams still shine through her silken strands. It's quite easy to compare to Hollow Knight and the containment of Radiance, but with the difference that the Weavers didn't give a fuck about Pharloom.||

[tawdry thunder]

its still kinda borderline IMO but this particular entry lends itself strongly to the idea that ||haunted bugs arent controlling themselves at all||

[hoary tulip]

||The Haunting seems to be less of a puppetshow and more of Silk manipulating and directing the minds of its victims to her own ends||

[rose granite]

||I'd say that's pretty clear, as seen with when they are compelled to sing by your needolin.||

||And you see them strung up like, well, insects.||

[dreamy scarab]

plus the journal entries for Whiteward enemies ||"Living Silk commanding a dead shell... An affront to nature, and one all too common across Pharloom."||

[hot mango]

That does make me wonder, || the Great Civilizations of Pharloom that rebelled against the Citadel- the Coral Knights, the Skarr, the Wilds, even the Snails- do they predate Silk, or did Silk found Pharloom?||

||We know the Void Civilization predates pretty much everything… actually even that’s debatable since there’s a Weaver Tomb at the bottom of the Abyss||

||The Mantises could possibly predate the Radiance- it’s really hard to tell who predates who when it comes to these Kingdom Conquering Higher Beings||

||I doubt we’ll ever get an answer about where higher beings come from exactly, apart from when they usurp each other and absorb their power, but even the distinction between founders and conquerors is super blurry||

|| And tbh, in hindsight, Silksong gives a lot of credence to the fact that Higher Beings are not required for higher thought, even if they help accelerate the process||

||Silk accelerated the evolution of the Weavers, but their intellect wasn’t bound to Pharloom- they could take it with them beyond the kingdom’s bounds. On that topic, the Citadel Bugs that went beyond Pharloom to kidnap Weavers, Hornet included, were they Haunted or did they have Free Will? Can Silk’s influence really extend that far?||

||Thematically this bluriness is a fascinating allegory for colonialism and overwriting history, but in terms of analyzing the lore it really makes things harder||

[autumn kettle]

||it's interesting, yeah, because higher beings are explicitly responsible for uplifting "lesser" beings...except for all of the places and people where they're not||

||course, we already knew that with HK||

[hot mango]

||The Mantises, so far as we know, are from Radiance Era. They don’t seem to have advanced as far technologically as the Pale King’s subjects but they were doing just fine and have good mechanical knowledge||

[autumn kettle]

||the mantis tribe are disconnected from any higher beings, even if the mycoids aren't (with whatever the fuck mister mushroom is) and the Weavers we now know to be godspawn||

[hot mango]

||But what about Pharloom’s castes? The Coral People seemed relatively advanced||

[autumn kettle]

||the coral folk were definitely pre-pharloom, as was verdania, and the ants had a pre-pharloom culture as well||

[hot mango]

||Sure they fell, but all Civilizations do… what’s especially weird to me is how the Moss Druid’s Needolin dialogue specifically references the song or heartbeat coming from the Sands of Karak||

[autumn kettle]

||khann was a monarch, and they had other rulers before him, so it was an established nation for a long while||

[hot mango]

||Karmelita was probably not the first capable of helping the ants resist, but rather the last and strongest Skarrsinger in their history||

||Man seeing the Crust Kingdom in its prime was tragic, but seeing the Skarr in their prime compared to today- knowing that they’re not dead but dying- just hurts even more. Ants are my favorite animal their story hits me the hardest||

[inland wave]

I love how the ||Clover/Cogwork dancers are handled. We fight them twice, always with a partner, but both alone, a facsimile and a memory, always just slightly off, out of reach, the Needolin lyrics falling out when half of the Cogwork breaks||

But yeah it's referenced that ||Silk kind of just.. arrived to these lands, from elsewhere||

||'Power here even before hers' or something of the sort||

[hot mango]

||It is kinda interesting how the difference between the societies with and without Higher Beings have a primary difference of not advancement or civility- just speed. Higher Beings don’t make civilizations, they just accelerate the process. So fast that the growing pains can be lethal||

||Which is yet another allegory for Colonialism lol||

||Verdania, Skarr, the Wilds, the Crust Kingdom- none of them had an Underworks, or Slab, or Whiteward, or Bilewater. Or maybe they did- but they aren’t the ones who were driven to near extinction or servitude. So we don’t get to see that.||

[tall night]

Do enemies respond when you take the bellway but don't reat

Rest

Im clearing out for courier rasher

[dreamy scarab]

They don't

[tall night]

Cool

[tawdry thunder]

... why didnt i think of that

[rose granite]

Tbh it's fairly straightforward even without it. Think if you take out the foes in the citadel from the bellway, that should by itself be most of it.

Though speaking of Courier rasher, I've taken up the minor hobby where whenever a video is posted of the Blasted Steps, I see whether or not the person playing is aware of the side-tunnel towards the end (in the room before the boss), and so far in most videos I've seen the answer is no.

Doesn't mean much beyond me finding it funny and enjoying thinking about environmental design, though I was a little surprised to see fireborn miss it.

[tall night]

Yeah I took the way backwards before going back and got it 2nd try I just knew I'd be really annoyed otherwise

[rose granite]

That's fair tbh.

[tall night]

Its just that one tall room in shelleood with the bell throwers that's the one

[rose granite]

I did look up a route for it myself, and am glad I did. Went through Sinner's myself.

[tall night]

In this Playsession I also fought || phantom || and holllllyyyy peakk

Felt the most like a true Hornet 3

I never used the blasted steps side tunnel but the difficulty of the tlj runback i will hold is not bad

[rose granite]

Also, I'm not kidding when I say keeping an eye out for this specific section of the blasted steps runback in random videos has become a minor guilty pleasure.

[brave flower]

is that the pogo

[rose granite]

I made a prediction about that specific section, and folk potentially missing the alternative path, and in lieu of data I find it funny to see pop up.

[rose granite]

It's a part of the Blasted Step runback, with two enemies, which you can skip entirely with the Wall-climb alone.

[brave flower]

...oh my god

i think thats the section i always just pogoed off the judge to get to the bell

[rose granite]

And when I realised the alternative route I made the prediction that it was unobtrusive enough visually that a lot of people may have seen it but not realised they could use it.

And so far whenever I randomly see this runback in YouTube videos, which is highly anecdotal data and thus should be taken with a grain of salt, they seem to use the common route. I know this because otherwise the enemies don't activate.

[rose granite]

If you're curious.

[brave flower]

oh uh

i noticed that on the way down

didnt realize you could go there on the way up

[autumn kettle]

you just jump into it

[rose granite]

Yeah, which was my prediction about it.

[autumn kettle]

man

i guess yellow paint really is necessary considering the norm

but on the other hand

[rose granite]

That's just design language, and not some grand critique of ineptitude

[autumn kettle]

metroidvanias are delighted to make all of their shortcuts unobtrusive fuckass secrets

[rose granite]

Tbh this isn't some great secret, since you literally have to jump past the other opening.

[brave flower]

honestly i like that its so hard to find

[rose granite]

So I do think it's just poorly communicated overall.

[autumn kettle]

yeah i just thought it was obvious enough myself, but i guess people are really just trained to ignore non-popping colors

[brave flower]

makes scouting out the area really thoroughly feel rewarding

[tawdry thunder]

if people miss out on this corridor then it explains why people kept cursing the runback for ||last judge|| like ive been seeing lol

the whole time im like "?? it wasnt that bad"

[autumn kettle]

yeah you have to jump directly under the lower entrance

[rose granite]

Not really, again I don't think that the lesson here is "people are unobservant

[autumn kettle]

and then past the upper entrance

[rose granite]

I noticed it, and noticed how it could easily be dismissed.

[autumn kettle]

this wasn't a statement about being unobservant

[rose granite]

And then have seen it be easily dismissed.

[autumn kettle]

just training on standard design language

[elfin ravine]

It's just slightly off screen, and also visually more obscure than the rest of the screen

[tawdry thunder]

when i was looking up the locations for the last few mask shards to finish up my 100%, some were so hidden that i knew for a fact id never in a million years find them. others were like.... basically hanging out in broad daylight lolol

[brave flower]

the thing abt the last judge runback is that its not exactly hard, just punishing
if you mess up at all the enemies will be in significantly worse positions

[autumn kettle]

tbh

with the corridor

there are exactly two enemies you interact with

and only one you run past

[tawdry thunder]

this is a big game with a lotta hallways and its easy to get tunnel vision (heh)

[autumn kettle]

the other just says hi

[rose granite]

I mean it's not really training on design language I'd argue, it's just our eyes being tuned to notice contrasts and not unobtrusive stuff, and there not being much that directs a person towards it.

That's just, like, people's eyes.

[brave flower]

that first judge is a jackass

[brave flower]

i didnt use the corridor, i pogoed off the judge you skip with the corridor instead

[rose granite]

Pretty much. I think it's interesting because I don't think it's meant to be a secret, more a later realisation on repeat runbacks. It's fun to think about and reflect on in that way.

And where I don't think the lesson is really yellow paint.

[tawdry thunder]

now that ive beaten the game, ive been trying to mentally rank who i consider to be the hardest bosses. and i do wonder what everyone herre thinks.... should the runback be considered in the arithmetic? like is that a fair metric to throw into the ring, or should the boss' difficulty be judged purely in a vaccuum?

[fluid star]

For your data, I did notice it, but I failed the jump once and for some reason assumed that means I couldn't do it with the movement tools available in Act 1 without having been captured by the Wardenflies. Then I also didn't take too many retries on the Judge, so I never questioned if I could actually use it.

[tawdry thunder]

i feel like counting the runback might be a slippery sope, cause then you have to count the zone, the enemies, everything in between

on the other hand, the runback is an important part of the process

it would definitely affect how i rank bosses like ||groal|| though

[rose granite]

Whilst noted, we don't really have a heat map of the zone so we'll never know in truth lol. Still, it's fun to think about for ttrpg maps and such.

[brave flower]

i dont think so, i think everything between the closest bench and the boss counts as part of it

[rose granite]

Agree there tbh, largely because they're a necessary part of beating the boss.

[fluid star]

Considering a lot of bosses can be encountered in any order with incredibly different tools available it's all subjective anyway.

[tawdry thunder]

another tricky part about ranking ||groal||, especially if you count the runback, is that ||he has two runbacks depending on whether you find the hidden bench, which drastically reduces how hard it is||

(suffice to say, ||groal|| is on my shortlist of bosses that gave me the most trouble lol)

but i did not find the boss itself to be all that challenging, just the shit leading up to the boss

[rose granite]

On a different note, for a runback I really came to enjoy, the ||Widow|| one is great

[fluid star]

And this illustrates what I sort of mean, since I don't find him hard, in execution, at all. Because ||I just cheesed him by chilling with the maggots. Don't have to heal, if you stay in the corner where he can't hit you anyway||.

[rose granite]

At first it felt rough, but when I got into the flow of it I really started to appreciate that particular run.

[tawdry thunder]

||even without using the maggot strat, groal in a vaccuum isnt all that hard. but having a masive runback plus a fairly long gauntlet preceeding the fight gives it a whole other vibe||

tricky to rank! but i do think i agree that all of that is part of "the boss fight"

[inland wave]

I ||Plasmium Overdosed|| my way through ||Groal|| mostly because I never found the second bench and also the ground is evil

[rose granite]

||I think he qualifies as a solid example of a gimmick fight of sorts, which tend to become vastly easier with experience.||

[inland wave]

Also happened to have ||Pimpillo|| for his one move there

||Dodongo||-ass

[tawdry thunder]

i felt that way about the ||last judge|| runback. by my last few attempts i found it quite enjoyable. it had a bit of a rhyhtm to it

[rose granite]

Oh huh, never thought of that but that makes sense that they'd include

[rose granite]

I liked it once I figured out the alternative path lol.

[inland wave]

That one ||Drillfly|| is an enemy for life but the run back got more flow-y over time

[rose granite]

With the alternative path it's a bit below ||widow|| but still solid, without it I felt it took a long time.

Which made sense, and why I was wondering if I was missing anything.

[tawdry thunder]

man ||widow|| was just a really solid fight. probably the first "oh shit" boss

also the first time i realized that ||you could deflect attacks/projectiles with your basic attacks. total game changer for the rest of the game, even if i was never all that good at using the mechanic proactively||

[rose granite]

||My favourite fight archetype by far, and I did wish there were more like her.||

||Lace was fine, but Widow to First Sinner stuck with me more.||

[tawdry thunder]

my wife was watching over my shoulder the first time i fought her and she was like "thats a lot of stuff on the screen"

[fluid star]

I find it interesting that ||Widow|| is an outlier in that regard since, iirc you can't ||deflect either Belleater, or Bell Beast's bells||.

[tawdry thunder]

and i was just sitting there like 😭 😭 😭

[rose granite]

Arguably the finale has a lil too much stuff lol, but it was still very fun and I liked it.

||First Sinner just ended up doing it even better for me.||

[tawdry thunder]

agreed, same formula but more refined

||first sinner was a magnificent fight, and had the best runback in the game 😉 ||

[tall night]

I just had one of the coolest boss fights into one that sucked butt
||Phantom|| into ||broodmother||

[rose granite]

On a different note, how did folk feel about big spoiler ||Lost Lace?||

[autumn kettle]

probably my favorite fight in the game

[inland wave]

Maybe same, real up there

[tawdry thunder]

loved it, but i felt it was a bit too easy for ||the final boss||

[inland wave]

tbf ||radiance|| kind of fell over like a sack of potatoes by comparison

[autumn kettle]

yeah, i wish it had another phase

[rose granite]

I liked it but think I'd gotten a bit used to the formula there by that point, so think it served its purpose well even if I liked ||First Sinner|| more.

[autumn kettle]

excited for godhome amped version

[tawdry thunder]

||once you figure out lost lace's moveset, you could absolutely just annihilate her. i think by my last few runs i burned through her first two phases in just a minute or so. the only reason the last phase took longer is because she would spend so long throwing random void shit at you, so you just have to wait until she locked herself into one of her more predictable attack patterns||

[rose granite]

||Crust King is a boss I think would benefit even more from amping them up, but we'll see about that potentiality in the future.||

[rose granite]

||Mm, which that was the part that was why I enjoyed it but it didn't leave as strong of an impression on me, since her moveset already built largely on her prior two encounters. That and the mid-transition was the only one that felt like a proper big transition this time around.||

[inland wave]

I'm not sure if they'll ever be able to top the vibe of ||THE RADIANCE|| blocking out all other visuals for blinding white nameplate

[rose granite]

||I can easily see why she'd be someone's favourite, but she ended up feeling overall fine to me in the end. Just don't really have a strong opinion on her.||

[rose granite]

Should be feasible, not like other games (or movies for that matter) haven't made solid introductions in the past.

[tawdry thunder]

||what i liked most about lost lace, and lace's fights in general, is that i am a big fan of "duel" type bosses. always a treat. but for a final boss i felt she coulda been juiced up a bit beyond the duel archetype||

just a bit.

[inland wave]

Remnant 2 had a lot of banger boss introductions, but somethin about that simplicity and vs all the others just getting a little 'we named this guy :3' in the corner

[hollow elm]

||I guess part of it loops back to Lace being mostly stuck in form to a degree.||

[rose granite]

||I think the archetype works fine, where the thing is more that if you were familiar with her moveset from the prior fights she didn't feel that different from then. In that sense I'm reminded of a thing TBSkyen has said a fair few times; a design meant to embody but not challenge a concept.||

||And I think if you are a big fan of the design continuing to embody the core, she works great! If you were hoping for the finale to challenge it instead, you aren't going to quite have that.||

[tawdry thunder]

thats a great way to put it

thats about how i feel

i do appreciate the former, but i was craving the latter

actually i already know who is going to be top of my list of hardest boss

[autumn kettle]

god, yeah, that boss was way too easy

like, i know the fuckin pit of a hundred trials was part of "the boss fight" gimmick

[tawdry thunder]

this fuckin guy! actually lowkey hated this fight, design wise

[autumn kettle]

but i found that part easy as well

[tawdry thunder]

gets a pass because its extremely optional but cmon!

[autumn kettle]

i really hope khann gets juiced up in godhome

or even in base game

[rose granite]

Yup, though it was designed in such a way that I think you could make a really good fight out of it.

[inland wave]

||Khann|| just continues to amp speed 2x longer, no other changes

[autumn kettle]

like

i think my biggest problem with him

[rose granite]

Eh, base game I think the ship has sailed for since numbers or speed wouldn't be quite enough.

[autumn kettle]

is that he only has one attack in phase 1

sure, it has two patterns

but it's just one attack, and then he gets uh...two more attacks

[rose granite]

Blue on blue hate, I see how it is 😔

[autumn kettle]

over the course of the fight

and imo all three of those attacks should have been part of phase 1

with phase 2+ adding new shit

and he was also very slow until the speed+ phase transitions

[tawdry thunder]

the only ||heart|| boss i found particularly challenging was ||the ant queen.|| they were otherwise all kind of pushovers at that stage of the game IMO

[rose granite]

You could have it start in its final phase and go from there, which tbh is why it is a good candidate for a godhome fight.

[autumn kettle]

at which point he hit the speed that i was like...expecting to be the start-of-fight speed

yeah

[rose granite]

Pretty much tbh

[autumn kettle]

like, i think that basegame could've started in final phase and gone to A Phase 2

with another gimmick

not more speed, because final phase was medium-slow but with a couple things to keep track of, so speed would be for godhome

but more shit

[rose granite]

||Clover Dancers I liked, but think you can describe as embodying Cogwork still; except also being much shorter.||

[inland wave]

I was also half-expecting to go back and fight ||Plasmified Zango 2, Goopier||

[inland wave]

that's part of the tragedy tho ain't it

[tawdry thunder]

im gonna give a hot take and say that ||Khann|| would be harder if he had adds. and i say that as someone who despises boss adds in this kind of game

[inland wave]

Though didn't mix it up all that much I s'pose

[rose granite]

Whilst it can work well, I think it doesn't hit the same as it already had with ||cogwork||

[autumn kettle]

he would definitely be harder with adds, i just don't think they'd make the fight a more fun kind of hard

[rose granite]

So wasn't really hit with the sensation of tragedy there at the end yet.

[inland wave]

Also wouldn't he just kind of obliterate them with big hitboxes

[tawdry thunder]

lmao yeah good point, i guess he is kind of anti-add

[tacit wadi]

So is there any lore on the ||nameless town||

[autumn kettle]

imo he just needed to modify the arena more

[tacit wadi]

Or does it just exist

[autumn kettle]

and more permanently

to make ||the coral pillars|| more threatening

[modern fossil]

I think it just exists. ||From what I can tell by playing with the needolin it seems like it's residents dug down to follow the call of mother silk||

Now it's abandoned

[tall night]

What about In terms of bosses in silkgodhome who weren't in silksong hmmmm

What would I want tho i don't know totally everyone so far

[rose granite]

Rather than normal adds, have him do what the ||great conchfly did with its children(?)/brethren, and have him command his soldiers to attack alongside him.||

[modern fossil]

Shakra's master would be a good silk god home boss

[tall night]

Shakra plus master yeah

||Vespa|| I think

Would be cool

[modern fossil]

||Snail shamans would be good too||

[rose granite]

It's been funny to go into Silksong and come away with the confirmation that I really do enjoy GMing ttrpgs of all things lol.

[modern fossil]

We don't have as many crestfallen warriors to fight in a dream arena in silksong

chuckles darkly

[rose granite]

Oh I know one! ||Zaza!||

[formal zenith]

would they not just be ||another "charges at you" boss||

[rose granite]

||Yeah, but sad.||

[modern fossil]

||Zaza in God home 2 just looks at you with big sad puppy dog eyes in order to demoralize you before true silk mother||

[formal zenith]

||savage beastfly more like sadvage beastfly||

[tall night]

Maybe silly but I would love a prime herrah

[modern fossil]

No that's reasonable

[formal zenith]

||mother silk with no GRAND?!||

[tawdry thunder]

||the best part about the garmond 1 fight was how pathetically easy it was. the whole time im fighting him im slowly realizing, like, "oh yeah this mf is dead meat."||

[inland wave]

||Sprintmaster Swift..||

[rose granite]

All three dreamers are pretty easy candidates for "Guys/Girls fans want to fight".

[inland wave]

He lasts a damn while, I have to give it to him

[rose granite]

Alongside the gods of Thunder and Rain.

[modern fossil]

Herrah is the only one I could imagine actually being able to fight though

[formal zenith]

does it make sense for the dreamers to show up in pharloom though?
aside from herrah obv

[modern fossil]

||We've already established that Hornet can fight her own memories||

[tall night]

Monomon is definitely just someone you put In a locker

[rose granite]

Think there were some old, old notes on a dreamer fight for the first game, but that's a concept which has long since been scrapped.

[autumn kettle]

monomon is not a boss, yeah

not in any way

nor is lurien

[inland wave]

It does seem wild that with enough magic and silk ||you can make memories -real-, memorium makes sense now I s'pose||

[modern fossil]

||A dlc about doing some self actualization by fighting more Hornet memories seems like it would be a good God home equivalent||

[rose granite]

You can justify anything with dream world memories, but I also just don't quite think the ones other than Herrah would be compelling.

[tawdry thunder]

oh wow i didnt put that together before. that is very cool

[tall night]

A duo fight with ||phantom and lace || that solidifies their relation that we only really saw in that one memory

Would own

[rose granite]

Tbh if I'd want anything from a dlc, it'd probably be ||establishing the groundwork for anything else they'd want to do within the setting in the future.||

[hoary tulip]

that's not even what the Memorium is is the funny part

[tawdry thunder]

oh man. fuck lol an entire ||zoo of ecosystems destroyed by the citadel, not only kept on display for the enjoyment of the destroyers, but literally ripped out of memory. thats so fucked||

[rose granite]

||I'm always going to be for more phantom content, as the sole Phantom X Hornet shipper.||

[inland wave]

Oh I figured it was sort of the opposite, they need ||the zoo to -see- the memories, thusly Verdania in danger of Fading||

but also we only do this with ||snails|| but who knows what the fuck else Pharloom was doing in these halls

[tall night]

I am a shipper for that but only in the way that a heated battle and death with nothing else is its own romance

Adored the voicelines tho

[rose granite]

I still think they've got one of the stronger dynamics in the game for how short it is.

Anyway ||looking forwards to Phantom being revived in the dlc.||

[tall night]

Oh. ||huntress ||? Maybe

Anyways while a godhome would be sick I think new iterative stuff I'd be just as happy

[modern fossil]

||Nu yearns for blood||

Yeah whatever form the boss rush would take it won't be the god seekers again

[rose granite]

I wouldn't be surprised to see them pop up, but yeah.

[south marten]

I don't particularly care what form the boss rush takes, I just want boss rush

[rose granite]

If we get a boss rush I'd still wager it'd be a dream world thingie.

[modern fossil]

I mean practically we don't have a dream nail to enter God home

[south marten]

||Red Memory 2: Electric Boogaloo||

[modern fossil]

||It would have to be whatever the snail shamans give us for the hearts||

[south marten]

Oh no

[rose granite]

Ah yeah, honestly speaking that part didn't even register as a huge issue.

Largely because I'm sure they can come up with some alternative explanation, of which you've mentioned one.

[south marten]

I mean, ||Song of the Deep||, it's fine

[rose granite]

I'd be for it having more uses tbh

[tall night]

||Or like idk eva looks inside your soul at your memories or something as dlc entrance ||

[south marten]

I still want my ||Vespa|| fight

I was so ready for it in ||Red Memory|| and feel a little robbed.

[rose granite]

||Felt odd that the needolin melody didn't really change after we gathered the threefold melody, but we got the song of the deep and it was important enough for a specific input instead of just altering the melody when at the location?||

[rose granite]

||You can find those in Italy if you want.||

[south marten]

[rose granite]

||But yeah, wonder if the Song of the Deep used to have a bigger role in the past? Could see it, and that role being repurposed for dlc.||

[tawdry thunder]

you should have to press specific buttons on the needolin to play a song, like ocarina of time

[formal zenith]

oooooh and what if each ||weavenest|| had its own unlock melody that you had to find out
that'd be so cool

[rose granite]

The notes transform into a platform challenge

[tawdry thunder]

finally, a real game

[rose granite]

I am still low-key surprised ||the weave-nests didn't upgrade the crests. Nothing wrong with that, it just caught me by surprise.||

[formal zenith]

yeah true, it also would've felt appropriate if they ||contained the silk skills||

[rose granite]

Big spoiler stuff ||One did I suppose, whilst the others had a tool for running fast, a broken gun, Eva, and I suppose the void?||

[tawdry thunder]

lmao

[formal zenith]

ah right i forgot about ||sharpdart||

[rose granite]

||It wasn't that they weren't relevant, they were. They just weren't in the way I was expecting.||

[south marten]

||Silk Soar was in a weavenest||

[rose granite]

||Still feel good about unlocking it without the double jump.||

[rose granite]

||...yeah completely forgot about that one lol.||

||Feels like the ascent was when I unlocked it.||

[tawdry thunder]

||weaver 1: please accept the gift of your ancestors: anklets to carry you forth as fast as the wind||

||weaver 2: and from me, i gift you my very soul, so that you will never be bereft of the power you need to save this world||

||weaver 3: heres an AR-15, glhf||

[rose granite]

||Speaking of the ascent, did anyone else get stuck here for a little bit thinking that you were supposed to use silksoar there? You can, but the timing is finicky, and if you respawn the lava is too close for you to pull it off I believe.||

[south marten]

Nah, saw the guy on the left and the ||Mt Fay|| training kicked in

[rose granite]

||Realised that too after finding the timing too tight, but the big open room made me think to use the skill that was seemingly for big open rooms.||

[south marten]

I think it's funny that, like. Canonically, pretty sure Hornet does everything without dying

I'm getting skill-diffed by the fucking video game character

[rose granite]

This is why the (hypothetical) third game should have us play Hollow Knight, so we can finally have a protagonist who canonically knows how it feels to lose.

[south marten]

The monkey's paw curls, you play the Hollow Knight before sealing the Radiance

[rose granite]

Also does this mean that throughout the game ||Hornet's only canonical losses are to a giant fly, and the procession at the start of the game?||

[rose granite]

I'd win.

Just don't get corrupted

[south marten]

Only if you ||get slabbed||.

[rose granite]

||Yup, which I presume will be an assumed canon||

||Even if it most definitely will never be confirmed either way.||

[thick urchin]

Nah, just decanonize|| Mt Fay.||

[tall night]

I always thought hornets head looked like you could pick her up and play it like an ocarina with her eyes like windholes

[rose granite]

https://youtu.be/Ky0ibOw3wZY?si=9YYkXppTARVLH5G0

[autumn kettle]

||you can enter both zones without getting got||

[safe yew]

truth be told, i'm still curious as to how the corpse runs work out in universe. given there's so much worldbuilding, the general non-explanation of the knight and hornet waking up at the last bench after dying but still having a shade/cocoon at point of death seems a rather significant omission (unless i missed something)

[thick urchin]

How much HP does Moss Mother (tuturial boss) have? I'm thinking about a hypothetical mod to give a tool in the first area, for tool only runs.

[rose granite]

120 I believe

||350 for the alternative versions||

[south marten]

How could you decanonize Hornet's beloved fluffy creatures?

[rose granite]

Wait a second... Was Hornet in Greenpath in HK because that's where the fluffiest creatures in that game are located?

Was everything else just a lie?

[thick urchin]

Are the Devouts fluffy?

[modern fossil]

I hope so. They're moss not hedges

[rose granite]

I mean, just look at the mosskin

[modern fossil]

Big fur

[modern fossil]

Master character design is making something with a beard be cute and fluffy

[rose granite]

But beards are cute and fluffy!

[inland wave]

I like the idea that Hornet's 'revivals' are just ||Her father's gift of prophecy, she snaps awake like she'd been having a nightmare||

The cocoon left behind I'm less sure of outside of 'well game mechanics'

[south marten]

||Need art of Pale King holding a dodgeball now||

[green bone]

God Flea ||Dodge|| finally done

[hot mango]

Problem: ||cocoon gets infested by the Twisted Bud when infected||

[tawdry thunder]

||gratz, what was the final score?||

[modern fossil]

Is beating ||Seth's flea scores needed for 100%?||

[autumn kettle]

no

[modern fossil]

Phew

[autumn kettle]

mementos aren't %

[green bone]

79

[thick urchin]

Setting out into Act 1 Bilewater. Wish me luck.

[tawdry thunder]

its needed to 100% your own immortal soul

[modern fossil]

||St. Peter is going to kick me out for not getting 100+ in flea juggle||

[tawdry thunder]

the trick to both ||flea dodge and flea juggle|| is to never jump unless you have to

[green bone]

||I have no idea how you deal with the drunken fleas in juggle||

[tawdry thunder]

||jump to hit them. you can jump+up air, jump+up air, jump+up air really quickly in succession and get them out pretty much immediately and with no risk||

||hitting them before their extra heavy gravity kicks in is key||

[rose granite]

||Oh, I just used a crest with long range and hit them quickly.||

[modern fossil]

I beat it ||with wanderer and honestly it was great||

[tawdry thunder]

that works too but is too risky for my blood

[rose granite]

||Tis why I liked Shaman, even if I suspected witch was better if it weren't for the fact that the hitbox felt wonky for me.||

[safe yew]

||maybe i'm weird, but i had little difficulty with the caffeinated fleas. it's when there are a bunch of fleas that i have trouble||

[rose granite]

||Usually it's when you get it when juggling other stuff or being out of position, though clawline can help there I'm sure.||

[tawdry thunder]

||for the normal fleas, they hoot when they appear, and the order of those hoots is the same order in which they start to divebomb. if you can keep track of the order of hoots, you can keep track of who is about to fall||

[modern fossil]

||The fact that landing in the ground in the sides of the stage is a loss but the fleas can go over it is awful||

That got me more often than I want to admit

[south marten]

The only things that give percentage are needle upgrades, silk skills, spool upgrades, mask upgrades, tool upgrades, all 51 tools, movement abilities (but not ||glide or double jump||), silk hearts, ||crests, Needolin, Needle Strike, binding Eva, and Everbloom||

[tawdry thunder]

||also, if you use shaman crest, the fleas are hittable as soon as they exit their tumbling animation and enter their divebomb animation (with their bell head aiming straight down). using this as a marker for when to hit was enormously helpful||

[thick urchin]

There's an NPC just outside ||Bilewater (in Sinner's road)|| that is related to coocoons...

[tawdry thunder]

||flea dodge|| is the real monster. i spent more time trying to solve that than i did any boss

[south marten]

Ah, but they aren't there in Steel Soul, so therefore Steel Soul must be canon.

[autumn kettle]

||poor styx :(||

[safe yew]

||poor guy got mandela catalogued||

[south marten]

Also, to be fair, they give you ||Silk Eaters||, so it's not technically directly related to the cocoon

[rose granite]

Do tool upgrades give it? ||I forgot about druid's eyes and still got 100%||

[south marten]

They do not

Or, rather

Those upgrades don't

I meant the pouch/kit upgrades

[rose granite]

Okay so some give it, and some don't

Ahhh

That'll explain it lmao.

[south marten]

I forgot about the tools that get a second form

[tawdry thunder]

i didnt know about the ||boomerang upgrade|| until i saw it in a 100% checklist. wish i knew about it earlier, that was my favorite tool 😩

[south marten]

But yeah no those three just exist

[tawdry thunder]

though idk if that coutns towards 100% or not, idk if any tool upgrades too

[south marten]

No completion percent attached

[autumn kettle]

they do not, because you already have the tool

[tawdry thunder]

poison boomerang got me through both ||beastfly|| fights, who is the true hardest boss in the game

cant wait for the inevitable future boss rush mode to do a ||double beastflies|| fight

[autumn kettle]

||double beastfly in the fourth chorus arena will be fucking hilarious||

[hot mango]

I mean there’s also a ||whole extra wish with Steel Seer I think Iji and a new boss so like who knows anymore||

[autumn kettle]

||Steel Seer Zi||

[modern fossil]

Hey I just realized that ||the little WaWa guys and the judges|| are our first direct example of how masks change the nature of bugs. Like we knew that forever but it's clear just how big of an effect it has with them

[hoary tulip]

mhm

[modern fossil]

||Double beastfly in the groal arena||

[autumn kettle]

heh

[tawdry thunder]

NO

[modern fossil]

YES

[tawdry thunder]

complete with the runback 😩

[modern fossil]

Lmao the only God home fight with a platforming sequence before

[hot mango]

||when I replay Silksong I’m bringing Voltvessel Stakes to that fight||

[rose granite]

||I genuinely think double beastfly without spawns would be quite fun||

[tawdry thunder]

||only if you can stun them by baiting them to ram their heads together||

[modern fossil]

||Too bad, go my Bilewater spawns||

[rose granite]

||tbh not the worst enemies, since I can pogo them||

||I think the worst may be something like the greater conchflies if they can get their shots off, or the conductors.||

||Or wait no, the fucking triple shot guys in putrid.||

||Hated those guys||

[tawdry thunder]

yep worst enemy in the game

[modern fossil]

Yeah I was gonna say ||either conch flies or the putrid guys but I figured if this is the groal arena it should at least match||

[tawdry thunder]

trying to do a mental inventory and i dont think its even close. even with maxed out masks and silk they still gave me a hard time

id have to check the journal

[modern fossil]

It's a combination of erratic spread and the fact they run away

[tawdry thunder]

erratic spread that is also somehow pinpoint precise

idk how they do it

[modern fossil]

Thank God they're only in one area

Primal aspids are everywhere in hollow knight

[hot mango]

||Greater Conchflies aren’t that bad since where they shoot is fairly consistent, so their shots go in very consistent directions and banks||

||At least if you mean the boss||

||If you mean the regular enemies then yeah easy agree||

[tawdry thunder]

i had a harder time with the ||miniature version of the conchfly boss. the name escapes me but they burrow underground at vertical or horizontal angles, very fast. they arent that common but they always gave me a headache, especially in the Khann gauntlet||

||in fact iirc they are the only enemies to actually kill me during that gauntlet||

[modern fossil]

The ||coral bubble guys were rough for me|| it felt really bad using my tools on them

[tawdry thunder]

||yeah they were annoying because you had to wait for their baffling horse shit to clear up before you could even hit them||

[hot mango]

I just spammed Thread Storm and took them out in 2 casts

[tawdry thunder]

it was very much like "are you done yet? can i play the game please? oh, more bubbles, nevermind, my apologies"

[hot mango]

The extended cast tears through them because they really can’t do anything about it || and thread storm destroyed their bubbles||

[inland wave]

||Shaman + Voltvessel|| oneshots them, and the roundboys

[tawdry thunder]

checking the journal and i cant find any enemy that i think is comparable to the spit squit in terms of frustration and sheer deaths-per-encounter, but there are a few that are comparable depending on what stage of advancement youre at

such as this lovely fellow

[rose granite]

||Meant the diagonal shot guys that aren't the boss but bigger than usual, though the boss works too. It's not that they're bad on their own, obviously they're very easy to deal with and I thought that could be left implied. Rather it's when put in conjunction with other enemies that they're tough due to the diagonal, bouncing projectiles exerting a lot of area denial on the player.||

[tawdry thunder]

before you get ||clawline|| this guy is an utter monster

ironic that their flight AI is basically the same as spit squit lol

[hot mango]

Oh yeah the ||regular shooters are agony I agree||

[rose granite]

||Usually when you're looking at enemies that are difficult in groups, it's not the master fighters but rather the ones who exert a lot of pressure through zoning that are tough. This is why the bell throwers are so reviled too for example.||

[rose granite]

The flight AI in this game is quite predictable tbh.

[tawdry thunder]

||yeah and clawline lets you get around 90% of it, the reason mr squit is so tough is because you cant deflect the spit like you can the bells||

[hoary tulip]

the flying enemy AI is annoying until you have The Thing

once you have it

you just do the needful

[rose granite]

Honestly I found them manageable even before that outside of I think ||The forum with the conductors||, largely because the AI lets you zone them easily due to them doing input reading, and because of tools/skills.

[hot mango]

That reminds me of a certain tactical TTRPG I’ve heard about, no idea what it’s called tho

[proud cobalt]

Hollow Knight Unofficial TTRPG.

[tawdry thunder]

a mild hack of 5E oughta do it 😉

[rose granite]

As an aside I did mention before that I found it funny how validating Silksong felt in terms of GMing, and I think ||the way in which spawn summons have generally worked out, the tactics people use for them, and what makes such fights easier by the most significant margin, to all be part of that.||

If you recall Pigsriot the various talks that have been had in Lancer about damage as a tool to mitigate a disadvantage in action economy, and how such design can lead to an arms race with a kind of feast or famine result, that was in the back of my mind a fair few times. ||Still loved most of the arenas.||

[modern fossil]

That's really interesting

[rose granite]

Everything comes down to action economy in the end~

And to an extent zoning, but that doesn't sound as pithy.

[tawdry thunder]

i admit, this game has gotten my gears turning quite a bit as well

the enemies are so laser precise in their function and the means by which they challenge the player

[hot mango]

If only there were a server for this, I believe mud and lasers, scifi game

[rose granite]

The way in which action economy counts for real time stuff as well is something I started to think about a lot due to fencing/HEMA, where it was pointed out that even if you're really fast you can't do more than maybe 1,5 moves per every move your opponent makes

[tawdry thunder]

note, too, ||how in act 3, every standard enemy that has been "voidified" is granted one of a limited suite of additional void attacks (optionals, you could call them 🤔). this has totally changed the dynamic of many enemies that became routine to fight. reminds me of the taken in destiny||

[rose granite]

And thus a lot of it comes down to making your moves efficient such that they put you in a position where you can end the fight. Prolong a disadvantage without any mitigation, and you're oft kinda fucked.

In silksong, where you don't have a lot of crowd control, said mitigation is typically either kiting or murder.

For a madman take, this is action economy at play.

[tawdry thunder]

lmao it absolutely is

youre a madman but you speak the divine truth

[rose granite]

Yeah, I think the way in which the enemies do have predictable patterns typically and expert specific pressures does make it a decent example of a game where you can see how overlaying these various patterns causes different results.

Where 1 aggressive big guy + 2 evasive zoners is a match made in hell.

[tawdry thunder]

i do wish there were areas that mixed enemy types from different "biomes" more often

just to see more such patterns

[rose granite]

That'd be fun, maybe as an ||act 3 thing||

||I think there should be more Maestros everywhere in the citadel||

[hot mango]

COLOSSEUM OF FOOLS 2

[rose granite]

Consider for a moment, any boss or big enemy in the game, but ||there are also two voidbound maestros there as well||

Oh actual quick question, since summon fights get some hate what were people's favourite ones? Suppose arenas can count too if you can't think of any.

||The dual moss mothers was weirdly fun for me, due to how scuffed it felt.||

[modern fossil]

Same

[rose granite]

It was a weirdly good fight

[modern fossil]

||Sister Splinter was neat too but I completely understand people's problems if the had any||

[wanton bone]

I feel like my complaint with a lot of arenas is that the size of the arena feels like a bigger issue than the adds. In the ||cogworks rn, and god are some of those rooms too small for what you fight in them.||

[tawdry thunder]

||signis and gron by a mile for me. i actually think thats up there as one of my favorite fights in the game. appropriately challenging, difficult as hell, and the two brothers complemented each other's movesets perfectly||

||i also didnt find the normal enemy adds to be all that overwhelming||

[rose granite]

||Oh yeah that was a summon fight, yeah that's valid.||

[tawdry thunder]

should be noted that i went there REAL early

like way earlier than i think i was supposed to

[modern fossil]

||Signis and Gron would have probably been more memorable for me if I did them before the third nail upgrade||

[wanton bone]

Particularly the arena on the left. Why does the low ceiling have enviromental hazards, and the fight have enemies that need pogos to deal with.

[tawdry thunder]

yeah i took them on somewhere mid-act 2, i think even before i finished the food fetch quest

[rose granite]

||I do think they end up opening up more later, though the only fights I remember not being a room with three to four flat walls was the Bilewater boss, Cogworks, and technically speaking the underworks one since the steam could be a genuine hazard.||

[tawdry thunder]

hard to remember.... this is a big fuckin game yall

[hot mango]

It felt like a fun shitpost

[rose granite]

||Yeah same, same. Seemed like a fun fight.||

[hot mango]

If I can be honest I enjoyed a majority of the enemy gauntlets

[rose granite]

Less of that and more just your classic chaotic fight.

Which is good, those are fun

It lets people use their shit in stupid ways.

[hot mango]

It’d be easier to list the ones I disliked ||Cogwork Core and Whispering Vaults||

[wanton bone]

||Underworks|| was also annoying - a big guy with scary zone attacks and a flyer that likes to hover in exactly the space to make jumping over or dashing under impossible, plus some obstacles on the walls to make gaining height that way harder is tricky.

[hot mango]

||I really enjoyed the Coral Tower + Lost Verdania’s enemy gauntlets, and the Court of Craws was also very fun. High Halls was a big challenge but a satisfying one to overcome||

[tawdry thunder]

i seem to recall the underworks gauntlet giving me a tough time of it

thats the one if, iirc, ||the big guy drops from the ceiling and breaks through the floor to die in spikes||

[inland wave]

I've never understood the gauntlet complaints, I want to beat up a room of funny bugs, I am playing Hollow Knight

[tawdry thunder]

my only complaint about gauntlets is that they dont reward rosaries. i know WHY they dont reward rosaries but still, you expect me to do this shit for free? without gettin PAID?? what kinda game you think this is

im not here to save pharloom im here to get rich

[wanton bone]

I like them, but it sometimes feels like the issue is less fighting the bugs and more not getting stuck in a corner.

[inland wave]

I had some of that with the ||Void|| set, they just do a lot of Screen Space Occupation

[wanton bone]

Shade Cloak and Descending Dark meant that late game Knight had a lot of tools to get out of being cornered, Hornet... doesn't.

[tawdry thunder]

||theres that one silk power that lets you blast through enemies. i think i used it precisely once, and thats when i got it lol||

[hoary tulip]

if you are getting hemmed into a corner by a boss, I suggest the Don't Get Cornered skill

[inland wave]

That's part of what I liked most about the combat in Silksong

[elfin ravine]

no Shade Cloak equivalent does make getting trapped in a corner much harder to get out of

Sharpdart being a skill makes it not exactly equivalent

[hoary tulip]

but yeah also I kinda like that Skong doesn't give you a Souls roll for free?

[inland wave]

Shade Cloak kind of dominated the game, Shade Cloak and Pogo Hop and all is fine

[hoary tulip]

like

positioning and spacing actually matter

[inland wave]

Hornet just has to move

( or use the ||Silk Parry||, or chance parry-mashing and not getting Hitbox'd )

That one at the start of ||Act 3|| is mean though

I'm imagine much worse for folks who don't like the Hunter Crest

the Wanderer Clan broken upon the rocks

[tawdry thunder]

we live on!

though i admit i did use hunter for a majority of act 3, i ended up wandering back to wanderer once i got close to the end

[inland wave]

I bounced around but ended on Hunter because it felt.. idk

Lore Appropriate

also just fond

[tawdry thunder]

the ||eva boost to damage|| was also quite nice.

but yeah its vibes for me, too. wanderer + longclaw just matches my playstyle very nicely

i like to go apeshit

.... but not so apeshit to justify using beast

im not sure i ever got that one

[thick urchin]

BEAST MODE

[tawdry thunder]

"got" as in comprehend

[inland wave]

that pogo is.. rough

and I feel like ||Witch|| was just kind of a more fun version of the bind

[thick urchin]

It takes a bit. "You have a side dash pogo on down input" is the easy part, "You need to have enemies around to heal, and they have to survive 3 boosted hits to get full healing" is the harder one.

[inland wave]

especially with the ||Trobbio x2Combo and Bind Extender||

[tawdry thunder]

the heal is what got me lol. it was very fun to use otherwise but i just dont play that way

not brave enough!

i like burst but i like a safe burst

[inland wave]

I fell off ||Witch|| just because so many enemies are too mobile to get a damn heal unless you stun them

[thick urchin]

After awhile, you start to look for opportunities. "I have my charge, but this enemy only has one hit left- finish him and get ready to heal just before the next one."

and sometimes there's enemies that respawn on room transition, that you can farm for a full heal, even if it's slow.

[inland wave]

Yeah for general traversal, it's fun to just devour a couple folks but the bosses just start bouncing so much

[thick urchin]

Ironically, bosses are where Beast mode shines.

[inland wave]

It does seem ideal

[tawdry thunder]

early on i saw a video of someone heal tanking a boss with beast crest and was pretty impressed

[green bone]

It's such a weird change but I honestly love it

[thick urchin]

There's also the "I'm a flying melee enemy now" playstyle.

[green bone]

It tends to reduce games to being about timing and nothing else

[hoary tulip]

I don't think Souls rolls are inherently evil

but like

I don't want every game to come down to timing my Don't Get Hit button

[tawdry thunder]

yeah i think i generally agree

[thick urchin]

And if you want it, isnt the Skuttlbraace a Soulsroll?

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/GzRbU4VXf-I More sawblades please...

[tawdry thunder]

god damn thats smooth

[proud cobalt]

Cool.

[safe yew]

||https://youtu.be/UAq9Af1Koj0|| spoilers for the alternate path to the citadel (this video being two tracks from said alternate path, back to back). christopher larkin cooks in general but imo he cooks especially hard with ||evil-ass organ music||

[inland wave]

Everything about ||Exhaust Organ|| goes crazy, lore to design to ost to bossfight.. the way it stitches those parts of the map together

[rotund magnet]

I hate this ||minigame ||so much.

||exhaust organ|| was the only redeemable thing in ||bilewater||

[inland wave]

The OST thouuuggh, but also im just pro-||bilewater|| in general

[hot mango]

Saaaame

||you can hate Deepnest all you want but you can’t deny how essential it is to Hollow Knight as a “screw the player specifically” area, and Bilewater serves that purpose well||

[inland wave]

Patstaresat is one of the few streamers I've seen go "Ogh that's hateful, this game rules" , instead of Increasing Annoyance

[elfin ravine]

I enjoyed exploring the area itself

it's purely the arena at the end that tilted me off the face of the earth

[hot mango]

Honestly? It didn’t annoy me that much

[proud cobalt]

Imo I’m just glad it doesn’t do damage when all your silk is gone.

[hot mango]

But it was also one of the last things I did in act 2 and I had some spoiler prep

[thick urchin]

I just got caught by the jailer in BILEWATER

[elfin ravine]

There is one there too, yeah

[thick urchin]

Man, going from beast crest to Hunter when getting my stuff back... Binding takes FOREVER.

[proud cobalt]

A wild Beast Crest user.

[rose granite]

I do suppose most beasts are wild

Unless they're savage

[thick urchin]

Just a pup. I've been learning how to Beast in ||Sinner's Road/Bilewater|| Act 1.

[proud cobalt]

Fair enough.

The fellow I watch is too deep into Reaper, they struggle with anything else.

[thick urchin]

Beast platforming. "So what can I Pogo with the TOP of my hitbox?"

[proud cobalt]

That’s good to know.

[dreamy scarab]

act 3: what do you meeeean ||there's a whole area east of Far Fields that I missed||??? is this some kind of ||Farther Fields??||

[modern fossil]

Yes lol, if it makes you feel better you needed to get to act 3 to reach it

[wanton bone]

I wonder if there's a scuttlebrace skip for that.

[modern fossil]

Hmmm maybe? I think it's too high and there's no way to get extra height in that room

[wanton bone]

Might also have been tagged with the "do not open until act 3"

[south marten]

It's still ||Far Fields||, although the way to reach it is a little convoluted.

[dreamy scarab]

alright, having now done the ||Festival of the Flea|| in one sitting without feeling like rage quitting, either I'm much better at this game than I thought or I don't understand all the salt

maybe it's my neurodivergence...

[south marten]

[Act 3] I'm personally not super happy with the placement of the ||heart bosses||, personally, other than ||Mr. Krabbs||.

• ||Karmelita is in Far Fields, but only accessible through Hunter's March||
• ||Nyleth is listed as being in the Shellwood despite being in an area that can only be accessed from the Underworks||
• ||Clover Dancers, and Verdania as a whole, are behind some random hidden exit to a room that doesn't show up until Act 3 and you don't get any indication that anything is there other than the vague idea that there's more map somewhere if you haven't gotten the map achievement yet.||

[vagrant spruce]

||do you have seth there? he can show up as a npc at the end of his quest line, and scores in the 90s for the minigames, and i think a lot of the salt is directed at beating HIS scores||

[south marten]

I didn't find ||Seth's scores|| too difficult to beat, other than ||Flea Dodge||, because holy shit that's an endurance test.

[elfin ravine]

it wasn't too bad
I just wasn't too keen on being stuck in the minigame dimension for a while

[dreamy scarab]

Oh, yeah, that would suck

[elfin ravine]

also I missed the Dodge score by 1 once, only to not get close again for several tries
and that did kinda annoy me for a little bit

[proud cobalt]

Oh, didn't know that.

[inland wave]

For me it's just ||Juggling||

If I could win 2/3 and get anything, hurray

but nawh stuck behind the devil's curse

And it's just.. not fun to try and try and try again

Tedious and RNG-laden

[south marten]

56 95 68, iirc

[rotund magnet]

fair thats one of the best themes in the game

[inland wave]

Greymoor really hits too in terms of the more ambient set, just 'Oh, oh this place is dying'

The grand fields, food for all

[thick urchin]

"moor" literally means swamp.

I found it hilarius when I realized the crows used Flappybird Physics

[thorny bear]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ab0MYoe1w5k

ok so the main appeal of the video is "wow crazy glitches, it's neat you can beat the game so fast"

but it's crazy to me that there's A THIRD LACE LOCATION

[brave flower]

WHAT THE FUCK IS THIIIIIS

[haughty zodiac]

Forgot to mention it here, but I beat ||Tormented Trobbio|| a while ago. Finally figured out his patterns and 'random bullshit go' style of attack. Incidentally, I have fallen in love with the ||Shaman|| Crest.

[thorny bear]

in ||memorium, in case you go through bliewater and putrified ducts to the memorium entrance||

[brave flower]

i think thats the one in the citadel where she shows up and wakes up the enemies

[thorny bear]

yeah

[south marten]

Fuckin how?

[thorny bear]

there's an alternate entrance to ||ducts in memorium||

[brave flower]

noclip, apparently

[thorny bear]

it honestly never occurred to me that you could go the other way

[thick urchin]

Somehow loading GMS in a map with sawblades. Really showing GMS how the White King raised her.

[south marten]

Yeah but you need to get into ||Ducts|| from ||Bilewater||, which doesn't have an entrance that direction

At least not until you open it

[brave flower]

it does with noclip

[south marten]

No no no

I get that

[brave flower]

at this point im pretty sure team cherry planned ahead for speedrunners to accomplish Shit Like This

[thorny bear]

doesn't it?

[autumn kettle]

nope!

[thorny bear]

isn't that the entire point of Groal

[autumn kettle]

nope!

||the point of groal is TE progress with the soul he's guarding||

[thick urchin]

"Speedrunners broke through the Windwaker barrier. Dont assume any of our invisible walls are safe."

[south marten]

But why would there be a trigger there when you need to go through ||Sinner's|| to get there, and she's at the start of it?

[brave flower]

and were like "ok JUST IN CASE speedrunners find a way to break this we need lace to be able to be there to turn on the enemies"

[autumn kettle]

||the entrance to ducts with him is blocked off from the other side||

||you just have access to the apostate key/huntress room||

[haughty zodiac]

Didn't someone discover a way to get into ||Wisps|| without triggering Lace? And that connects to ||Underworks||.

[thorny bear]

ah, so it's an "if you wander into this while exploring you get absolutely nothing for your last three hours, fool, this won't be useful for another act" situation

[inland wave]

there are FLEAS TO SAVE

[south marten]

||Apostate Key and Huntress|| are still a thing

[autumn kettle]

no, it's a "you get two very useful items and main story progress"

[inland wave]

and you get to ||fight a big frog||

[autumn kettle]

"but you don't know what the key item is for yet"

[thorny bear]

i thought we were just saying groal doesn't unlock apostate key

[autumn kettle]

????

no

you asked

if there was an entrance to ducts proper

to which the answer was "no, you only get access to ||the apostate key and huntress room||"

[thorny bear]

ohh, groal unlocks the portion of ducts with the key, but not the rest of the ducts?

[south marten]

You can get to specifically those two things in ||Ducts||

[autumn kettle]

yes

[south marten]

But nothing else

[thorny bear]

alright

[south marten]

You can't get to the rest of the area

[haughty zodiac]

Hypothetically, could you get to ||Memorium|| without previously encountering Lace via the ||Faydown Cloak Clawlineless Skip||, and then use that to perform the ||Act 1 Wisp Thicket Skip||? That would get you to ||Underworks|| without encountering Lace - might be a way to go up from there to ||Memorium||?

@south marten

[south marten]

I mean, theoretically, maybe?

[hot mango]

Okay, I know for a fact unlocked ||the entirety of the Ducts without once so much as knowing Groal exists||

||So Bilewater has nothing to do with Ducts in terms of access sans a shortcut||

[autumn kettle]

yes, we've established that

it's also ||not a shortcut||

[hot mango]

Okay I was reading back and double taking but wasn’t sure

[autumn kettle]

||except from ducts to bilewater||

[hot mango]

||That sounds like a shortcut to me, knowing Bilewater||

[autumn kettle]

or, no, that's what you meant

[hot mango]

Guys… the Lancer discord just keeps feeling more and more befitting for Silksong Discussion || #lancer-general message||

[thorny bear]

resisting the urge to ping reply that message asking what it has to do with silksong

[green bone]

Just obtained ||Pristine Core||

[green bone]

The parkouring section above ||the GMS arena|| might actually be worse than Path of Pain

[vernal stone]

It's tricky but the sequences between checkpoints are shorter

[hot mango]

||Last Judge explodes in an act of devastating death throes. That feature of the Morningstar, an iconic third party NPC all about exploding into massive death throes, is named Last Judgement||

[hidden flame]

Does not that boss use a censer as an *ahem* Morning Star, as well?

[south marten]

At least you only have to do it once before you unlock a shortcut around 90% of it

[green bone]

Does anyone what you are supposed to do with these guys?

[tacit wadi]

Hit them for their rosaries

[rose granite]

Huh, never seen them before.

Neat!

Assuming this isn't a lie ;p.

[hot mango]

That’s absolutely a fake screenshot

Still fun but it make me jump

[south marten]

Dream nail them to enter the Godmaster DLC

[green bone]

You just got silkposted by a smooth criminal

[safe yew]

employ the nuu three-step method:

• cut them with your blade
• cut them with your mature spirit
• cut them with your savage adult heart

[rose granite]

Neat!

[autumn kettle]

hi i need help

my gurr the outcast looks weird

[hoary tulip]

she has never known defeat

[elfin ravine]

call for Let Me Solo Her

[green bone]

Im geniunely gonna cry act 3

[hoary tulip]

oof

[south marten]

That's rough

[green bone]

(I have gone slightly further before which makes it even annoying)

[elfin ravine]

that climb is rough, yeah

[green bone]

it's the bloody of column of ||bugs you need to pogo off that annoys me, I end up overshooting and slamming into the bug above the next one which kills my flow||

[south marten]

Reaper helps, your hitbox is big enough that you can double pogo

Uhhh

Hurtbox?

Whatever, I don't remember the distinction

[green bone]

It's the dounle pogo of hitting two at the same time that really throws me

[fluid star]

The column is pretty much the ||end of the route|| so just tank through it.

[green bone]

I should get the permanent wall cling tool but I got such a sweet bench right here

[rose granite]

Wanderer helps with that one in that the pogo is shorter I found, but mostly it's finding a rhythm for it.

You'll get it eventually, and after that it's just the same gimmick the entire area has already done a bunch.

[rose granite]

Yes you should :p.

[tall night]

Woaggg just fought the || first sinner|| first boss to actually kill me a solid number (more than 5 at least) in a while. And very very fun

The teleporting really made me dash happy and I was just crashing into it, tho this and ||trobbio|| felt so good like yeah if I get HIT sure take 2 masks idk but if I just fall into them 1 is fine thank you

[tawdry thunder]

||first sinner|| is a banger fight, one of my favorites

main reason i want a boss rush mode is so that i can accurately rank these fights

[tawdry thunder]

i genuinely found this area to be fun to navigate. it was cool how ||the game makes you kind of stretch your platforming muscles well outside your comfort zone, ie making you clawline THEN jump||

[tall night]

The hornet journal entry after the ||garmond and Zaza|| fight 😭

She's just like ||man I love this guy but he's cooked||

ACT 2 - Is there a specific way to trigger meeting thr ||green prince|| I've been down in that little room a trillion times and I ||unlocked his Cage before the dancer fight||

[dreamy scarab]

I just stumbled on it ||even though I met him after the dancer fight, he just showed up in that arena to say "oh, well, I guess that's already done"||

[tall night]

Haven't seen carapace nor claw of him since sinners road. Its been sort of annoying really

[inland wave]

Tbf he told you not to open the door

[tall night]

True lol

[inland wave]

A rare character that seems to dislike Hornet

[tall night]

This is why /j

[south marten]

I think you need to ||reawaken Twelfth Sentinel||

[hot mango]

My assessment of the Silksong community at this point in the game’s release cycle, poison swamp side area spoilers- ||everyone loves Phantom and that is unanimous||

||Either their lore, their design, their fight, the exhaust organ, the mists, the ost of any of those three things, their route being good for speed in speedruns, their reward, how secret they are- everyone loves something about Phantom||

[tall night]

Their voice 😭

[hot mango]

Their gender

[tall night]

I thought people were exaggerating with ||groal|| but no it sucks

[inland wave]

I think that's why they gave him a silly little grin

He knows he's bastard

[south marten]

Genuinely, get ||bombs and flies||, then sit in the goop. His attacks can't reach the bottom right of the arena, and ||he eats the bombs when he does the succ||.

Poison for a little extra damage

[tall night]

I beat him a Lil bit ago but ty I cant even imagine it without stumbling upon the closer bench

[rose granite]

Yeah, it's a toughie

[umbral canyon]

||https://youtu.be/BEMN5U4QpnM?si=AVNHWxjh5IGVYewT||

[tall night]

Ok lol ||shakra|| hard too

Im getting speed blitzed

[tall night]

i wonder if elder hu was from her tribe, they have the same triple ring uberblast

[thorny bear]

that's...a very good question

[fervent sand]

||she's a rough fight but I find her enjoyable. Even when you get a chance she's prepared for you||

[south marten]

I mean...

There are definitely similarities

[thick urchin]

Speaking of ||Phantom||, I'm finally through ||Bilewater|| and into Act 2. Tried a few times to get the first jump of Mt Fay Early, but it's just too much for me.

[tall night]

so i heard that in other peoples games that ||the liittle fireplace pilgrim gets killed by a bone tyrant but in my game that never happened he dissapeared and i thought it was just over, but i met him at the farfields shop i guess he went on his pilgrimage i was so happy||

[thick urchin]

It happens after you ||take a quest to kill a bone tyrant. Later an, another bone tyrant destroys the starting village, and one of the pilgrums dies, and there's a funeral and everything.||

[hot mango]

You know, k was turning it over in my head…

There are a grand total of 4 bosses in the game with actual bad runbacks that I can think of (technically only act 2 spoilers, but like tail end act 2): ||Last Judge, Groal, Forebrothers, and technically- by going off of the amount of rooms to traverse with actual challenges- Widow.|| and major act 3 spoilers ||I guess you could also count Clover Dancers with that logic, making it 5||

[tall night]

||yeah i killed the bone tyrant really late, pilby left and i found the same pilgrim at morts shop in far fields he talked about his journey||

[thick urchin]

Widow's runback isnt bad.|| jump over the elevator and walljump to the shortcut, then dash through.||

[hot mango]

||Yeha it isn’t literally bad, I was just going off the metric of “how many room transitions are between your respawn and the boss?”||

||Hence the technically||

[tall night]

i found ||conchfly 2 ||runback to be pretty annoying even with the shortcut, which is crazy cuz tlj was not that bad to me

[hot mango]

Most bosses honestly have their respawn points like. One room over.

[hot mango]

I did consider both the 1 and 2 versions of that boss- they seemed like bad runbacks.

[thick urchin]

IIRC, it's ||bench room with wall climb, the sprint through shortcut room, a 2 second room to fall through the floor, and falling into Widows arena||.

[hot mango]

The runbacks didn’t bother me all that much, I’m just trying to identify- based on the bosses that have received runback complaints- what other bosses have similar runbacks, and why do they avoid criticism? Or if the number is small, why did these few pain points ruin the other reputations?

[umbral canyon]

||raging conchfly|| was kinda tedious imo, but not difficult

[thick urchin]

Beastfly runback was worse than Widow. ||drop to chapel level, there's a tight runjump-dash to clear the trap and guard, dont overshoot the updraft, into the chapel, DO dashjump into the updraft, and face the boss.||

Phantom runback is ||a lot of walljumps and dodging timed hostile terrain to pick up +6 bars of silk before the fight||

[umbral canyon]

If you count gauntlets, ||karmelita|| actually has a fairly involved runback

But it's a fun fight all the way through, gauntlet included, so no complaints from me