SilksongTweaks
Return to where you died, never permanently lose rosaries, set max masks and damage taken. One panel, gamepad friendly, shows whether each tweak is actually working.
About this mod Author’s original text
Silksong Tweaks
Four quality-of-life tweaks for Hollow Knight: Silksong, in one mod with one panel.
Press F8 in game. Everything applies instantly.
- Return to death spot — after respawning at a bench, travel back to where you died, on a
cancellable countdown
- Keep rosaries — dying twice no longer destroys your first cocoon
- Max masks — raise Hornet's maximum health (1–20)
- Damage taken — scale incoming damage, from invulnerable to harder than vanilla
👉 Full usage guide
Install
With a mod manager (easiest). Install with r2modman or Gale. BepInEx is
pulled in automatically as a dependency — nothing else to do.
By hand.
- Install BepInEx 5 for Silksong
— extract it, then copy the contents of the BepInExPack folder next to
Hollow Knight Silksong.exe.
- Run the game once so BepInEx creates its folders, then quit.
- Drop SilksongTweaks.dll into BepInEx/plugins.
- Launch and press F8.
Uninstall: delete SilksongTweaks.dll. Nothing else is touched.
Why another mod?
Because you cannot tell whether the others are working.
The mods this replaces will happily report that they loaded and then do nothing at all — and
from the outside, a working mod and a silently broken one look identical. This mod shows a
status per tweak: whether it hooked the game, and when it last actually did something.
| Badge | Meaning |
|---|---|
| ACTIVE · fired 12s ago | Working, and it has done something |
| ACTIVE · not yet fired | Hooked, not yet triggered |
| OFF | You switched it off |
| UNAVAILABLE · | Could not hook the game, and why |
A game update that breaks one tweak leaves the other three running, and says so.
Design notes
- Your save file is never written to. Max health works by intercepting the game's reads,
never by storing a new value. Uninstalling leaves a vanilla save with nothing to undo.
- Nothing hooks compiler-generated code. Iterator state machines like d__1101 carry
numbers the compiler regenerates on every build, so hooking them breaks silently on any game
patch. Every hook targets a stable, named method.
- One source of truth for hook targets. HookTargets.cs is consumed by both the runtime and
a test that reads your installed Assembly-CSharp.dll and fails if any target has moved.
Run it after a Silksong update and it names what broke.
- Disabling never un-patches. Patches stay installed and short-circuit on a boolean, because
runtime un-patching is a known source of instability.
Building
Requires the.NET SDK. The game supplies the reference assemblies.
dotnet build src/SilksongTweaks -c Release
dotnet test tests/SilksongTweaks.Tests
If Silksong is not at the default path:
dotnet build src/SilksongTweaks -c Release -p:GameDir="D:\path\to\Hollow Knight Silksong"
tools/ApiInspector reads the game assembly without running it, for finding hook targets:
dotnet run --project tools/ApiInspector -- dump "" '^PlayerData$' 'health'
dotnet run --project tools/ApiInspector -- xref "" '^maxHealth$'
Credits
Silksong Tweaks is an independent implementation, written against the game's own API. None
of the mods below were decompiled and none of their code is used. They came first, they proved
these ideas were worth having, and they deserve the credit for them:
- Xiaohai (XiaohaiMod)
— ReBack, for returning to the death location
- BlueRaja
— rosaries never permanently lost, for merging death cocoons
- Ericky1694
— CustomDifficulty, for health and damage tuning
Built on BepInEx and
HarmonyX. Not affiliated with Team Cherry.
Licence
MIT.
Install & use Install: BepInEx plugin
- The archive from playbuff is the mod itself — usually a BepInEx plugin (a .dll or a plugin folder once unzipped).
- Recommended: use a community mod manager (such as r2modman) — pick this game, import the mod, and the manager sets up BepInEx and its dependencies for you.
- Manual route: install the BepInEx loader in the game folder, then drop the unzipped .dll or plugin folder into BepInEx/plugins/.
- Launch the game — the BepInEx console logs every plugin it loads; seeing this mod in the log means it is installed.
Mods with listed dependencies need those installed too, or they will not load. Options are usually changed in-game or in the plugin's config file.
Install these first, or the mod will not work: