About Stitchwork

forked and maintained by FabulatorK

The short version

Stitchwork is a robust asset replacement mod and creator enhancement tool kit. (It helps with making skins and loading them.) It's a humble fork of Patchwork by Ashiepaws, whom this project owes great gratitude towards.
Most features in this project are built from prior feedbacks for Patchwork and collaborating with skin creators.

Install

• Mod manager: install from Thunderstore as usual.
• Manual: put Stitchwork.dll into BepInEx/plugins/. That's the whole install — since 0.8.1 the shader bundle and localization tables ride inside the DLL, albeit a restart might be required. (Companion files beside the DLL still work and take precedence if present.)

Patchwork by Ashiepaws

Patchwork pioneered live asset replacement for Hollow Knight: Silksong — sprites, audio, text, video, all swapped on the fly without touching a game file.
It defined a new granularity standard of asset replacement mods at a per-sprite level, this helps skins survive game updates better and more controls for artists over their work.
Stitchwork inherited its loading model, its pack idea, and its replace-don't-modify approach, and ideas from Ashiepaws continue to shape the roadmap to 1.0 and beyond.

Two behaviors follow from that lineage:

• Patchwork packs load unchanged. Stitchwork discovers Patchwork/ folders exactly as it discovers its own — a pack authored for the original framework needs no re-authoring.
• If Patchwork itself is installed, Stitchwork goes inert for the session rather than fight over the same game hooks.

As of version 0.8.4, old skin packs made for Customizer can be discovered by Stitchwork without moving from their existing install path (...\Hollow Knight Silksong\Hollow Knight Silksong_Data\Mods\Customizer), they are properly tagged with the "Customizer" badge.
In addition, Customizer skin packs downloaded into the BepInEx\plugins folder by mod manager can are recognized and they were the "wayward" badge in the Pack Manager GUI.

Where to report problems

Stitchwork is a separate project from Patchwork. Do not submit Stitchwork issues to Patchwork's GitHub page. Ashiepaws does not maintain this fork, and a report there does not reach us. Report Stitchwork problems through the Stitchwork channels: the community modding Discord, or a message on this Thunderstore page. Include your BepInEx/LogOutput.log — most problems are visible in it.

What the fork adds

On that foundation, Stitchwork builds out the creator toolset: the Dev Hub (find any asset by pointing at it in the game world), the animation console and onion-skin canvas workflow, per-clip animation art (Appliqué), the Pack Doctor, boot health checks, and interface localization.

New in 0.8.5

• Skins now work on macOS and Linux.
  Rotated sprites used to need a platform-specific shader, and where it was missing, art quietly failed to appear.
  That whole mechanism is gone — replaced by a drawing path that works on every graphics API by construction.
  Works out of the box for testers, no need to update configs.
• Your canvas edits are safe to recompile.
  The animation canvas now remembers what each frame looked like when it was extracted, and skips every frame you didn't touch.
  Reused frames can no longer overwrite work you did elsewhere, and anything it does replace is backed up first.
• Audio replacement sample rate mismatch now recorded in log for rectification.
  Replacing a Needolin melody could produce a strange periodic stutter — a tiny rewind every few seconds.
  The cause is a sample-rate mismatch, and Stitchwork now reports in the log, naming both rates and the fix.
  Match the vanilla rate of 44.1kHz, and the tape stops tugging.
• Smoother replaced cutscenes.
  Log writing now pauses while a cinematic plays and resumes when it ends. Every log line is a disk write, and during video playback that competed with the stream itself.
• World Pick improvements
  Particle renderer game objects are selectable now, and they are opt-in. In addition, picking any object now reports its full draw-order data. This helps users identify why is object X over object Y a lot more.
• Per-clip art (Appliqué) reports itself.
  The index line now says how many clip overrides were found and whether they came from a pack or your workspace.
• Better first-glance diagnostics.
  The install root is logged before anything else can fail, packs that ship deeper folder layouts are no longer mistaken for a different pack format, and the sprite editor now opens your file instead of a fresh copy when you use instance-specific folders.

Wiki

There is a wiki section on the mod page providing essential information with text only.
The promised bundle wiki pages will arrive before the end of August.
Since there are new features, wiki contents are being adjusted again.

Credits

Beyond its predecessor, Stitchwork is shaped by many hands:

• The skin creators and testers whose packs, bug reports, and screenshots drove nearly every fix and feature in this mod — the change history is, honestly, a conversation with them.
• The localization helpers: the Chinese terminology work that the in-game glossary and the wiki's zh pages are built on, and the German translation effort underway.
• Fellow toolmakers whose published work taught us techniques: dakusan (SilkDev — the world-pick projection approach), the DebugMod authors (cursor handling, and the pause workflow every creator uses), YLTai and CarrieForle (whose font mods shaped Stitchwork's font-handling boundaries), and Custom Knight Creator from the Hollow Knight era — the animation canvas's spiritual ancestor.
• The lineage before the lineage, inherited with Patchwork's own thanks: Douglas Gregory (the GPU performance work the tk2d sprite path is built on), RatherChaoticDev (Silksong Customizer, which Patchwork grew from), and Su4enka (CustomizerT2D, which shaped the T2D support Stitchwork extends).

Special thanks

• To MorningRain.
  For localization assists, feedbacks, and moral support.
  Check out their incredible Nightmare Hornet skin project here.

• To MeteoRa_ on Bilibili.
  They pushed the boundaries with the debug process and shaped experimental features, contributed greatly to the UI layout and mod icon design.
  They are working on a Second Sentinel skin and a Lies of P inspired skin.

• To InkBlight(三只墨荒) on Bilibili, whose Lace skin pack and Night Heron asset pack replacing the Moorbugs.
  They helped improved the T2D support features of Stitchwork significantly with valuable findings and reports.

• To Snek, who offered contribution to technical documentation and localization of Stitchwork's wiki pack into the German language.