How this wiki works

Foundations · everyone · start here. What Stitchwork is, whether you need it, how to install it. Five minutes.

The wiki is built in modules. Module A — Foundations (the A- pages) is the shared groundwork: what Stitchwork is, install, the Pack Manager, how replacement works, and when things look wrong. After A, the modules are optional and self-contained — take the ones your work touches: B Sprites · C Text · D Audio · E Video. Reference holds the lookups.

Read all of Module A first — player or creator, no exceptions. A player who reads only A can install and manage packs and stop there. A creator reads A, then jumps to whichever module(s) they need, in any order. B–E are pick-and-choose; A is the part that isn't.

You'll be able to: install Stitchwork, confirm it's running, and know where to go next.

What Stitchwork is

Stitchwork swaps Silksong's art, sound, and text on the fly without touching the game files — it intercepts what the game loads and hands back a replacement. Remove it, and you're vanilla again, no trace.

Stitchwork is a humble fork of Patchwork by Ashiepaws — the framework that pioneered this for Silksong, and to which this project owes great gratitude. Packs are collections of custom assets made by creators, structured as folders of replacement files — a recoloured Hornet, custom title music, a rewritten dialogue line. Prior packs made for Patchwork load in Stitchwork unchanged. You may load many packs at once, toggle each one individually, and reorder which wins when two or more collide.

Who uses it

• Players install others' packs and live in the Pack Manager (lists and toggles packs).
• Creators make packs and live in the Dev Hub (a collection of tools for finding assets and previewing replacements).

Requirements

• Hollow Knight: Silksong. (Only tested on Windows platform)
• BepInEx 5 — the framework Silksong mods run on. Any other mod installed this already; if not, see the BepInEx setup guide (Troubleshooting has the link).
• A few hundred MB free for large skin packs.

No need for Unity Editor, nor programming knowledge, nor a separate game build. (We made sure the install process is easy and as dependency-free as possible)

Installing

The DLL file, the ASSETBUNDLE file, and the Lang/ folder go together in one folder under BepInEx/plugins/. The recommended name for a manual install is StitchworkRoot — deliberately not Stitchwork, so the install never gets confused with the Stitchwork/ subfolder that packs use.

1. Download the latest release (Thunderstore or the community link).
2. Extract — you get a folder with Stitchwork.dll, stitchwork.assetbundle, and Lang/.
3. Manual install: put it under BepInEx/plugins/ and name it StitchworkRoot:

   …/BepInEx/plugins/StitchworkRoot/Stitchwork.dll
   …/BepInEx/plugins/StitchworkRoot/stitchwork.assetbundle
   …/BepInEx/plugins/StitchworkRoot/Lang/
   

   (Thunderstore Mod Manager uses its own folder name — that's fine. Stitchwork finds itself wherever its DLL loads from, so the name is a tidiness recommendation, not a requirement.)
4. Keep one copy only. Upgrading? Replace the old files — a stray second Stitchwork.dll elsewhere only confuses things.
5. Launch the game.

Find a badge overlay bottom-left of your screen — the Status Overlay — seeing it means Stitchwork is alive.

First launch asks for one restart: Stitchwork enables a smoother-performance setting (incremental GC) that needs a single relaunch. One toast, one restart, never again.

Packs start OFF

A new pack is disabled until you enable it in the Pack Manager. Dropping one in shouldn't rewrite your game unasked.

Already using "Patchwork"?

Stitchwork is a fork of Patchwork, and the two can't run together (they fight over sprite loading). If Patchwork.dll is present, Stitchwork goes inert with a main-menu toast notification — remove Patchwork.dll to use Stitchwork.

From the Architect-Silksong editor? Architect does not need Patchwork and runs fine beside Stitchwork.

What now?

• Install a pack → Installing Packs
• Make a pack → Starting a Skin Pack, or the no-art-tools shortcut, Text & Dialogue
• Something's broken → Troubleshooting

Worth knowing

• Hot reload: save a PNG, see it in ~1s. (Only a new Stitchwork version needs a restart.)
• Quiet by design: packs activate on their own conditions; there's no in-world ON switch.
• Dev Hub is hidden — open it with the Hotkeys.
• Saves are safe: Stitchwork never writes any save data. Delete the Stitchwork components, and you're back to vanilla.

You can now install Stitchwork, confirm it's live, and pick your next page.