When Something Looks Wrong

Foundations · everyone. The 90-second triage. Nine times in ten the answer is one of three things — this page is those three. The deep cases live in Troubleshooting.

You'll be able to: find the cause of "it's not working" without guesswork, by asking three questions in order — and know when to stop here and open the full reference.

First, breathe — nothing's broken

Stitchwork never writes to your save and never edits a game file on disk. Whatever you're seeing, the worst case is a replacement didn't apply — not damage. You can't corrupt anything from here. So this isn't damage control; it's just finding which link in a short chain came loose.

The chain is: **Stitchwork running → pack loaded → pack enabled → the right asset on screen. ** Check it in that order, and you'll land on the break.

Question 1 — Is Stitchwork even running?

Look at the bottom-left corner. A small badge — the Status Overlay — means Stitchwork is alive. No badge, no Stitchwork, and nothing downstream can work.

The overwhelmingly common cause: the old Patchwork mod is also installed. Stitchwork is a fork of it; the two fight over sprite loading, so Stitchwork steps aside and goes inert with a notice on the main menu. Remove Patchwork.dll from BepInEx/plugins/ and it wakes up. (Using the Architect-Silksong editor? That doesn't need Patchwork and coexists fine — only a standalone Patchwork.dll trips this.)

If it's not Patchwork, it's almost always one of: BepInEx isn't installed (no BepInEx/core/BepInEx.dll), or the DLL is in the wrong place (it must sit one level under plugins/, e.g. plugins/StitchworkRoot/Stitchwork.dll — not loose in plugins/, not buried deeper).

The built-in second opinion: the Dev Hub Dashboard (key 2) opens with a health strip — a one-line boot self-check covering version pairing, install files, and internal bridges. All green means Stitchwork and your game version agree; a warning there, quoted in a report, usually answers the question before anyone opens a log.

Question 2 — Did the pack load, and is it ON?

Two different things, and people constantly miss the second one.

1. Loaded? The Status Overlay's pack count should include yours. If it doesn't, the pack folder is one level too high or too low — a pack must land as …/{author}-{pack}/Stitchwork/ (that Stitchwork/ subfolder is the part everyone forgets). See Installing Packs.
2. Enabled? Open the Pack Manager (click the overlay). New packs start off — by design; dropping one in shouldn't rewrite your game unasked. Toggle it on, then click Apply. Nothing happens until Apply. Stitchwork would rather do nothing than act on a half-made decision.

Question 3 — Are you looking at the right thing?

The pack's working; you're just not seeing it yet. Three flavours:

• Wrong frame. Animated characters only show your replacement when that frame is on screen. Replaced an attack pose? You won't see it standing still. Wait for the pose, or step to it in the Dev Hub's Animation tab.
• Wrong sprite system. Silksong draws 2D art two ways (tk2d vs Texture2D), and a file in the wrong system's folder simply isn't found. If a replacement won't take, try investigating: is it the other system? — see How Stitchwork Works.
• Wrong scene. If the pack has conditions, it only fires when the conditions are met, and sometimes it is scene-specific. Walk into the scene it targets — and confirm the scene name (the Status Overlay subtitle shows it) matches what the condition expects. See Conditional Activation.

The quick lookup

When to leave this page

If the three questions didn't crack it, the case is a real one — open Troubleshooting. It carries the edge cases (audio first-play quirks, off-screen windows, the known cosmetic limitations) and, at the bottom, how to file a bug report that can actually be acted on. The single most useful thing you can attach is BepInEx/LogOutput.log — without it, anyone helping you is guessing.

You can now triage a problem in the right order, fix the three common breaks yourself, and hand off a clean case when it's genuinely something deeper. Next: you've finished Module A — pick your module. Sprites → Starting a Skin Pack · Text → Text & Dialogue.