Testing With Savestates (DebugMod)

Advanced reading for Text and Dialogue — though it applies to any replacement you want to test at a specific game moment.

Some of what you'll want to replace only happens once. The first time you talk to an NPC, a unique greeting plays; talk again and you get the repeat line from then on. So how do you check that your replacement of that first line reads right — without starting a brand-new save every time?

The answer isn't a Stitchwork feature. It's a companion mod, and it's the better tool for the job.

DebugMod's Save State

DebugMod (the practice/debug mod from the Hollow Knight speedrunning lineage, on Thunderstore for Silksong) has a Save State feature: it captures the entire game state at a moment — your position, the scene, and your save data — and restores it instantly, as many times as you like.

That is exactly the tool for iterating on one-time content.

The workflow

1. Walk up to the NPC, but don't talk yet.
2. Save a state (DebugMod).
3. Talk to the NPC. The dialogue keys appear in Dev Hub → Text as the game requests each line.
4. Edit the line in the Stitchwork dialogue editor and hit Save.
5. Restore the state (DebugMod). You're back to just before the conversation — which now plays its first-time dialogue again.
6. Talk again. Your edited line plays in its real first-time context.
7. Not happy? Edit, restore, repeat. Seconds per loop, instead of a fresh save each time.

Why it works even when the flag editor shows nothing

Stitchwork's flag editor tracks PlayerData — the game's saved variables. Many conversations record their progress there, and the editor shows it. But some don't: a chunk of dialogue is sequenced by an internal FSM (the game's state-machine logic) that never touches PlayerData. For those, the flag editor has nothing to show — there is no saved flag to watch or rewind.

Savestates don't care how the dialogue is driven. They snapshot the whole moment, FSM state and all, so restoring drops you back exactly where you were either way. Where the flag editor can't reach, the savestate can — you never have to understand what advances the line, you just snapshot the spot and return to it.

It composes cleanly with Stitchwork

Restoring a savestate loads the scene, and a scene load is exactly when Stitchwork re-applies its replacements. So your edited sprites, audio, and text are all live again the instant you restore — nothing extra to do.

The two mods stay in their lanes: DebugMod moves you through game state, Stitchwork replaces the assets. Install both — they don't conflict (Stitchwork even mirrors DebugMod's cursor-visibility behaviour so windows from both play nicely).

Image needed: DebugMod's savestate panel beside the Stitchwork Text tab, mid-edit, showing a first-time NPC line about to be re-tested.