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 from Thunderstore with r2modman or Gale. BepInEx is pulled in automatically as a dependency — nothing else to do.

By hand.

1. Install BepInEx 5 for Silksong — extract it, then copy the contents of the BepInExPack folder next to Hollow Knight Silksong.exe.
2. Run the game once so BepInEx creates its folders, then quit.
3. Drop SilksongTweaks.dll into BepInEx/plugins/.
4. 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.

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 <Die>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 "<ManagedDir>" '^PlayerData$' 'health'
dotnet run --project tools/ApiInspector -- xref "<ManagedDir>" '^maxHealth$'

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.

Changelog

1.0.0

First release. Four tweaks in one panel, opened with F8 or the Back/View button on a controller.

• Return to death spot — travel back to where you died after respawning, on a cancellable countdown
• Keep rosaries — dying twice no longer destroys your first cocoon
• Max masks — raise maximum health from 1 to 20
• Damage taken — scale incoming damage, from invulnerable to harder than vanilla

Every tweak reports whether it actually hooked the game and when it last did something, so a tweak that silently stopped working after a game update is visible rather than invisible.

Your save file is never written to. Max health works by intercepting the game's reads, so uninstalling leaves a vanilla save with nothing to undo.