5 mods to make Hollow Knight Silksong better, but not easier

We all waited 8 long years for Hollow Knight: Silksong to finally arrive, and it's genuinely a perfect sequel that builds on the first game's success, learns from it, and gives us more of the same, but better. In the meantime, however, the community didn't just sit on its hands and wait (although there was a lot of that involved as well). Instead, Hollow Knight became supported with mods by the truckload, with some of them capable of transforming our entire experience of the first game.

So, a week after Silksong drops, it's great to see that the modding community has kicked into high gear already, developing all sorts of customizations to tinker with the experience of playing Team Cherry's sequel. Still, a lot of them are aimed at making the game easier, which sort of beats the point. I've found that it's far better to simply find some mods that make the game better vis-à-vis flow and quality-of-life, while still keeping the challenge of each boss fight and area intact.

5 Silksong Death Counter is... pretty self-explanatory

Adding a wall-of-shame element to the HUD

A count of shame if there ever was one, the Silksong Death Counter mod is quite self-explanatory. It keeps count of how many times Hornet has bitten the dust, and keeps a permanent display of said count. If you want per-game stats, this mod provides them, and it also provides per-run stats if you need them.

The best part? You can reset it if you want the exact number of times you've died at the hands of a boss with a simple hotkey. In its latest update, the Death Counter mod has become even more impressive, seeing how it posts the number of deaths per save on your save file itself while in the Load menu. You can also position this counter anywhere on the screen, should you want that death count closer to your face, so you can feel the shame of repeated reloads better.

4 Stakes of Marika is a checkpoint QoL mod everyone needs

No more run-backs a-la Demon's Souls

While it's the Benchwarp mod 2017's Hollow Knight that acts like the Stakes of Marika mechanic from Elden Ring, where you can effectively just take your benches or checkpoints with you wherever you go, Hollow Knight: Silksong's mod of a similar nature is much more direct in its name.

What this mod does is actually pretty simple. This isn't an 'easy difficulty mod'. Instead, it just makes it so that you respawn right beside the entrance to the last room you died in, as opposed to respawning at the last bench you unlocked, and then having to come all the way back to where you died. Considering just how many times you're going to be seeing that game over screen and reloading to the last bench in a brutally-punishing game like Silksong, this is a quality-of-life mod rather than a cheat, and just makes the overall flow incredibly smoother.

3 Teleport is pretty much just a quick-load function when you need one

There are plenty of choices in here to tweak as you please

Random Teleport is one of my favorite mods from the first game, and while the base game's mod is more about randomly throwing you across the map in two-minute intervals, this is simpler. Much like a portal, this mod lets you put down a checkpoint absolutely anywhere you are. So, the next time you get lost or get derailed after seeing five branching paths too many, the Teleport mod brings you right back to the place you dropped your portal at.

It does much more than that, too. Another hotkey can get you back to your last bench if you want, in case you feel like modifying your Charm build before getting back in stride. The best part about this mod is how it allows complete controller customization and shortcuts, too, which means I don't have to keep leaning in to hit hotkeys on my keyboard before picking the game back up again.

2 Always Have Magnet Effect fixes what feels like a dev oversight

It frees up a yellow charm slot while having rosaries float towards you

You know that feeling when you watch a YouTube Short or Instagram Reel while a Subway Surfers clip plays on half the screen? The secret satisfaction you get when the guy picks up a magnet to make all the coins float towards him for a few seconds? The Always Have Magnet Effect mod for Silksong is exactly that, except that Hornet will always get shards and rosaries float towards her.

Now, in the regular non-modded game, you'd have to have the Magnetite Brooch yellow charm equipped for this, and that only works for rosaries. This mod removes the need to keep that charm equipped, and it also works for shards. Now, I can finally have the Sprint Speed charm and the compass charm equipped, since equipping those two with the Magnet charm isn't possible in the main game. A quality-of-life feature since it feels like an oversight from the devs, the Always Have Magnet Effect is genuinely a nice-to-have mod. Plus, if you only want it to work on either rosaries or shards, you can easily do that, too, which spoils you for choice.

1 AutoMap updates the map as you move through it

Better flowing, but never easier

When I said I'm trying to make Hollow Knight: Silksong better but not easier, this kind of mod is exactly what I meant. Automap by WheresWolfgang over on NexusMods makes sure that you still have to go through the process of getting a map for each new area in the game. In the base game, to unlock the area of a map, you have to do three things — purchase a quill, purchase an area's map, and then rest at a bench for the map to update itself.

The Automap mod changes only the last part. You still have to make the two purchases, but this time, the map updates as you move through that area, making for a dynamic map screen where you update it as you go through it. It won't update for areas you haven't bought a map piece for, either, making sure that the effort stays the same, but the experience becomes smoother and better to live with.

Released September 4, 2025

ESRB Everyone 10+ / Fantasy Violence, Mild Blood

Developer(s) Team Cherry

Publisher(s) Team Cherry

These mods don't make me feel bad about using them

At the end of the day, mods like these don't make Silksong a walk in the park. Instead, they make the whole journey smoother, smarter, and a lot more rewarding without undermining the challenge that makes this series so beloved.

There is no trumping Team Cherry's original design philosophy, so these mods respect that balance while fixing only a few annoyances here and there without changing the experience in any way or form vis-à-vis difficulty. If I'm going to be putting another 30-odd hours over the next long weerkend into Hornet's adventure, I might as well do it with tools that refine the flow, instead of dulling the edge of the game.