One little bug has broken Hollow Knight: Silksong speedrunning wide open with the ability to fly through the game as an unkillable god

Silksong's Infinite Silk Glitch Discovered - YouTube

Hollow Knight: Silksong continues to get picked apart as players try to find every little secret Team Cherry hid inside of it over the course of its long development. That also includes the things it probably didn't intend to be in there, like glitches.

YouTube user Kilroy Was Here has returned with another glitch that changes protagonist Hornet's life forever. After locking her in jail and smacking one of its toughest bosses to death, Kilroy found a new trick that untethers her from the constraints of gravity and the physical world.

Silkeaters are little grubs you can crush to retrieve the stuff you leave behind when you die in Silksong. They're usually just a convenient way to replenish your silk—which is used for healing and special attacks—without having to get back to where you fell. But Wuffie, a user on the speedrunning Discord, discovered that popping a silkeater in the middle of an animation at the end of a boss fight causes something very strange to happen.

Although it might look like Hornet is still mid-stab on the boss, using the bug at that exact moment will create a second, cooler Hornet who can move around, fly, and pass through walls. Wuffie was using cheats to get it to work, but Kilroy pulled it off on the final boss in Act 2 with no help.

You'd think having the ability to fly anywhere would be glorious, but the glitch is more finicky in practice. Hornet sometimes uncontrollably floats up or down and she can't interact with anything in the world unless she's standing on the ground like normal. But being able to do it early in the game on a few specific bosses means there could be a ton of different ways to utilize it for skipping locations or sequence breaking to get items early. It's basically a speedrunner's dream.

Kilroy played around for a bit and realized the only way to get Hornet back onto solid ground is to nudge her into a ledge so that she grabs it as if she was jumping toward it normally. You lose the ability to fly and clip through barriers, but you gain the ability to have more silk than is usually possible. For whatever reason, Hornet's silk meter is endless in this state and you can attack enemies to fill it up as much as you want.

As long as you're quick to heal when you need it, having infinite silk breaks the game. No boss can kill you when you're so silk rich that you can spam special attacks and heal whenever you feel like it. "Now it takes a long time to set up … but if you do this on a Steel Soul run or something, I can guarantee you that with enough set up you won't die ever," Kilroy says, referring to the mode in the game where it's game over after a single death.

While they find the infinite silk fun to play with, Kilroy says they plan on seeing how far they can fly through Pharloom in the near future. The current world record for a glitched speedrun is a little over 10 minutes. As long as this new grub glitch is allowed, I could see that time going down even lower, maybe below five minutes.

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Tyler has covered videogames and PC hardware for 15 years. He regularly spends time playing and reporting on games like Diablo 4, Elden Ring, Overwatch 2, and Final Fantasy 14. While his specialty is in action RPGs and MMOs, he's driven to cover all sorts of games whether they're broken, beautiful, or bizarre.

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