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Silksong conceptual food design

At last, it is time. So this post is going to be different from my Hollow Knight one as I drew way more stuff this time around. I was ecstatic when I found out that Silksong had food related worldbuilding in it. I was really grasping at straws with the Hollow Knight one, so I’m glad I have much more to work with here! >:)

In the past year I’ve learned way more about agriculture and food production. Previously, I was very reliant on Greenpath (I also regret not making proper use of Fungal Wastes)—however, Silksong also has way more varied and “nature-rich” regions which allowed me to spread out crops and resources over different areas. I’ll likely be making another post at some point that’ll go more into depth about my field research since I took over 200 in-game screenshots of plants and such…and then learned how to rip game files so I could get the raw spites.

Also bc I got questions about this with my last hk food concepts piece, if you want to use any of the ideas here for personal projects, fanwork, etc—go ahead. You don’t need my permission, the world is your oyster

But anyway, my commentary regarding the art will be under the cut since this is already getting pretty long.

Spices, Herbs, and Seasoning

Man I didn’t even come up with unique names for like 90% of this. Okay so this section probably takes the most inspiration from in-game environment sprites out of any of the agricultural sections. Thyme, tarragon, rosemary, sage, chamomile, white plum blossoms, the red pea flower, sumac, and of course clovers all are based on my silksong field journal. I added a new blossom to the nectar flower section, the purple ones are more rare but you can harvest saffron from them. The white ones come with plums and nectar. Vanilla blossoms are rare but chamomile is plentiful, it blends in with the white rose-like flowers that are all over Shellwood. The red flowers are called “pea plants” by the game files so i kept that part of the name. But the seeds are a stand-in for allspice. I haven’t decided on what to do with the leaves/main body. Coral stars are based on star anise—peppercorns, cloves, chives, and coriander are just that. I finished this section ages ago, I’ve just been procrastinating on every other section.

Fruit

A lot of these are inspired by either in-game environmental sprites and/or real life fruits. Mossberries and silk fruit are obviously in game, but everything else is made up. So quick rundown:

ice apple → ice fruit, cloudberry → puffberry (I had also called it “powderberry” in my notes), jackfruit → mega-mossfruit, durian → spikefruit, Yang Mei → coral plum, miracle berries → rosary berries, mangosteen → crustfruit, rattan fruit → oocula, sugar apple → plated sugar apple. I didn’t change the name for the Kaffir Lime because I got lazy. My, uh, design for the rattan fruit may have been inspired by the Ooca, tit fruit.

The coral plums were still called yangmei up until like the last second, I truly had no creativity left. The lotus fruit probably should’ve been in this section but reorganizing these pages is a nightmare.

Vegetables, Roots, Yams

The spiral sprouts, moss artichoke, abyss root, lotus fruit, and cotton puffs were influenced by environmental spirits I screenshotted while doing field research. I would’ve just combined this section with the fruits but these pieces are so crowded and convoluted, it would’ve been a mess.

I don’t know where the Silk Squash or Lufta’s names came from, squashes all look so similar that it’s impossible for me to figure out what I based them on. Those may very well have been their actual name but google is not helping me here. Celtuse is the original name but the coloration is different. Lotus root, lotus fruit, oca, mashua, and the bamboo shoots didn’t get special names. As for the others: black radish → void radish, black carrot → void carrot, scorzonera → abyss root, winged bean → verdania bean, cardoon → cotton puff, fiddlehead → spiral sprout, samphire → asparagus, crosne/chinese artichoke → artichoke root

Mushrooms (Bilelands)

There wasn’t enough here to fill a full page so I vertical-ized it. Get condensed fool. Anyway, I got lazy here after the Paper Mushrooms. These are all based on real mushrooms (minus the aforementioned paper mushrooms which are based on environmental sprites), I didn’t really do any research on their habitats or anything (morels probably shouldn’t be here). So this section isn’t super high effort compared to the others. Also I combined Sinner’s Road, Bilewater, and Putrified Ducts together for the Bilelands, since that’s how Vog refers to them.

Extras (+ baking soda)

I’m now going to subject you to my algae farming agenda.

Algae is a super underrated resource, in real life where we have sunlight and large swaths of land for agriculture, its usefulness is less so, but for limited settings (like space faring or underground bug civilizations) algae is a good resource for farming. Algae/spira flour and glucose can be produced through it, as well as oil (which I believe can be used for plastic production). Other sources for flour like rice and sorghum have to be farmed in specific conditions, but for the citadel, spira flour is probably more accessible. Sucrose requires sugarcane which likely became less accessible when the burning bugs took over wisp thicket. Spira flour has a natural green coloration but the capital uses bone char to bleach it white (bone char comes from deep docks). Fructose and glucose sugar have a whiter tint so they don’t need as much processing. Some of this is based off of real life processes, some of it is me talking out my ass.

And yes, I did come up with a method for how they’re acquiring soda bicarbonate, unfortunately it’s very convoluted. In my HK food chart I just listed soda bicarbonate as coming from mineral springs, but Pharloom doesn’t have hot springs everywhere so I had to get more technical.

Salt Spikes (from Sands of Katar) combined w/Ground Limestone to create “Soda Ash” which is then dissolved in water and combined w/Carbon Dioxide (found in groundwater & lakes) to create Baking Soda.

Alternative method: Salt Spikes combined w/Ammonia (found in Deep Docks) and Carbon Dioxide to create Baking Soda and Ammonium Chloride (used in fertilizer).

Can be found (albeit rarely) naturally occurring in basins & hot springs. Sometimes found in mudrock (Deep Docks), co-product of shale oil extraction from solution mining. This is all based on real life, I’ve just simplified it heavily. Method two is literally just the Solvay Process. A lot of this is paraphrased from Wikipedia and I understand the basic gist of it but I’m not a chemist. This project had me googling insane shit again, but this time it was more to the tune of “do bugs have collagen” rather than “do bugs make milk” so we’ve improved slightly. I’m ignoring the fact that they don’t have collagen, there’s probably some beasts around somewhere that are vertebrate. Oh yeah also I’m into vinegar now. I had some pomegranate vinegar and it was delicious. Pour some of that into a nice cold glass of club soda and it would be perfect unfortunately my mother has hidden the vinegar. Uh, so anyway, there’s more vinegar options. Fruit, sugarcane, and grains. Oh yeah and the Cheong method of syrup making returns, this one uses a lot of sugarcane so its more old fashioned (in this setting not in real life).

Animal Products

I previously had roach milk as this decadent dairy product and then Silksong introduced roaches and put them in the biohazard area, so, surprise! It’s gone sour now.

Weaver milk is infinitely more rare here, but I should clarify that when I’m saying weaver milk I don’t just mean The Weavers, I meant spiders in general. The weavers aren’t having kids, but the Phallids may produce more offspring that will require some nutrients.

Ant and craw milk are more normal. I realize the craws are bugs, but I’m treating them like birds. So they get eggs and milk. Ant milk is thicker and richer in flavor while craw milk is more watery and nutritious. The cheeses present are all based off of real cheeses—Lebanese white cheese, camembert cheese, and blue cheese. Weaver silk cheese is inspired by the Centaur’s silk cheese in JayEaton’s “Runaway to the Stars” series.

As for eggs, the craw eggs are more like typical bird eggs, while the maggot eggs are gelatinous and usually laid in gooey bunches underwater. I had to google ant eggs for this drawing so you all owe me money for that. The moss egg is me capitulating to the game design, they look like artichokes to me so I used the design simultaneously for the vegetable and the egg. I imagine some foragers have had the traumatic experience of dropping what they thought was a plant and it then cracking like an egg upon impact. Or biting into it and it making a gooey crunch. These are all good ideas.

Oh yeah, meat. Standard meat here. Added some more organ cuts and included some creatures that are referred to as edible prey either in the compendium or by NPCs. I’m glad my pickling inclinations the last time were fulfilled here, more pickling. Vinegar is great and we should be using it more. Get pickling now! The sauerkraut is here because I was so focused on pickling that I forgot that the page was for animal products. Also ignore the crust organ, I put it in the animal products section, but in my head its a 50/50 between “stone from the guts of a [previously] living macro-organism” and “big walnut”.

Miscellaneous Musings

I know that in-game the Memorium is meant as a sort of zoo/archive for the fauna and flora of different regions. But I think it would also serve as a useful area for farming, since the citadel likely doesn’t want to have to rely on other regions for food production. Deep Docks serves a strong role in mining/harvesting the materials needed for filtration, purification, etc. for various baking ingredients. But Shellwood and Sands of Katar likely also were and are very important for food production. Salt is a necessary resource, which may still be harvestable post-collapse. If Pharloom Bay somehow gets added in a future DLC/update then I can probably use that for salt production. I need to learn how to mod Silksong so I can add new regions/areas in. That’ll likely take me forever though, I have a microscopic level of modding experience. The HK modding community is more combat/platforming focused, which makes sense considering the game genre. I just wish modders did region expansions in Hollow Knight like the Rain World modders do. I love the Rain World region expansions, The Mast, Fog Gulch, and Preservatory are my favorites. But in terms of achievable Silksong mods—the organ harvesting quest is my favorite quest in the game and if someone could make a mod that extends it to like 100-150 per category I’d appreciate it. Team Cherry should hire me to design/draw stuff for a DLC, I definitely won’t spend the entire time creating 30 food-related fetch quests. I have depths beyond this!

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