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” in 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 Karak) 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 Karak 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 (Edit: right after I fucking posted this) 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!
I sure hope everyone who doesn't want potential Silksong spoilers has the right tags blocked because here is my guesses and theories and so on and so forth on who the weavers are! Like, more specifically who's who, kinda thing. Yeah. Here you go;
Atla: a reference to Atlas, the Titan holding the world; this is because weavenest Atla can be considered to be at the base of the world (the Abyss would be the underworld)
Additionally, Eva is latin for Eve, the first woman and the first sinner for daring to grab the fruit of knowledge, just like First Sinner
I disagree with the notion of Atla/ First Sinner being uniquely able to maintain her essence because of her title: her essence is as well preserved as any other enshrined weaver, she just decides to throw hands in a dream as a test about it; her title is such because history=time, her research likely resulting in discovering the silken lie
Camora: couldn't find any good candidates for what the name could be referencing, just a mormon thing and a mafia thing, so probably a random name
Keelal: keel is the "spine" of a boat, but also used for similar looking structures in nature such as a bird's breastbone or a ridge on the petals of a flower; there's also keelhauling, which is an old age of sail punishment; I struggle to see the relevance of any of these potential meanings to the path, there's no river or bay to sail ahead, and Shellwood Pond doesn't have boats or seemingly a need for them. I guess boats could be made with shellwood if there were any?
Cindril: finally another easy one, cinder derived name for a weaver in a field scorched by lava
Askar: arabic for army, askari means soldier; fitting for a weavenest containing blueprints for a gun
btw, idk if you were rather referring to the door being wide open, but the unhinged halves of the door are still there
Murglin: could only find one of those sketchy "meaning of names" websites conveniently claiming it means "marsh by the sea" , which does fit the location of the weavenest at the far east of bilewater (Pharloom Bay real); the claim about the meaning of the individual particles muir and linn do somewhat track at least
Karn: an outdated mining term for a pile of rocks; somewhat fitting of a weavenest crumbling to rubble because of the constant mining of worms, I guess
also, "only weaver to remain within a weavenest", someone forgot about Absolon ;p
Greymoor weaver: how convenient that the weaver granting Hornet her signature thread storm back is the one enshrined weaver to not have any spines, making her look just like the Hallownest weavers
Now, I wouldn't jump into conclussions just yet
I'm not sure it has passed so much time between when the weavers left hallownest and silksong for the body to fossilize like that, although I must admit fossilization does seem to happen way easier, faster, and more frequently in this world
still, the spire looks as old as any of the other weaver spires, older than the structures surrounding it, and I'm not sure a bunch of weavers coming back would have the methods to build such a structure (they seem designed to preserve the enshrined weaver and their essence and silk, Eva's own chamber is one too), let alone a singular weaver
Absolom
still found within her nest, named after Absalon ("father of peace"), her weavenest is found in the Abyss, this world's underworld, where she was clearly studying the void
the farsight, an instrument found here, is one most curious, having a capacity pretty much identical to the world sense ability granted by the Pale King to the vessel
and the tool does look like the wyrm, doesnt it
this combined with the studying of void could easily lead one to theorize this weaver to be one that returned from hallownest with experience working close to the king
however, either the timeline is extremely fucked and the weavers returned from Hallownest before the deep docks were created (or at the bare minimum when the ancient diving bell was last used), or this is all just a fucky coincidence
it is also possible the weavenest itself already existed and returning, unseen hallownest weavers descended down there through an unknown route, left the tool there, then left, for some reason
the ability she grants, silksoar, is essential to escaping the abyss
and Hornet does so by ascending through three distinct weavenest elevator shafts
Comparing these with the active one at Atla makes this obvious
and why do I bring so much attention to the elevators? well, the rune at the top of the elevator platform is the same rune as silksoar, albeit simplified because of the size on screen
oh yeah some resources if you wanna download yt videos for no reason in particular (<- lying)
loader. to: site lets you download in mp3 and mp4 formats. just use an adblocker or you'll be taken to shady sites. is a bit slow.
yt1s: exactly the same as loader.to. same thing with the adblock. faster than loader.to but less efficient (can't put multiple vids to download at once)
jdownloader2: program that looks sketchy but is really good at downloading playlists. requires java. (my personal fave. pretty fast and convenient.)
amp4: mp4 downloader (mid at best. can be slow and can't download videos over 2 hours in length.)
these are the sites i've tried and like. feel free to contribute more in comments or reblog. whether it's in our favor or not, this too shall pass. ❤️
DS Over-Analysis Lorethrough #1: Character Creation
Too much lore? Too many plotpoints to follow? Three games is a lot, and with each having some inconsistencies it can lead to a mess of thoughts. So let’s wipe the slate clean and take a dive through the first game with a fine tooth comb!
Today I will be going through and over-analyzing every bit of lore revealed through the progression of the game. Only going by what we know when we find it.
And we will also be ignoring the existence of the sequels entirely. Not even interview statements or translation errors, only everything that’s in the game we play! Though I may include what new info we can gain by looking outside at another date.
I put more than 30 images so I can't post it to here without trimming a bunch so I'll just be posting a google doc of it. So let’s get into it!
Too much lore? Too many plotpoints to follow? Three games is a lot, and with each having some inconsistencies it can lead to a mess of thoug
TL:DR
What have we learned?
It is a fantasy setting with knights and sorcerers and earldoms, along with some more advanced tech such as binoculars.
There are at least 6 nations and 4 geographical locations. Our starting classes are from one of them.
[Astora]
[Carim]
[Catarina]
[Thorolund]
[Vinheim]
[Zena]
[The Fivefinger Delta]
[The Great Swamp]
[North Catarina]
[The Far East]
And that there are 3 types of magic
[Sorcery]
[Pyromancy]
[Miracles]
And lastly something about Humanity…
All before even starting the game! And don’t forget the Opening Cutscene that will loredump a LOT of info!
In Mario & Luigi: Brothership, a glitch can occur with the Shy Guys fought in Bowser's Castle whereby counterattacking them on a specific frame will cause them to vibrate eternally.
This will prevent the Shy Guy from ever finishing his attack, resulting in his turn and thus the battle never ending. The game must be reset to continue regular gameplay.
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