March Mini Update

Howdy Silksong runners, now that some of the chaos of the poll has ended, it's given us some time to look over some smaller topics that were previously pushed aside. Firstly however -

The Speedpatch

You may have noticed runs using the beta speed patch are now being verified 🎉 The speedpatch is now fully legal for use in runs, however keep an eye out for any announced updates as they will be required when released.

Rule Changes

We've given some attention to repeated topics brought up in discussion, and amended the rules as follows.

Gameplay Rules

• Glitched runs are now allowed to quitout on failed cutscene skip attempts.
• Verifiers may reject your run if they determine it to be abusing the gameplay rules by purposefully hardlocking.

This doesn't effect most runners, but helps address the issue glitched runners are having with memory leaks, longer loads, and funky MMS timings. We're aware this solution isn't perfect, but hope it helps runners with piece of mind, knowing they are no longer forced to sit through unskippable cutscenes. Additionally an explicit rule has been added, that verifiers can (and will) reject runs if they believe a run has purposefully hardlocked at any point, to take advantage of existing rules. Ultimately, we are still working off a glorified honour system, and we hope we can trust our runners enough to not take advantage of the gameplay rules.

Game Settings

• If you change the VSync setting either during or before your run, you must have a clearly visible FPS display in your recording.

Originally this rule also referred to changing your frame rate via the in game frame rate cap. It was a rule grandfathered in from Hollow Knight, due to concerns of people editing config files. However the same does not apply to Silksong, and so you will no longer be required to show an fps counter, when only changing this cap. You will however still be required to show one when changing the Vsync settings, due to concerns of unstable Vsync usage, and potential cheating concerns of monitor refresh rate changes outside of view in recordings.

Breaks

Runs are no longer required to reach act 3 to take a break.

• After your first 30 minutes of gameplay, you may take a 10 minute break.
• Additionally, for every hour of run length, you may take another 10 minute break.
• Breaks may be combined; for example, taking a 20 minute break after playing for 1 hour.

You will still have access to unlimited (within reason) breaks after 3 hours.

• Breaks MUST be timestamped in the description of your run.

This does indeed now mean you can take breaks in runs that do not enter act 3. Such as Any%, Low%, AA1B, AA2B, Awoo%, and so on. The goal of this is to help with accessibility, allowing runners a well earned break in their runs, especially now that we have added some new longer categories to the boards that don't enter Act 3, while not overstepping on potential cheating issues with breaks too long. We hope this is a suitable compromise.

Autosplitter update

Additionally a change to the autosplitter has now been added. The file select screen will now be untimed, mainly to help taking breaks. To accommodate this the older ruling on breaks hasn't necessarily changed, but rather reworded to fit the behaviour.

• The timer should pause upon opening the file select menu, and continue after loading into your selected your file.

We will not be retiming any previous runs to account for this change. After briefly looking over runs that would be affected (i.e. tied runs on the leaderbaord) very few of them are affected at all by this change, and the tied runs that would end up being lowered by this change, are not lowered enough for us to necessitate a full board retime. We simply do not have the time or resources to make such a change. If you feel as though your run would be heavily impacted by this new timing, feel free to bring it up with a verifier or moderator in the speedrunning discord, and it can be discussed further.

Hey all! Yesterday we released the results of our February Poll, a writeup of which can be seen here. The results of this & many other moderation decisions are detailed below.

SpeedPatch

As we start to legalise limited modifications to improve the competitive experience, we've published the HKSRC Speedpatch for use on the boards, a version-independent modification framework not dependent on BepInEx. Many thanks to @peekagrub for this implementation!

Currently the following patches are available as of v0.1.0-beta:

• CourierRNGFix (Prevents being given a repeat courier delivery, allowed for NMG runs that do Couriers)
• DowndashTransitionFix (For Glitched only: prevents game locking on downdashing through transitions with Noclip)

Note that the current version is a beta; runs on this version may be rejected if issues are found with the implementation, but otherwise the mod is legal.

Rulings

• Pin Pogos are now legal in NMG.
• This does not include infinitely rising 'Spinny Pins', the use of which remains banned.
• Queued Walljump Interrupts ('Corner Jumps' such as Cocoon Skip Skip & Memorium Corner Jump) are now legal in NMG.
• QWJI Storage remains banned - see the writeup for details.
• Map drops are now legal in NMG.
• Boss timings have been clarified in the All Bosses Requirements; new runs that miss the boss requirements may be penalised up to 3 minutes.

Category Changes

• The Any% Release Patch / Latest Patch split has been modified to Cloak / Cloakless.
• Judgement has been renamed to Act 1, including Judgement & Sinner subcategories for Bells route & Mist route respectively.
• All Act 1 Bosses & All Act 2 Bosses have been added as subcategories of All Bosses.
• Low% True Ending has been added as a subcategory of Low%.
• Twisted% will be moved to Category Extensions due to runner feedback.
• All Bellways & Bath% have been added to Category Extensions due to runner demand.

We hope you all had a good holiday season & are ready for the next year of Silksong speedrunning! In the 3 months since the boards opened on Oct 1st, we've seen over 1000 runners submit over 2500 runs, just barely missing the 1000 active runners mark. I believe this might actually be a record on Speedrun.com, though we don't actually have the data to check, so you'll just have to believe us :)

We've been continuing to work over this month to get through our remaining decisions & prepare for the upcoming Sea of Sorrow content update; here's what you need to know!

Upcoming Poll

We have a set of decisions in the pipe, some of which we are passing to a poll; this is currently being drafted and should be available in the coming weeks. This poll will require the Silksong Runner Discord role to respond; if you have not got this role yet & have a verified submission to the Silksong leaderboards, please use ;grantsrrole in #roles-and-commands to get access to the votes channel.

Verifier Call

As we continue to get a truly incredible volume of submissions, we are once again opening a call for new Silksong verifiers! We are immensely grateful to our verifiers for their incredible work; without them our community would not be able to function.

Please note that you can also apply to become a Hollow Knight verifier if you wish, though we are not currently short on Hollow Knight verifiers.

If you have previously submitted a verifier application, please submit again to the below link; this is a new form & your previous submission won't be seen!

Click to apply

Hi all! It's been just over a month since the leaderboard embargo was lifted, and we've seen over 1300 verified submissions, with another 400 runs having been submitted to the Judgement Challenge at the start of October. In just 1 month, Silksong has garnered more active runners than every other game on Speedrun.com, including Celeste, ULTRAKILL & even PEAK, despite all these having much shorter categories on average!

Category changes

Any% has returned to the Mist, with a new world record by Remto demonstrating the massive potential timesave of Cloakless with the Key route through Wormways. As cloakless & cloak routes both look like interesting runs, the former being restricted to only Release Patch, we have added an annotation for Release Patch runs. This can be used to create a leaderboard split once more cloakless runs are submitted.

Thanks to new runner interest, we've added a variety of categories; on the main leaderboards:

• 100% (our apologies for the delay on this one!) & 100% All Bosses as a subcategory.
• All Bosses

And on our category extension leaderboards:

• Moss Grotto IL - now you can justify your early game resets!
• Dapper Slapper (slap all 3 slappable NPCs)
• Slab% (Unlock the bellway in Slab), with the Jail% subcategory (avoid freeing Bell Beast or opening the Slab door, causing you to become softlocked in the Slab)
• 6 Wishes

Rule Changes

Yesterday the results of our first major poll were published; a complete write-up is available, but in summary of the decisions made:

• NMG:
  • Bind Dash Refresh remains allowed. This may again be revisited in the future once we have a better understanding of runners' familiarity with the tech.
  • Lever Skips are now allowed.
  • The Voltvessel One-Way wallbreak at the Ducts - Bilewater shortcut is now banned.
  • Trobbio Skips (all cases of hitting a Vaults block the wrong way by other means than the Needle) are now banned.
  • Deep Docks Bridge Hazard respawn is now banned.
• Ultrawide resolutions (defined as any resolution with an aspect ratio wider than 2:1) are now banned.
• All Bosses includes all bosses voted on except Craggler, Moss Mother 3 (Voided) & Skull Tyrant 2 (Bonebottom). A complete list will be made available shortly.
• New Categories:
  • All Bosses will get its own leaderboard on the main board.
  • 100% AB will get a subcategory on the 100% boards - depending on runner interest this category may be subject to review once runners have had a chance to route & run the category.

Future votes will require a verified run on our leaderboards; please make sure you get a run in if you want to help us shape the future of Silksong speedrunning!

As always, you can see a complete history of our rule changes on the Silksong-Rules Github repository, and rules discussions are best directed to #silk-src-discussion or #silk-nmg-discussion in the HKSRC Discord.

Hi all! It's been an exciting month behind the scenes, with massive amounts of discoveries, category ideas, routing, optimisation & discussion. If you haven't already, we strongly recommend joining the Discord & grabbing the Silksong Gamer role; most discussions are taking place here, along with resources, skip videos & route notes. We will be working on putting these in more accessible places over the coming months.

A setup guide is available here if you want to jump in!

Challenge

To celebrate the embargo release, we have partnered up with Speedrun.com to create the Silksong Judgement Challenge! The category we've selected for this challenge is Judgement (Finish Act 1 by defeating the Last Judge); this is an approximately 30-40 minute category showcasing one of the many Any% routes up to Act 2.

Submitting a verifiable run grants you a site-wide title of "Weaver", and there will be a $1000 prize pool distributed to the top 5 runs at the end of the challenge. For more details, please see the challenge page. Submissions close 2025-10-05 (Sunday).

Please note that submissions to our leaderboard and the challenge leaderboard are not the same - we encourage you to submit your runs to both, but if you want to enter to win you must have submitted your run to the Challenge leaderboard.

Submissions

The Interim submission sheet is now closed to new entries; you can see it archived here. We will be filling out a more complete world record history for this period in the near future.

We ask you not to submit runs using the beta loadless timer if you have been using it. In addition, we will be dating all runs prior to October (besides current WRs) as if they were performed on 2025-10-01, in order to preserve our existing WR history.

Rules

You can see the up-to-date game rules that all runs must abide by here, and the No Major Glitches ruleset here. Some of the more important items to point out:

• We do not allow runs on the public-beta branch - please ensure you are not opted into the public-beta branch before submitting.
• Your game must be unmodified, including BepInEx; see the Setup guide for help on launching without BepInEx.
• We do not allow videos hosted on Twitch, due to their unreliability regarding their Highlights storage policy.
• You can export videos from the Twitch Video Manager directly to Youtube, or download and reupload to another site.
• Videos must have certain areas of the screen uncovered; see our video guidelines.
• If using the load remover, Livesplit's loadless timer must be visible throughout the run.

Setup

If you have previously setup the autosplitter, please note that the setup process has changed; HKSplitmaker & Livesplit can now handle the whole process for you!

You MUST make sure you remove any old autosplitters from your layout by removing the Auto Splitter Runtime layout component! Runs on an old autosplitter version may be timed with loads not removed!

• If you used HKSplitmaker, simply delete the Auto Splitter Runtime component from your layout ("Edit Layout... > Select Auto Splitter Runtime > Press the - button on the side") and activate the new autosplitter in "Edit Splits... > Activate (above the splits table)".
• If not, please follow the Setup Guide for downloading & activating the autosplitter!

If you previously set up SSDebug, please note that we are now using a new DebugMod; the old SSDebug is incompatible & savestates made for it are now out of date. Please see the Setup Guide for information on installing & using the new DebugMod.

Practice savestates are available from the Silksong-Resources repository!