The pieces
The needle
Fast, short, three-hit combos with a downward diagonal pogo instead of the Knight’s straight one. Needle Strike, learned from the Pinstress in Blasted Steps, adds a charged hit. Four upgrades from Pinmaster Plinney, each for a Pale Oil.
Silk
The spool under the masks. It fills by landing hits, empties into Bind (heal) or a silk skill, and a Silk Heart refills it once when it hits zero. Spool fragments add segments; eighteen of them, nine segments.
Bind
Three masks back for most of the spool, and Hornet is vulnerable while she does it. Binding at the wrong moment is how most early deaths happen; binding after a boss combo ends is the skill the game is teaching.
Silk skills
Silkspear, Thread Storm, Cross Stitch, Sharpdart, Rune Rage, Pale Nails: six, each bound at a Weaver statue or won from a boss, and only one equipped at a time. Cross Stitch is the parry; it comes from the Phantom.
Crests
A crest is a moveset and a tool layout at once: the Hunter’s combo, the Reaper’s heavy horizontal swing, the Wanderer’s speed, the Beast’s rage, the Witch’s drain, the Architect’s drill, the Shaman’s magic. Change at a bench.
Tools
Red ones are ammunition, rebuilt at benches with shell shards; blue and yellow are passives. The crest decides how many of each colour you can wear.
Rules that hold in every fight
- Two-hit rule: enemies in act 2 and beyond deal two masks a hit. Health is a smaller buffer than the mask count suggests; the spool is the real one.
- Pogo everything that can be pogoed. The diagonal makes it a dodge and an attack in one, and half the platforming is pogo chains over thorns.
- Bind when the boss is far, not when you are low. A boss that closes distance while you hold the button costs you the spool and the masks.
- Silk skills are burst, not rotation. Bank the spool for one big hit at a stagger, or for the heal, never both.
- A red tool is a boss opener. Straight Pins, Tacks and Cogfly do their work in the first ten seconds, when the pattern is still unknown.
Still to verify
Cross-checked on 17 September 2026 against the Hollow Knight Wiki and Nintendo Life’s tools and crests guides. Cross-checked against official Team Cherry announcements and verified community databases. Still to confirm in-game.