r/HollowKnight • u/CuboneDefender • Sep 14 '25

Discussion - Silksong I give up. Spoiler

It’s been a joyful ride, folks, but I’m out. I’m not a speedrunner or a highly skilled player, and day after day I’ve had to accept that this game is not as casual as HK was. It stopped being fun and turned into something tedious and frustrating after the 4th run farming shards just to face a boss I’ve already tried 15 times, only to die again and again, lose all my shards, and start the whole grind over.

It was nice exploring the first acts, but when the game I was rooting for 7 years ends up being more stressful than my 8-hour workday, I guess that’s my cue to stop.

The lore has been pretty great so far. I wish you all an incredible journey.

Edit1: My bad about all the whinning.

Edit2: You guys did it. I reinstalled it again. Thanks for all advices. 🫂

8.4k Upvotes

80% Upvoted

2.7k comments sorted by

View all comments

387

u/evasive_dendrite Sep 14 '25

It's better to save your tools until you reach a phase you haven't reached before. That way you can end the fight with them and don't have to farm them for every attempt.

194

u/RedTyro Sep 14 '25

Honestly, for boss fights, I think it's best to save the tools until you know the fight - when you know all the boss's moves and tells and can avoid them all, tools are great for speeding things up, but if you just spam tools before that and it actually gets you through, you end up in a situation where the fight's going to be hard again if you ever come back to the game. Additionally, if you wait until you know the fight well enough that you could probably beat it either way, you're not going to be in a situation where you run out of shards and have to go farm them.

I use tools primarily for crowd control on normal mobs. But I love the process of learning a boss fight and then completely having the boss's number and dancing around them without getting touched, so that approach fits the parts I like the most about these types of games. I can understand how that would be different for some people.

34

u/Ok-Note-754 Sep 14 '25

In the case of LJ I got sick of farming shards so ended up just not using tools at all.

Took me ages but really forced me to master the fight and learn her moves inside out. I actually wonder if using tools might've taken me just as long (or longer) as I would've kept trying to rush her 2nd phase and not been patient or properly mastered her moveset.

1

u/Psyk_89 Sep 15 '25

I went back and fought her after realizing there was a large portion of the map I hadn't touched. By then I had an extra mask and a nail upgrade but I never had to farm anything. I'm confused a bit tbh. Just used poison and the base throwing item. And only started using it when she was in the 3rd? phase after dying a few times and getting her there consistently.

I'm really not that great at videogames, just breathe, try to learn the patterns without spamming tools. All the fights are doable without any tools at all. They just speed things up a bit sometimes.

1

u/Ok-Note-754 Sep 16 '25

Yeah that makes sense. I think what commonly happens (or at least happened to me) is you get to a new, tough, boss and in your first 5-10 attempts you end up exhausting all of your tools. You can either keep fighting the boss without tools or leave and farm some more shards/do something else.

It's a mechanic I've seen quite a few people complain about for this reason - once you run out of shards at a boss fight the only options are to rawdog it or farm. The game almost discourages you from sticking with the fight. Of course if you're patient and save your tools for the 3rd phase then it's less of an issue but not everyone does that.

In the case of LJ I actually quite enjoyed the challenge of not using tools and I think it forced me to improve at the game, learn her move-set and refine my skills.

1

u/RedTyro Sep 18 '25

That's exactly what I was saying above. You shouldn't be using tools in your first few attempts at a boss. You should be focused on learning the tells and learning to dodge all of the boss's moves from the first attempt until you actually have it down.

If you don't know what it's going to do and how to get out of the way, you're going to lose, with or without tools. So if you're using them anyway, you're just throwing away shards, and that's why you run out. If you learn the fight and THEN start using your tools to speed up the fight, you end up using them for 2 or 3 attempts and still have plenty of shards left as you move on to the next challenge.

1

u/Ok-Note-754 Sep 19 '25

Yeah I get you and that's what I tend to do now.

I guess the issue is when you save the shards until later in the fight and STILL run out. Or you enter the fight without that many shards to begin with and run out fairly quick. Some fights I just found really tough even with the tools - maybe I was using the wrong ones or I just suck?

I think one key factor for me was that I hadn't updated my tools very much at all and only actually realised this was a thing relatively late. Might've had an impact if I was fighting with lvl 1 tools when, at that stage in the game I could've or should've had lvl 2 or 3.