Hollow Knight in 3 hours

This page is going to have two sections: one where I discussed how this route came to be and one where I explain the route. To jump to the second section,

Section 1: design

What has to happen in order to beat Hollow Knight? Well, in the most simple sense, you just have to kill the Hollow Knight. tHK, however, is sealed inside the Black Egg, and so before you can kill him, you have to kill all three Dreamers. Each of those Dreamers, however, has even *more* obstacles that you must cross before challenging *them*, leading to the organization of prerequisite objectives into what I call "prereq chains":

Because you must defeat the Watchers before you fight Lurien, and because you must* get the Monarch Wings to fight the watchers, everything on this flowchart can be considered an effective requirement.

*I'm aware that there are skips that I completely ignore during this design. I have no qualm with those who choose to learn these skips, I just think it's not very fun in 2D games.

The above image has 18 objectives in it, and so it's correct to say that our route needs to average at most 10 minutes per objective. However, not all of these tasks are created equal. Freeing Sly, for instance, is a trivial task that takes less than a minute. Fighting the Watcher Knights, on the other hand, is a herculean effort.

Let's colour these 18 tasks by their approximate difficulty:

Blue tasks are simple. Green tasks are slightly more complex. Yellow tasks are moderately difficult, and orange and red tasks are prohibitively difficult.

From this chart, it's clear that there are three fights that we need to optimize around. We optimize around taking the Dash Cloak from Hornet by putting it right at the start of the 3-hour journey. If you fail, you can just start over, having only lost 20 minutes or so of your progress. On the other end, we optimize for the Watcher Knights and tHK by putting them together at the very *end* of the run, so that we have 2 hours to prepare for that fight.

Our goal, before the Watcher fight, is to have the following:
Descending Dark
Shade Soul

seven masks

seven charm slots

the Channelled Nail

You start with five masks and three charm slots, so two spells, two weapon upgrades, two masks, and four charm slots adds a total of 10 more objectives to our mandatory 18, for a total of 28. If we complete one objective every 6.4 minutes, we'll finish the game in time with 48 seconds to spare.

Let's put some of these on a map:

Credit for the map (that Imma reuse the hell out of during the actual guide part of this page) goes to the fantastic folks over at Scripters' War.

Remember that we need to hit these in a certain order. It's up to us what that order is, but we only have so many choices, given the above positions and the fact that, for example, you can't get to almost any of these without the Mantis Claw, as shown by the above flowchart.

I'm skipping a lot fo steps here, but here is the order I came up with:

In order:
-Gruz Mother

-Sly

-False Knight

-Vengeful Spirit

-Hornet's Mothwing Dash Cloak

-the Mantis Claw

-the Sharpened Nail

-the Ground Pound

-the Lumafly Lantern

-Crystal Dash

-Descending Dark

-the Dream Nail

-Isma's Tear

-the Monarch Wings

-Uumuu

-Monomon

-Herrah

-the Channelled Nail (I forgot to put this one on the map, my bad)

-Shade Soul

-the Watcher Knights

-Lurien

-the Hollow Knight

That's 22 out of 28. Still missing are our six objectives that can happen at multiple locations:

-get two more masks

-get four more charm slots

Also missing from the above map is money collection. The collection of 1800 geo for the Lumafly Lantern and 1 Pale Ore for the Chanelled Nail is not negligible.

Let's take a look at those collectables:

There are 16 mask shards, 8 charm notches, and 6 Pale Ore in the game. We can spend about two minutes getting each one we need. Thus, we can eliminate some obvious ones that would take far too long:

-the Pale Ore at the top of Crystal Peak

-Nosk's Pale Ore

-the Pale Ore in the Colliseum

-Grubfather's Pale Ore

-the charm notch for owning 25 charms

-the charm notch in the colliseum

-Grimm's charm notch

-the Hive Guardian mask shard

-the 1,500 Essence mask shard

-the Delicate Flower mask shard, even though it'd be *sick* to do that in a 3-hr run

From this, we know a few things. For one, we know that we'll be visiting Salubra, as she sells 3 of the 5 charm notches we haven't elminated. For another, we know that we'll have to collect between 10 adn 18 charms, as that's Salubra's criteria for being willing to sell you notches.

Finally, we know that we have two options to collect a Pale Ore: journey through the Mawlek tunnels or collect 300 Essence.

Now that we know some things, let's consider our deadlines. We're on a schedule, after all.

A lot of thought went into the above schedule. Here's just a little:

Soul Catcher is most players' first charm, and it makes using Vengeful Spirit much easier. That's indispensible in both getting to and defeating Hornet (the second-hardest part of this route). However, it's also the single charm that takes the least tiem to get, clocking in at about three seconds' deviation from a mandatory path. So it's a no-brainer to get this right after learning the Vengeful Spirit.

Fighting through the Mantis Village is also quite a task, and, so long as we're only wearing Soul Catcher, we're wasting a charm notch and not at our complete potential. However, there aren't any useful 1-notch charms, so it stands to reason that before we attack the Mantises, we should acquire both another 2-notch charm and our fourth charm notch. There's one conveniently on the way into the Fungal Wastes.

The other grabbables are similarly spread through the schedule where I think they would be most helpful.

We know that the first charm we'll get* will be Soul Catcher. Our second? Longnail. We'll be taking the Stagway back from Hornet to Fungal, and Salubra is right there selling it. It's a no-brainer.

I followed lines of thought like this for a long time, and then iterated on designs (an early version of this route picked up Fury of the Fallen, but I found that I only ended up needing 10 charms, so I avoided it), and eventually came up with the following route.

Section 2: The Route

You're about to read a *lot* of instructions. Obviously, you should not read them all and then begin attempting to follow them--this kind of task, like cooking or assembling furniture, is best attempted piecemeal. As such, I've realized the need to break this run down into sections. Now, I could have separated this sections equally, or ended a section whenever you fight a boss, but I 've decided on a more important metric: Benches.

When you sit on a bench in Hollow Knight, your game is saved. When you die, you* return to the last bench upon which you sat. However, critically, *when you close out of the game, you also return to the last bench upon which you sat.* We're gonna abuse this fact pretty hard. If you encounter a bench in the wild (or if you're ahead of schedule,), feel free to go sit on it, but bear in mind that you will now have to backtrack manually to your previous bench, costing precious time.

Each bench-to-bench section (with one exception) has its own section of this webpage. I haven't put in all the hyperlinks yet, but when I do, they'll be here:

Bench 0: King's Pass

IllIQUID ASSETS	GRUBS	MASK SHARDS	CHARMS
47	37	38	121
27	23	17	67
26	18	26	70
19	18	19	56
17	10	15	42

Jesus Christ, Wix doesn't let you change the data inside tables??? how come literally nothing works on the internet anymore