Hollow Knight's Map is Broken (Script)

This is a map of Hallownest. And so is this. And this. And, technically, this. These images are the primary way Hollow Knight informs us of the shape and size of its world. And as nice looking as these various maps are, they aren’t actually Hallownest itself. They’re abstract shapes and drawings that imply what Hallownest is supposed to look like. I want a map that looks exactly like what we see ingame. I want to push the camera out and see a fully detailed version of Hallownest in its entirety.

I want something like what Team Cherry showed off in the 2014 Kickstarter trailer for Hollow Knight, where they zoomed out on the Forgotten Crossroads and revealed almost the entire area in one image. Of course, this shot wasn’t made by just zooming out the camera ingame. Hollow Knight only has one room loaded in at a time, so even if you did unlock the camera and zoom it out, you’re never going to see more than one room on screen at a time. This is sort of like real life, where objects outside your field of view cease to exist.

Team Cherry actually constructed this footage by combining a bunch of screenshots of Hollow Knight’s rooms together in some kind of video or image editing software. We can actually tell that that’s what they did because if you zoom in on this part of the map, you can actually see the Knight just kinda hanging out. You can even see it again near the entrance to Greenpath.

Now, you could theoretically do this exact same process but for all of Hallownest, screenshotting every single room and combining them together to create one continuous map of the entire game world. But would anyone ever actually take on such an insane challenge and actually do this? Are there any brave soldiers in the Hollow Knight community willing to step up? That was a rhetorical question. And the answer is yes.

Back in the ancient times of August 2017, a member of the Hollow Knight community known as Nook, or The Embraced One, began chipping away at mapping out the entirety of Hollow Knight’s world. She’d continue to work on this project in her free time, juggling it between work and developing her own game. And in February of 2023, she finally released a complete map of Hallownest. The final work is a massive image, 72,622 pixels wide by 48,128 pixels tall. For reference, the Knight, as it appears in this map, is 23 pixels wide by 50 pixels tall. The map contains a total of 307 rooms, compiled from over 6000 screenshots, each of which had to be cleaned up and connected to each other in one giant image. The entire image can be viewed on Nook’s website, Hallownest.net, where she set up an interactive version that loads up right in your browser, that way you don’t have to open the massive 800 megabyte file on your own machine.

Nook was inspired to do this after finding a complete map of Castlevania: Symphony of the Knight, which is basically Hollow Knight for boomers. In fact, you can find quite a few full detail maps online, painstakingly created by fans to capture the sheer scale of various Metroidvania maps. This practice goes back well over a decade, with maps like these being created for games like the original Metroid for the NES. As far as I know, these maps don’t have any widely recognized name. But for this video, I’m just going to call them “composite” maps, since they are usually created by compositing a bunch of images together to create one big picture.

Creating a map like this presents two technical challenges that I’d like to discuss in this video. The first challenge is creating complete images of individual rooms. This can be difficult because a lot of 2D games, Hollow Knight included, feature something called parallax scrolling. This is where objects in the far background move across the screen at a slower rate than ones in the near background, creating an illusion of depth. It’s a bit tricky to spot if you aren’t looking for it, but you can see it clearly in certain objects like this chain found in the Crystal Peak.

Some modern 2D games achieve this parallax scrolling effect by not actually being 2D at all, instead using a 3D camera and just locking it from tilting or rotating. This is done because, paradoxically, 3D game engines can actually be quite useful for building and debugging 2D games, as well as seeing wider support on a greater variety of systems. Hollow Knight also utilizes this method for its rooms. Using the program HKWorldEdit2 we can actually open up Hollow Knight rooms and move the camera around freely. From here, you can see that the 2D assets that dress up a room are actually placed in 3D space. So when the camera tracks the player moving around, these objects pan across the screen at different speeds.

This is all very cool, but it makes creating a full sized image of the room a lot more complicated. If you take individual screenshots and stitch them together, background objects will end up appearing multiple times since they don’t pan across the screen as quickly as foreground objects. To combat this, Nook had to manually edit almost every room to make sure the background was free of duplicates. This means pulling sprites from sprite sheets and manually adding them back into the image, as well as finding clever ways to hide seams between screenshots, such as placing them behind pipes and pillars. Nook uploaded timelapses of this process on her YouTube channel and it shows just how much work went into reconstructing these rooms.

The end result of all this is that rooms on the composite map don’t quite reflect their ingame counterparts 100%. Some artistic liberties had to be taken to make these images even possible. And this isn’t the only aspect of the map that required some creative workarounds, which brings us to the other technical challenge involved with creating this map; actually lining up all the rooms with each other.

In an interview with PC Gamer back in 2017, Ari Gibson described Hollow Knight’s map as “98% pure”.

There are just a few cheats...like a tiny room goes down like, 20 tiles too low, that kind of thing. There's never a case where an entire room is a paradox, that kind of thing. [Source]

And… well…

In reality, Hollow Knight’s map cheats quite a bit, especially when compared to games like Super Metroid and Symphony of the Night. Of course, these older games used rigid grid maps, and while Hollow Knight’s rooms were conceptualized as boxes as well, in practice, the rooms come in various shapes and sizes and are much more freely placed on the game’s minimap. This means a variety of things. Some room exits don’t line up, multiple rooms sometimes occupy the same space, and some areas are much further apart than expected.

This means Nook was basically constructing a puzzle with misshapen pieces. So to make sense of all this, we’re going to be going through each area in Nook’s map and examining how well Team Cherry constructed them from a cartographer’s perspective.

I’ll be pointing out things such as misalignments between rooms, significant gaps between rooms, and rooms overlapping with one another. So which area in Hallownest do you think will turn out the best? Which ones will have the most nonsensical room layouts? Be sure to leave a comment down below that has nothing to do with what I just asked. 

Also, before I dive in proper, I did just want to mention that Nook is also a game developer working on her own game called Where Birds Go to Sleep. It’s a narrative adventure game that looks super weird and super cool and you can find a link to the steam page in the description if you’re interested in wishlisting the game.

Crossroads

I have randomly decided to begin our journey in the Forgotten Crossroads. Despite being the simple starting area, Crossroads actually boasts the largest number of external rooms of any section in Hallownest, comprising a total of 40 rooms. When I say external rooms, I am excluding rooms like the Snail Shaman mounds, shopkeeper rooms, and other interior rooms that aren’t included on the game’s minimap. So pretty much any room that is entered using a doorway.

If we look at the long vertical room on the left that connects to Greenpath, we can see two horizontal paths that cut across the top of the Crossroads. These two paths then connect to a room on the right, the room that leads to Myla and the Crystal Peak. But the lower path is too far down here. So we’ll be adding the first of many hallways here to line these rooms up correctly.

This lower hallway also isn’t long enough to span the entire width of the Crossroads, so an extra hallway needs to be added somewhere in here to make it reach.

Switching back over to the long vertical room on the left, we can see that the drop into Cornifer’s room also needs to be a bit longer than you might think. Otherwise the False Knight room would crash up into the room above it.

Looking at the bottom of the Crossroads, some rooms are, unfortunately, just too cramped. The Crossroad hot spring room, arguably one of the best rooms in the entire game, thanks to the inclusion of these two bugs who I can only describe as “really good friends”, literally cannot exist where it is. The minimap straight up lies about how tall the room below it is. This room is literally as tall as the room to the left, leaving no space for this supposed hot spring room. To compensate for this, Nook shortened the spa room as much as she could, and placed a hallway underneath it. 

And the exact same thing happens over to the left as well. The room heading down into the Fungal Wastes is too tall to fit underneath Cornifer’s room. Nook had to insert another hallway here to make everything fit.

Another room that just won’t fit where it needs to is the Stag Station. The ceiling of this room crashes into the room above it. To fix this, Nook applied a bit of shrinkage to the room, making it about 25% smaller.

At the very, very bottom of Crossroads we have the elevator that leads down into the City of Tears. This room can be accessed from the right by walking straight across, but we can see that if that were the case, the Soul Vessel room to the left of the elevator would be overlapping with this Goam Mask Shard room. So a vertical hallway needs to be added here to space things out a bit. This added hallway also pushes the elevator further to the left for reasons we’ll see later.

There’s another pretty bad overlap at the entrance to Greenpath. The ceiling of the room leading to the Brooding Mawlek is crashing into the Elder Baldur room. Adding a thin hallway with a slight vertical rise makes this slightly better, and it also keeps lower parts of Greenpath from overlapping with Crossroads. 

Overall, I think these numerous room misalignments, combined with the sheer number of rooms in Crossroads, make this first area somewhat confusing to navigate at times. I have accidentally walked into this damn elevator room when I thought I was higher up more than once while playing this game. And while I am bad at Hollow Knight, I’m not THAT bad.

Now, you could argue that these misalignments add to the design of Crossroads. Perhaps Team Cherry wants you to get a little lost and turned around in this area, so the misalignments aren’t that big of a deal. It’s a reasonable argument to make on the internet. But if you tried to make this argument to my face, I would probably punch you.

I will say that Crossroads does have to contend with being surrounded on all sides by other areas that it has to line up with. But I can safely say that the Forgotten Crossroads is easily the worst offender in the entire game when it comes to rooms overlapping or just not lining up at all. If I had to guess, I’d say that Team Cherry made the Crossroads first, and weren’t as experienced with making sure rooms lined up correctly. Because I do think every other area in the game does a better job than the Forgotten Crossroads.

Greenpath

Greenpath does a much better job of keeping its rooms lined up fairly consistently. While Greenpath’s rooms are on average larger, we’re only dealing with 31 rooms this time instead of 40. But that’s still a big number, only surpassed by the three largest areas in the game. Greenpath has two large corridors that run across the area, and they connect back to each other across three branching paths, all of which line up relatively nicely. 

The top section of Greenpath, where the player first finds Zote, also lines up well. In the bottom section of Greenpath, where the area connects to Fog Canyon and Queen’s Garden, Nook did add a vertical hallway near the Stone Sanctuary bench. This keeps a portion of Queen’s Garden from overlapping with the path to Sheo’s hut.

But outside of that, Greenpath is in really good shape. I think it really benefits from having the space to move as far out as it wants. As you can see, Unn’s room at the very bottom of the lake is the leftmost room on the entire map. Either way, Team Cherry did a good job on this one.

Crystal Peak

Our next stop is in Crystal Peak. Peak has a total of 26 rooms, and takes the general shape of a tall rectangle with horizontal offshoots. There are two entrances into Crystal Peak from the Forgotten Crossroads, and both of them have some issues.

The lower entrance is not quite long enough to make it across the gap created from the width of the higher entrance. So a hallway has to be added to make up the difference. This is the first of many border hallways which connect two separate areas together. And let’s just say that these hallways aren’t going to be staying very straight, if you know what I mean. 

As for the higher entrance, it actually doesn’t drop down far enough to line up with the lower entrance. This is in part due to that vertical hallway added in Crossroads that we looked at earlier. But this problem actually compounds more as we look deeper into Crystal Peak.

Two additional vertical shafts are needed to connect upper Peak to lower Peak. Nook actually had to extend the well drop at the top of Crossroads to keep these rooms from overlapping. This extended hallway on the left also pushes the Crystal Crawler room up so it can line up with the Grub challenge room on the right. So while some of Crystal Peak’s weirdness is due to things happening in Crossroads, there are still some internal misalignments within it as well.

Another issue pops up at the Crystal Dash challenge rooms that connect Dirtmouth to Peak. The path is simply too short, and two hallways were added to make the section long enough.

I should mention that Crystal Peak was one of the earlier maps that Nook recreated, as she was going area by area at first, and her methodology for dealing with misalignments wasn’t fully set in stone yet. At first, Nook wanted to avoid making these extra hallways as much as possible. But as she got further into the project, she began to realize that it was going to be impossible to line up all of Hallownest’s rooms without more liberal use of these hallways. Before coming to this realization, she employed a different trick to fix some of the misalignments in Crystal Peak, scaling.

A good example of this is the vertical room right of the lower bench room. This room has three exits on the left side of the screen. But these exits are too close together, and don’t match up with the exits they connect to. Nook chose to scale up the entire room itself so that it aligned with these three adjacent exits. However, outside of Peak and a few rooms in the Soul Sanctum, Nook rarely used this method to line up rooms.

Crystal Peak is home to a very unique set of room connections. When you drop off the cliff at Hallownest’s Crown, you will go to one of two separate rooms depending on if you exited by going down or by going out. The downward path actually does link up pretty closely to where we would expect. Nook opted to show the further path on her map, and it’s fairly reasonable all things considered. The only other spot in the game that acts like this is the drop off in Howling Cliffs. You can either drop into King’s Pass or Dirtmouth depending on how you exit the room. 

Speaking of Dirtmouth, let’s check out this little observation deck where Quirrel can be found. In his dialogue, Quirrel mentions that he can just make out the light from Dirtmouth all the way off in the distance. Now, is this possible? Realistically, Quirrel probably would not be able to see Dirtmouth itself. This is true when looking at both Nook’s map and the ingame minimap. The shape of the cliffs would block his view. But from the game’s opening cutscene, we can see that the surface world of Hollow Knight appears to have a lot of fog and clouds. So it’s possible that light being emitted from Dirtmouth might be reflected off the clouds above it and that might be visible to Quirrel in the Crystal Peak. So I’m calling this one plausible.

While not as solid as Greenpath, Crystal Peak is reasonably connected together, all things considered. Things are a bit spaced out, but nothing overlaps, so that’s a plus in my book. But unfortunately, Crystal Peak is not quite “peak”.

Fog Canyon

Fog Canyon is a small, humble area with only 13 rooms. And it doesn’t cheat much to achieve this. The biggest offender in this area is the explosive bubble room, which overlaps somewhat with the room below it. So it has to be moved back and up to fit properly.

While Fog Canyon might fit nicely internally, its connections to other parts of Hallownest are pretty egregious. The whole area is just too small for the space it’s supposed to take up. Nook decided to line the area up with its connection to Queen’s Station, which is the lowest section of Fog Canyon. This results in very long, winding hallways between Crossroads, Greenpath, and the upper portion of the Fungal Wastes. Even the connections to Queen’s Garden aren’t quite long enough to make it on their own.

So internally, Fog Canyon looks great, but its border hallways are just silly. You’d really need the Mantis Claw to get anywhere in this version of Hallownest. Which I guess is already kinda true, but it would be even more true than it already is.

Fungal Wastes

Fungal Wastes is next with a total of 30 rooms, some of which are packed together quite tightly. And for the most part, things don’t overlap much. However, Nook did have to smush the Shrumal Ogre arena room into the room to its right.

Vertical hallways had to be added near Mantis Village in a couple of spots, mainly so that the bottom of Fungal Wastes was low enough to connect to both Deepnest and the Royal Waterways.

However, the most blatant flaw in Fungal Waste’s layout is the room leading up to the Fungal Core. You probably remember seeing an entrance to this room when first exploring Fungal Wastes. You likely hadn’t found the Mantis Claw by this point, so this room entrance taunts you by being too high up to reach. 

But with the placement of these rooms, the Fungal Core would be overlapping with the room directly above it. The only way this path works is if this entrance is lower than the wall you have to scale to access it.

Right beside the Fungal Core, another vertical hallway has to be added to line up the cross section between Fungal Wastes, Deepnest and Queen’s Garden.

So, remember back when we were talking about all the extra hallways that had to be added in the Forgotten Crossroads? Well, both Fungal Wastes and City of Tears are downstream of that piss storm, and we’re now going to see the consequences of shifting things around so drastically up there.

Fungal Wastes is now really far away from the City of Tears, and by extension, the Royal Waterways as well. In the top right section of the Wastes, the player can find a large door that is chained shut. The other side of this same door can be found in the City of Tears elevator room that leads back up to the Forgotten Crossroads. But these rooms are nowhere near each other on the composite map. Because both areas are connected to Crossroads, they are forced apart due to that level’s janked up layout. And this is even after pushing the Crossroads elevator as far to the left as possible to get it closer to Fungal Wastes.

So, Nook decided to add a few really long hallways to connect the Fungal Wastes to both the City of Tears and the Royal Waterways. 

City of Tears

And so we’ve finally arrived in the heart of Hallownest; the City of Tears. This area is massive, with 37 exterior rooms, which is STILL 3 less than the Forgotten Crossroads. The City of Tears was a uniquely challenging area for Nook to map out due to the sheer openness of the rooms. A lot of the rooms in Tears aren’t closed off at the edges, instead implying that there is more to see just beyond the edge of the screen. Because of this, Nook decided to fill in these gaps with additional background to reveal the unseen portions of the city. It was an insane amount of effort, but it really helps illustrate just how massive the city really is.

Some of the buildings look a bit strange when seen in their entirety, but let’s be totally honest here. The buildings in the City of Tears just look weird in general. For me, it’s all these windows. I think their design was inspired by termite mounds, and these windows are where the holes on a termite mound would be, but I’m just not a fan. Don’t get me wrong, I really appreciate the smart, walkable, mixed-use urban design of the City of Tears, but man, these buildings are weird.

The opening portion of Tears, starting from where Quirrel is found, heading down into the city streets and then back up into Soul Sanctum, lines up fairly well. However, the bridge path up top where Zote can be found is a bit longer than the ground path near Lemm, so a hallway is needed to space things out a bit.

In the Soul Sanctum, the most troublesome room is just left of the Soul Master boss arena. This room drops down low enough that it’s overlapping with the bridge underneath. From this bridge, we’d expect a little bit more space, as we can see open air just above it in game.

A bit of hallway was also added before the lift heading up to Crossroads to help push the rest of the City further right, so it’d line up better with that side of the world map. And this hallway isn’t the only one. More are added in the top and bottom paths near the Hollow Knight fountain to space the city out even more. Without all these extended hallways, there would be a pretty big misalignment with the Resting Grounds elevator.

If we look at the Watcher’s Spire, we can see that the lower portion of the tower doesn’t go high enough to line up properly with the Soul Sanctum tower, so a vertical hallway is needed to help out. The Watcher Knight room is also misaligned with the room right below it. These two vertical hallways just don’t line up at all. Luckily for Nook, fixing this on the composite map was pretty straightforward.

Yet another hallway is needed after Watcher’s Spire, and we can also see a pretty crazy border hallway with the elevator shaft heading down to the Ancient Basin. Because we’ve been stretching the city so much to the right, this room actually needs to cut back to the left. It also needs to be further down to line up properly with the left side of Waterways, which itself had to be pushed down due to the infamous Tuk Rancid Egg room.

On the far right side of the city, King’s Station shares two exits with the room on its left, which, unfortunately, do not line up. While it’s not on the map, Nook actually did recreate the Pleasure House elevator room, and we can see that it’s not quite tall enough to reach the other room on the composite map. There’s also another vertical hallway added above King’s Station. This was all done so that there would be open space beside the window found at the top of the Tower of Love.

Also, this isn’t really a misalignment, so much as an observation that the bugs of Hallownest have no idea how to build buildings, but the penthouse of this tower is way wider than all the floors below it. I blame gentrification.

Finally, there are the connections to Kingdom’s Edge, all of which are just way off. The two exits near the Tower of Love, which aren’t terribly far apart, split way off of each other in Kingdom’s Edge. These types of misalignments can’t be blamed on changes made elsewhere in the map. These rooms just don’t line up right at all. You probably also noticed that the horizontal distance here is also quite large. That’s due to the top path between City and Kingdom’s Edge, the one that leads to the Colosseum of Fools. This hallway is so long it pushes Kingdom’s Edge really far to the right. This hallway is also higher up than the game implies, so another vertical hallway is needed. So none of the connections between Tears and Kingdom’s Edge line up very well.

All things considered, the City of Tears could have been a lot worse. Its internal connections do make sense for the most part, and there really aren’t many major overlaps either, which I think are the biggest offenders when it comes to map layouts.

I can sort of imagine a long hallway existing between rooms in my mind, but two rooms occupying the same space simply isn’t possible outside of the U.K.

Dirtmouth & King’s Pass

I think we need a break from some of these more involved levels. Let’s take a look at something more simple for a change. Dirtmouth and King’s Pass are only two rooms, so there's not much to keep track of here. However, as you can see, there’s a pretty large gap between these two rooms. This is because Howling Cliffs drops directly into King’s Pass, and since the cliffs are connected to Greenpath, we end up with a pretty large gap that’s completely unaccounted for. Team Cherry really should have put an extra long, empty hallway here. I think it would have tremendously helped the overall game experience.

Howling Cliffs

The Howling Cliffs only have 6 rooms on the composite map. And everything actually lines up pretty well. It’s probably the best region on the entire map in terms of rooms fitting together. I should mention that the drop down into King’s Pass is a bit strange. There’s a very long border hallway that needs to be added. Also, the opening cutscene from Hollow Knight shows us what the path from Howling Cliffs to Dirtmouth should look like, and it’s not really clear where King’s Pass is supposed to be. Like it’s just not there? Where did it go?

The more astute of you might have noticed that a certain room was left out of Nook’s composite map. In the top left hand corner of the area is the entrance to the Stag Nest. And the Stag Nest’s room placement is so nonsensical that even Team Cherry left the room off the minimap completely. If we were to put the actual Stag Nest room on the map, it clearly overlaps with the room below it. And we can see that the edge of this room extends far beyond the edge of the actual cliff itself. It’s like Team Cherry wants to treat this room like the various internal rooms found in the game, but didn’t actually give the room a door entrance like you’d expect. This room is just very weird, and weird things make me angry.

Royal Waterways

We caught a glimpse of the Royal Waterways earlier but let’s figuratively dive a bit deeper into this area. The Waterways consists of about 16 rooms, a fair number of which are quite large, meaning the Waterways still takes up quite a bit of space. Right off the bat, the whole area is lowered just a bit to prevent the infamous Tuk Rancid Egg room from poking up into the city streets.

Towards the left side of the area, Cornifer’s room is moved slightly down to make it line up correctly with Fungal Wastes. A couple of vertical hallways are needed to make the left half of Waterways line up correctly with the long elevator shaft leading down to the Abyss. You can also see that the tight hallway that the player is supposed to Crystal Dash through had to be lengthened on both sides. The bottom path of the elevator also has an extra hallway that goes down a little bit. This was done to make the tram line in Ancient Basin line up vertically with the tram lines in Deepnest and Kingdom’s Edge.

On the right side of the Waterways, things actually line up pretty well. However, just like with City, the Waterways are quite a ways away from the Kingdom’s Edge, so a pretty big hallway is needed to connect them.

You might have noticed that this map does not contain the Junk Pit, where the Godseeker can be found locked away in her cocoon. If you weren’t aware, these rooms, along with the Pale Lurker arena, were added into Hollow Knight a year after its release in the Godmaster update, and there are a few unique aspects to them likely because of this. Two of the new Royal Waterways rooms actually do fit nicely on the map, but this third room is special because it very clearly runs straight through another portion of Waterways and connects to the room containing the Nailsmith’s hut in City of Tears. Well, it almost connects anyways.

Team Cherry left this third room off the map, which kind of makes sense because the lower passage to the room is a doorway, making this an internal room. However, the higher passage to this room is an exit hallway. It’s a bizarre inconsistency that could have just been avoided by adding a doorway in the Nailsmith room instead of a hallway. What were they thinking? Team Cherry obviously should have used a doorway here. And yet this game sold hundreds of copies.

Another reason Nook left these rooms out of her map is because the parallax in the Junk Pit room is way more complex than the vast majority of rooms in the game, perhaps because Team Cherry had more time to work on the room, or had a change in design philosophy between the release of the base game and the release of Godmaster. This was Nook’s attempt at fixing the room, and it just didn’t end up looking right.

Overall, Royal Waterways is a bit weird, but it does a good job at maintaining internal consistency with its level design. Unfortunately that’s pretty much the only thing good about this place.

Ancient Basin

The Ancient Basin consists of 16 rooms, as long as you include the Birthplace, which isn’t actually included on the minimap. The Ancient Basin is unique from all the other areas of Hallownest because it only borders one other area, the Royal Waterways. Because of this, and because of the vast empty space available to the Ancient Basin at the bottom of the map, it doesn’t have any major misalignments or overlaps. We do have a near-miss over where the breakable ground leads to a Pale Ore. But everything else just works, probably because every path leads to a dead end, so nothing really has to line back up.

While we’re down here, let’s take a look at the massive Abyss entrance room. This room alone is taller than the entirety of the Soul Sanctum. This room was also an absolute nightmare for Nook to clean up due to its insane parallaxing. The main component of the background is this strange low resolution wall structure. In game, it stretches all the way across the entire room, but to work on the composite map, Nook had to mask out the entire background and manually add a thinner version of the background back into the image.

Queen’s Garden

Moving on to Queen’s Garden, this area contains 18 rooms in total, and is one of my personal favorite areas in Hollow Knight. But how well does it hold up to scrutiny?

Let’s start at the very top, where Garden connects to Greenpath. To the left of this room is the White Lady’s cocoon room, which has two sections to it that remain isolated from one another. This lets the player catch a glimpse of the White Lady’s cocoon without actually being able to enter it. Because of this, a vertical hallway is needed here on the right to line up the lower path to White Lady’s room with the top path.

From looking at the main loop of Queen’s Garden, we can see that some vertical adjustments had to be made to line things up internally as well as correctly connect to Fog Canyon. In the bottom portion of the area, a somewhat long horizontal hallway is needed next to one of the vine platforming rooms. Without this, the rooms above would overlap with each other pretty badly.

So Queen’s Garden wasn’t quite as tightly constructed as I had hoped. But keep in mind that’s my fault for having hope.

Deepnest

Just below Queen’s Garden is everyone’s favorite pit of death and despair, Deepnest. Deepnest is on the bigger side too, with 27 rooms. Every connection to Deepnest lines up well on Nook’s map, but they all needed to be extended a bit to connect together. Deepnest itself also had to be extended just a tiny bit so its connection with Queen’s Garden lines up correctly. We also have some additional hallways off the first Garpede challenge room to line things up with Fungal Wastes and the rest of Deepnest.

But if we look at just Deepnest’s internal connections, we do find a few issues. Over in the Distance Village we have a misalignment with the room directly to the right. This path leading to Midwife is too high up. Right next to the drop from Fungal Wastes, we have another pair of exits that just don’t line up at all, requiring a winding hallway to patch things up.

Another pesky misalignment can be found with the tram room where Cloth appears. This room has two bottom exits, but they are too close together to line up with the top exits of the room below. This room, and the room to the left of it, also had to be moved up, so that the entire Failed Tramway portion of Deepnest would align vertically. The tall room near Mask Maker is what pushed everything up, and we can see how the path right of here had to be lengthened out as a result.

With how cramped together the right side of Deepnest is, I’m surprised things have lined up as well as they have. But it’s not quite up to par with some of the other areas in Hallownest. Sorry to all my Deepnest stans out there. Your life is already so hard.

Resting Grounds

Resting Grounds is one of the smaller sections of Hallownest, with only 13 rooms, so there’s really not much to get wrong here. That said, its connection to Crystal Peak ended up pretty misaligned. The Knight takes a bit of a tumble when coming down this hole, it seems.

Aside from that, an extra hallway is needed to line up the top path of Resting Grounds with the lower path. And another hallway is added right of the Blue Lake. Overall, the Resting Grounds could have been a bit better considering how few rooms it has, but it’s not awful by any means.

Before we go, I should mention the Resting Grounds’ notable landmark, the Blue Lake. As we can see, the lake itself is roughly right above the City of Tears. We know from the minimap that the lake doesn’t span the whole width of the city. But from the composite map we can also see that the lake can’t even be that deep either. There’s no way all this rain is coming from one puny lake. I’m starting to think this game is unrealistic.

Kingdom’s Edge

To finish off our journey through Hallownest, let’s take a look at Kingdom’s Edge. We’ve already talked about how none of its connections work very well. Some of you may be aware that Kingdom’s Edge used to be a part of Deepnest. In fact, the file names for all the rooms in Kingdom’s Edge are called “Deepnest_East”, but eventually Team Cherry decided to tear Deepnest apart and make Kingdom’s Edge its own area. Perhaps this is why Kingdom’s Edge doesn’t really connect to the rest of the world very smoothly.

Kingdom’s Edge has 26 external rooms, however, Nook included an additional 6 rooms not included on the minimap. The Cast-Off Shell room has been included, as well as the incredibly tall room on the far right side of the area that leads to a giant Geo deposit. This room is normally reached through a doorway, but Nook decided to include it anyway since it doesn’t overlap with anything. We can see that this room does reach pretty far down into the Abyss, with it stopping somewhere in the middle of the giant Abyss entrance room.

The other addition Nook made was the internal rooms in the Colosseum of Fools which also aren’t shown on the map. The Colosseum is home to what is arguably the most blatant spacial deceit in the entire game. When you enter the colosseum proper, there’s a very long hallway the player has to traverse, which really builds up the tension leading to the various trials encountered there. But the Warrior’s Pit, just below the Colosseum is both a lot shorter, and yet reaches the other side of the colosseum. Since this is such a segregated area of the map, it really doesn’t matter, but I would say it’s the biggest single cheat the game pulls off.

Another issue I noticed with the Colosseum is this hole right beneath it. This is, presumably, the shoot where defeated warriors are dumped out of the Colosseum. On the composite map, this shoot is directly underneath the Shade Trap room in the Warrior’s Pit. However, I think it’s supposed to line up with this grate near the Warrior Pit bench, where we can see light shining up from below. But even if you scooted the Colosseum over as much as you could, it still wouldn’t reach. 

As for the rest of Kingdom’s Edge, this long, narrow room isn’t quite wide enough to reach the rooms beside it, so some extra length is needed. Additionally, the Tram room at the bottom of the area doesn’t line up correctly with either of the rooms next to it. It’s too low and too short.

As for the Hive, it fits surprisingly well into the bottom portion of Kingdom’s Edge. And while we’re here, let’s take a quick peek at Hive Queen Vespa. As you can see, she is one giant woman.

The section to the right of the Hive is also very well constructed. I’d say that Kingdom’s Edge is yet another area that benefits from having plenty of room to sprawl and not having many other area connections to handle.

Speaking of things that are sprawling, looking at Kingdom’s Edge like this helps us examine some strange recurring imagery. You might have noticed these weird bone-like structures winding in and out of the walls in various places, with a huge concentration of them being found right next to the Cast-Off Shell. It seems likely that these are part of the Wyrm’s decaying carcass, which is coiled up all throughout Kingdom’s Edge. The portion of the corpse we walk into seems to just be the mouth of the Wyrm, and the Wyrm itself is actually much, much longer than this. Taking these additional bones scattered across the area into account, here’s a more complete view of the Wyrm corpse as it can be seen in Kingdom’s Edge.

We can also see a lot of these white branches and discarded or dislodged teeth littered all over the place, which likely come from the Wyrm corpse as well. If we assume that these objects tend to stay close to the carcass, then it might be even bigger than what we can actually see. Looking at it now, the Wyrm easily dwarfs any other creature in Hallownest. It’s way bigger than Bardoon. It’s way bigger than the Colosseum carcass. It’s even way bigger than the infamous Tuk Rancid Egg room. It truly is gargantuan, and can only really be appreciated thanks to looking at things from a new point of view.

If you want to read more speculation about the Wyrm’s anatomy and biology, check out this post by fellow Hollow Knight community member, MEBI. It’s some really cool stuff and I highly recommend you check it out.

White Palace

We’ve reached the end of Nook’s creation of Hallownest, but I wanted to do a bonus round for the White Palace. Since Nook hasn’t created a map for this area, we’ll be using a different composite map created by Raining Chain. This map can be viewed on their website and is more focused on showing item locations than having realistic room connections. But it can still be used for comparing scale.

Before the White Palace was moved into the Dream Realm, it was originally located in the Palace Grounds in the Ancient Basin. If we place the palace into the spot it supposedly was before, we can see that it’s absolutely massive. The White Palace almost reaches up to the top of the City of Tears. So how does this make sense? You could argue that the Palace as we see it in the Dream Realm doesn’t truly represent the Palace as it was in the real world. Or you could argue that Team Cherry just wasn’t concerned about this when making the level. Either way, it’s very funny to think about the White Palace literally sticking up through the city’s sewer system. 

As for the rooms in the White Palace itself, there are a few things worth noting. First, the Path of Pain does not fit in with the rest of the map. But, it’s not really clear if the Path of Pain is supposed to be a real place at all. It seems to just exist to protect the sealed memory found at the end. So maybe it shouldn’t count.

The second weirdness is the Pale King’s workshop. This room’s exits are so incredibly misaligned, there’s no possible way that it was a mistake. This could imply that the Pale King was trying to hide his workshop and used some kind of Pale King magic to make its entrance nonsensical, or it’s just further proof that the White Place as it exists in the Dream Realm has somehow become warped from how it existed in the real world. Or it means some other third thing that I’m too stupid to think of.

I’ve been quite harsh on Hollow Knight throughout this video, picking it apart and criticizing the most minute of details. But I should mention that I don’t think these misalignments and overlaps are all that noticeable when playing the actual game. And I think most people who played Hollow Knight would probably agree. The world doesn’t feel broken while playing, which ultimately is what’s actually important from a gameplay perspective. So I do think Team Cherry pulled it off where it actually counts. Except maybe Crossroads. Still not sure how I feel about that one.

Either way, it’s impressive how Nook worked around all these issues to put together a complete map like this, and I had such a great time poking around her creation and seeing what a spatially accurate Hallownest might look like. And like I said before, you can view the whole world map over on Hallownest.net if you’re interested.

Of course, with Silksong on the horizon, the big question on all our minds is, how will that game’s world fit together? I asked Nook if she was planning on mapping out Silksong like she did for Hollow Knight and committing to cleaning up another of Team Cherry’s geographical messes.

She said “fuck no”.

Songs used:

Dung Defender - Hollow Knight OST

Hornet - Hollow Knight OST

Aquatic Mine (Instrumental) - Sonic Adventure 2

Brinstar Overgrown with Vegetation Area - Super Metroid

Forgotten Crossroads (Bass Loop) - Hollow Knight

Greenpath (Bass Loop) - Hollow Knight

Crystal Peak (Main Loop) - Hollow Knight

Fog Canyon - Hollow Knight

Fungal Wastes (Bass Pizz Loop) - Hollow Knight

City of Tears (Inside Loop) - Hollow Knight

Dirtmouth - Hollow Knight

Godhome Atrium - Hollow Knight

Royal Waterways - Hollow Knight

Abyss - Hollow Knight

Queen’s Garden (Main Loop) - Hollow Knight

Deepnest - Hollow Knight

Resting Grounds - Hollow Knight

Kingdom’s Edge - Hollow Knight

White Palace - Hollow Knight

Enter Hallownest - Hollow Knight OST