Uh, so Nook's website has crashed due to the influx of traffic... Please be sure to check back in a few days to see the map in full! EDIT: It's back up now!
Honestly, I've always assumed Hallownest was built like an anthill but represented like an ant farm. This would mean that some rooms curve and layer back on themselves or other rooms, but Cornifer, being the legendary cartographer he is, figured out how to represent the 3D world in a 2D space.
The problem with that logic is that for the most part, maps and locations _do_ align, which would almost never happen in a 3D world with 3D space logic. So it is just a ton of blunders and negligence on Team Cherry's part.
Yeaahhh… (Let’s just all ignore that a good 40% or more of the actual map was never drawn by Cornifer in the first place and that all his rather “notebook sketch” like mapping of hallownest get entirely replaced by the night itself TLDR: Man cornifer’s such a good cartographer I love him No but seriously we should appreciate the knight’s drawing skills more often)
Damn, reediting every single background as well as high res screenshoting and connecting everything together?? Nook did insane amounts of work! Props to her!
People on scripterswars recreated the entire map way back in 2017 after some months of release. It has way less unnecessary details and it is wayyy more useful: it tells you the location of all grubs, bosses, benches, charms, and other stuff.
I like to think that the hollow knight map is canonically three dimensions, and sometimes hallways or rooms can bend into the third dimension in order to account for overlaps. I guess this is supported by that one telescope in City of Tears that allows you to view the world from a different angle, and by several cutscenes.
Rain World's map does actually try to represent just this sort of three-dimensionality in game, with rooms appearing on different layers and making many connections somewhat vague to represent long stretches of pipe not depicted in gameplay. It mostly works, even if it does make things a little more confusing to navigate. I think in retrospect I'm glad Hollow Knight didn't try to literally represent that.
@@sithdude2436yeah I was wondering if the white palace really was that tall, then Ancient basin could be moved forward or backward from where city of tears is, and so that way the palace could either be a humongous skyscraper in an extremely large and high cave, or just be mostly built into the ceiling and the building is just connected to the ceiling of the cave.
I highly doubt what I said above about the palace is true though since we see the front of the palace and it really doesn’t look like it would be that tall, probably just how the game had to map it since it’s 2d and it shouldn’t make sense, or the palace was just much smaller than the possibly warped one in the dream world.
me too, but i really enjoy the thought of hallownest being narrow and pressed against glass looking like an ant farm like youre just looking at ur silly little bugs doing bug things
28:00 I think the problem with overlapping rooms is that we're looking at a 3D environment through a 2D lense. The stag nest probably wouldn't actually clip into other areas if a z-axis could be better included.
Yes. I would like to point out that from the little intro sequence we can see that the path to dirtmouth is winding a bit, so if we assume that the length is shortened in game to make it 2d, then the length on other side of dirtmouth could also be shortened, meaning dirtmouth could be further away from crystal peak than it appears, meaning that the view from that observation room might actually be able to see the village far away
I don’t have any issue with all the hallways i always imagined sometimes between rooms there’d be a hallway and it’s skipped. Kinda like how a film doesn’t show every second of a character travelling somewhere
Yeh thou it slightly classes with the concept of map cartographing in the game. You often draw hallways, so why not draw the rest? That is why people usually use more the argument that technically "in lore" the map isnt all in an xy flat axis, since well, there is background that shows the world extends 3d too. Doesnt work 100% of the time, but works enought so ingame people usually dont notice the paradoxes.
I agree. I’ve always felt that it’s a good practice to differentiate how a game’s world is depicted in game vs. how it is in-universe. That what we see in game isn’t a perfectly literal representation of how it “really is”. Take Peach’s Castle from SM64 for instance. Are we supposed to believe that most of her castle is just empty rooms with paintings strewn about? Probably not. It’s just an instance of Gameplay vs. Story Segregation.
It's the vertical hallways that I'm more concerned about, since they may break the lore. A vertical shaft is only traversable with mantis claw, so in locations where mantis claw might not have been attained, the knight might be able to traverse these shafts without mantis claw, which doesn't make sense.
It's interesting that you consider needing to add hallways and such as misalignments in the map. I kind of always assumed that there were implied hallways and such between rooms, rather than them being perfectly contiguous. It's really awesome to see the amazing work Nook put into this, though, my goodness!
Depends. Some transitions match real well and could be expected to stitch. Others have very different style and ambiances, making the space ellipse obvious.
I had the same feeling about the stag station or the hot spring in the forgotten crossroads, where entering it might actually take you to a different Z-depth to provide the space for the taller roof and the tunnelways.
hmm... I feel like horizontal hallways I can buy that for, but vertical and jagged hallways less so? Like any vertical shaft would require the mantis claw to be used to go up it, which some of the vertical transitions don't, and stuff that has to go up or down as well as side to side during a room transition feels like it would be a room if it was actually intended.
it seems more likely crossroads was made first relatively accurately, but then over time various things were added and maybe a few things remove and there simply wasn't space with other regions around to remodel as needed. it wasn't inexperience with the first map but rather general inexperience that the first section of the map suffers the worst from by merit of being around the longest.
ya know, i just think a lot of "rooms that overlap" would be placed behind eachother, obviously its a 2D game but it has a lot of parralax and suggestions of 3D space, so i dont think its that bad that the map doesnt fully align 100% of the time
Man... I feel like someone making something of this complexity is committing to a pretty thankless job, one most people might glance over and then walk away from. So it's kind of cool they get their work really delved into so more of us can appreciate everything that went into it
I'm so glad you put some focus on the infamous Tuk Egg Room. That room was the place that truly made the game for me. I've beat this game and all of its endings many times. I've achieved the full 112% thrice. Yet, throughout my entire Hollow Knight journey, nothing will ever parallel the pure ecstasy of my first time stumbling into the infamous Tuk Egg Room. I cried, prayed, and donated $2,000 to my local St. Jude's Children's Hospital branch the first time I saw that beautiful big bouncing boy perusing the garbage beneath the City of Tears. Thank you, Mossbag, for bringing forth into the public eye what is quite possibly the greatest achievement in game development history. I am forever indebted to you. 24:27
The Infamous Tuk Egg Room combines the grandeur of the White Palace, the mystery of the Void, the holiness of the Garbage Pit, the isolation of Kingdom's Edge and the terrifying atmosphere of Deepnest's cryptid-filled tunnels. Truly one of a kind.
A fair bit of these can be accounted for by treating Hollow Knight as a two-dimensional adventure through an otherwise three-dimensional world. Just because the camera pans left on a room change doesn't mean the Knight had to have walked a perfectly straight line, the path could have angled without players being made aware. I think that particularly accounts for places like the White Palace and Soul Sanctum, and you can already see it basically canonized by the existence of doorway rooms and the Stag paths that take off outside the plane of the map.
@@TheEmbracedOne It's a beautiful work, and a staggering amount of effort! You have my admiration for sure, I adore these kinds of maps. Gl on your game development!
People on scripterswars recreated the entire map way back in 2017 after some months of release. It has way less unnecessary details and it is wayyy more useful: it tells you the location of all grubs, bosses, benches, charms, and other stuff.
Mossbag, i can't stress enough how sane your uploads keep me during the wait for Silksong. Thank you so much for everything you do for this wonderful community.
@@TutorialsGuyPlease never say that again. Any semblance of stability that remains in my mind is held together with used duct tape and a sticky substance I think might be glue.
I was going to say the same thing. The Map itself is a masterpiece but I have to give it to Mossbag for taking the time to break it down like he did. Good job to the both of them!
I thought of the White palace as deeper in the Z-axis (assuming that X is horizontal and Y is vertical here), I always imagined that the entrance was it's own long hallway that goes deeper in, and didn't line up with anything because it was on a whole other plane. But then you'd have to make multiple composite maps to make what would ultimately just become a 3D map
You know I do kind of like how Silksong is taking a long time, because we get to see fun videos like this which probably wouldn't exist if Silksong released already! I don't think this is "scraping the bottom of the barrel", I think this is getting a chance to show off a cool thing that a HK fan did and giving her the spotlight she deserves for her hard work. How Nook did this is actually really interesting and cool and I admire her effort. I hope her own games she's developing goes well and I hope to see more fun videos like this from the HK fandom in the future!
Overlapping isnt a problem. It can easily be handwaved away with "You're underground, there are some slight curves/diagonals that you can't notice go toward/away from the camera
this interactive map is one of my favorite fan-made projects EVER. the sheer level of dedication and love that Nook put into making it as smoothly tied together as she could is simply gorgeous
Give this man a SilkSong, before he starts studying the phylogenetics of the different inhabitants of Hollow Knight !! Seriously, cool video ! I really didn't expect a tidiness contest between the areas of Hollow Knight !
@@Blue14113 He mentioned a fan project that aimed to create a conlang in the style of Hallownest's apparent dialect, based on the signage around the world. It's been dubbed "Hallowspeak" and has its own website by the same name.
I think that most of the overlapping rooms and misalignments can be handwaved away by saying they're in front of or behind each other, and that Hallownest isn't actually 2D and flat, only represented as such. I always thought of the Pale King's workshop as just going the other way. Like, you walk down a corridor, and take two lefts, and now you're in a new corridor going back towards where you came from.
I once had this "good idea" for a Minecraft project to create the entire map in creative (if the knight was the size of a Minecraft avatar). Now this didn't get too far as it really was a hassle to even get the outlines, but I did notice that it really was near-impossible to get the rooms to line up neatly, I had to extend some hallways or drops within the crossroads (the only part where I did stuff) to make it actually fit continuously
With the White Palace, it's worth remembering that it could have gone deeper into the background rather than lying flat on the current map. With the workshop entrance, it's possible that the halls would be curved in some way. Or it's all just a dream, oh well.
That and, as funny as it would be, the actual White Palace as it was before the Infection was probably _not_ a gigantic death Labyrinth of buzzsaws. I feel like that stuff was implemented when it was pulled into the Dream World and hidden behind a barrier.
This makes me appreciate Team Cherry's work and the Hollow Knight community even more. I can't imagine the time it took them to make all of those ridiculously detailed rooms, pretty awesome people would take the time to make a map this big.
I feel like some room misalignments can be explained away with the room being in a different plane in the 3D space, like how the door rooms are in the background.
Absolutely love fan projects like this, and also completely understand that "fuck no" at the end lmao. This is an impressive endeavor, but needless to say I very much understand why one would only want to do it *once.*
Remember that one room in Greenpath that connects Hornet's arena with the Lake of Unn that everyone complains about because there's nothing there? Well maybe Team Cherry knew that other such connecting rooms must exist but left them out because they didn't want there to be too many rooms like that one.
First off, I'm so glad you got so many eyes on nook's project, mossbag. That's wicked cool of you! 😃 Second, thanks for taking us on that trip through the map and highlighting all of those extra/changed hallways. Third, that's gotta be your best video ending. Ohmygod. 🤣
30:16 one thing about this room is that whenever I go in it with wayward compass, it always says I’m in a completely different area like kingdom’s edge or greenpath.
The fact that this map and by extension Hollow Knight contains 307 rooms is honestly kind of mindblowing. The amount of work Nook put into this to connect everything in a seamless way is incredible. I’m shocked at how few rooms there are, Hallownest is huge and I would’ve thought it had 500 rooms, if not 1000. Though, I guess a lot the rooms in Hollow Knight are quite large, which is something I never really thought about.
I absolutely loved the in-depth look at the details and making of this map! More content like this! It's such a cool alternative look at a world we love so well.
Fun fact, the game Rain world (has a lot of similarities with HK) has a fully interactive map, made with screenshots that shows all the rooms and how they connect in ghe regions, the map even features the geometry of rooms the creature spawns in them and the in game file names for ALL of the rooms. I just think thats cool
@micahjones7837 the map is so big, and you barely have a sense of where you are supposed to go. I think ive explored most of it, but I have to go back and finish the game, probably restart again
True but the map doesn’t really attempt to fit things together super well and the different areas are all given fully separate maps. Also the game kinda uses pipes to cheat with how it puts stuff together.
Fireborn, Windette, BlueSR, Skurry, CcMacci, the developpers of Pale Court and the guy who beats GPZ every day till silksong releases: Are we a joke to you
@@Snt1_ They are a joke to me, not because their content is bad or anything, but just because I don't really watch them, therefore they don't exist to me.
@@WanderTheNomadyeah, but main comment mentioned the "Hollow Knight comunity" as a whole, therefore our individuality is irrelevant in this discussion.
When this video started, I assumed the map was going to be a project handled by a full team or something. Like, one person per area. One gets Crossroads, one gets Deepnest, and so on and so forth. To learn one person took care of all of it, and even provides the necessary edits to make it look good AND make sense is just mind boggling. Kudos to Nook for taking on such a project!
So much weird, understated humor in this video. And I hate weird things. Thanks for showcasing this incredible work, and walking through all the challenges involved in making it!
Would be hilarious is in a future interview the dev say this video specifically is the reason silk song took so long because they wanted the world to line up perfectly.
Yeah for real! Just going over the number of edits in the forgotten crossroads I was thinking “man I would have given up already at this point”. The dedication is remarkable.
Then you see a map of a game like Rain World and realize that the map is separate into distinct LAYERS, meaning several rooms are in front or behind many others. This extra level of depth really makes the world feel more real, which is precisely what Rain World strives to do with its real-time ecosystem.
My idea is that the maps aren’t broken, they’re just 3D. This is explored fully in Rain World with layering on the map, but in Hollow Knight the map is just an abstract 2D representation. In hollow knight, rooms appear to overlap because corridors and entrances are in front of or behind others, making rooms that sit behind or in front of one another. And the doorway thing is less about defined “internal” rooms and more about angles and rooms behind other rooms
As someone who aspires to code my own game in the HK style, watching educational and practical tutorials on world-building is very beneficial, especially given the amount of time and devotion required to create masterpieces like these
If u ever do it, put a plague doctor character named “Doc” in there and I promise I (Doc, aka Mud) will be your hardest fanboy and promote it when I am a multi millionaire and personally beat the shit out of anyone who critiques your game
i honestly assumed there were hallways between a lot of the screen transitions and they weren’t directly smushed together. some definitely feel connected directly but most just feel like there is a little walk that they just didn’t feel the need to add because its just empty.
I actually noticed or at least presumed some misalignments but I always just thought of them as being a result of Hollownest being 2D. I imagined the rooms to never be exactly on top of each other but kinda in front of behind from our point of view. The rooms you walk through don't actually face exactly east or west but may turn a bit towards or away from the camera.
Can absolutely confirm the theory of seeing the light of Dirtmouth. Having driven at night on many highways you can definitely see the glow of cities long before you can see the city itself.
Nook did an amazing job with everything, really an amazing work of art completing the puzzle. Thank you for showcasing such an amazing project and showing every change that had to be made to make it all perfect!
You see, many of these things can be explained by working off the wild theory that the universe of hollow knight is actually 3 dimensional genuinely though the level of work put into this is astounding, massive props to Nook for doing not just the lining up of everything, but also using actual in game assets to make things work correctly
Honestly I’m so glad this video exists. I always struggled with my understanding of how everything seemed to line up, so I’m glad to know my confusion was justified
Mossbag doesn't lack object permanence. Objects only exist when mossbag looks at them. That's why I carry a locket with his picture with me wherever I go in order to not disappear.
7:36 I want an immortal snail hollow knight mod. The player is invincible to normal enemies but the snail is always making a beeline straight for the player and if he touches you its game over. The mode starts with a cutscene of the snail escaping his tungsten capsule with ominous music.
The only conclusion one can draw from these changes, namely the re-scaling of rooms to make them fit, is that The Knight actually changes his size on a whim depending on his environment. I cant wait to see the video on all the lore ramifications this discovery has on the game.
Hey mossbag, i just wanted to thank you, i absolutely love your videos and you are probably by far the biggest reason why i even was able to finish this game. Normally i have the habit of dropping games pretty frequently either if something new catched my interest or if I'm just too frustrated (people might call me casual haha ) anyway, your videos kept bringing me back and back at the game until i pretty recently finally finished the game with everything that didn't require the buzzsaw Palace or nightmare grim and just succeeding that far gave me some real sense of accomplishment and confidence. Something i had been really lacking at that time so i wanted to say thank you, especially since that accomplishment probably gave me just the necessary strength to finally seek help with my depression so hey it might actually be that your videos kinda saved my life ^^ thank you
DS1 is mostly geographically consistent, aside from Tomb of the Giants, which clips into New Londo pretty significantly and also is nowhere near deep enough for the view into Ash Lake to actually exist. Aside from that, it's remarkably accurate, and the interconnections really do make geographical sense, and the existing inaccuracies are relatively minor and well-hidden. DS2 is... not spacially accurate, to say the least. It does a horrible job of actually covering those inconsistencies up, so it's blatantly obvious that the world makes no sense even when playing casually. DS3 also has quite a few inconsistencies, but unlike DS2, those inconsistencies are definitely intentional and very well-hidden. Basically every existing inaccuracy is in service of making the world feel larger than it really is, and it definitely works to the game's advantage to disguise how actually compact the game space is.
@@twistedgwazi5727 I think a lot of the inconsistencies in ds2 are probably intentional as well. Like, the infamous one, a lava lake at the top of a windmill. That's too obvious for devs to not have known. That *has* to be intentional. I think it works to highlight how messed up the world is, as long as you don't assume poor work from the devs and manage to see it from the perspective of a character in the world
personally ive always viewed the scene change loading as the knight travelling through some areas in the background (like the hallways being addrd by nook), which helped me understand why the rooms don't match exactly, as we just weren't showed the "gaps" very good video though!!! made me think about this more (and also got me more amazed at nook's insane efforts)
I always just assumed that between every two room transitions, there were miles and miles of paths and adventures we don't get to see. That both clears up any map alignment paradoxes, and explains why enemies that fall through a transition don't come out the other side - they get lost in the interim
I'm a writer and...while we all have some drawings in the early part of our projects they get modified a lot over time. My current maps looks nothing like they used to. Stuff was added, some places were teleported etc...
Yeah the above comments pretty much cover it. I'm sure consistency was a focus in the design phase, but various changes (some for gameplay, some for flow, some for clarity, etc.) would result in the end product being very different.
I will say, when you jump down the well the journey is longer than it looks, you can hop back up and its deeper than i assumed. I say thats what happens between areas. Cuts out the unimportant parts and gives you the most important parts.
I'd love to see something like this for Rain World, but unfortunately the map is kind of cursed in that game because of the layers, so it's probably a lot trickier to manage.
At least Rain World does have the advantage that you have a lot more freedom to line things up, since even the in-game map just represents pipe connections as wobbly dotted lines to suggest that it's cutting out longer stretches of pipe. So it's at least *conceptually* possible to make a consistent "canonical" map ... even if you'd need some kind of 3D software to do it.
That's because Rain World's map layers are meant to simulate a more 3D world. None the less a map like this has already existed with the interactive map project for Rain World. Someone is going even crazier by remaking the entire map, height and all, in Minecraft.
This video has single-handedly delayed Silksong another 2 years so Ari and William can make the world properly contiguous.
Thanks, wortsack
GOOD!!!!! I LIKE CONSISTENCY!!! NOTHING IN MY LIFE SHOULD CONFUSE ME. >:^(
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH NOOOOOOOOOOOOo
@@LuperisNone This statement is false
So we should have sacrificed him after all...
Good video but can you personally release silksong already
fr
yeah im thinking this is slop worthy
Ikr? Keeping that Silksong all to himself. Damn hoarder.
Oh my Dolan is here
Huge Hollow Knight Drama
Very considerate of Team Cherry to make their fanbase feel at home by giving Hallownest the same geometry as a clown car.
Hornet is made of non euclidean geometry confirmed.
DAMN- gonna need another ice age for that roast
💀
amazing comment lmao
@@spookidoxzsghostdont say ts again
Uh, so Nook's website has crashed due to the influx of traffic... Please be sure to check back in a few days to see the map in full!
EDIT: It's back up now!
Okie dokie
UH OH
ALREADY??
Will do!
Funny how much power a sacrificed Hollow Knight UA-camr has over a website.
Honestly, I've always assumed Hallownest was built like an anthill but represented like an ant farm. This would mean that some rooms curve and layer back on themselves or other rooms, but Cornifer, being the legendary cartographer he is, figured out how to represent the 3D world in a 2D space.
This, this is exactly how I feel. Like the world is more layered than it seems, but has to be expressed in 2D
The problem with that logic is that for the most part, maps and locations _do_ align, which would almost never happen in a 3D world with 3D space logic. So it is just a ton of blunders and negligence on Team Cherry's part.
@@i_am_ergoThat's just showing how good a cartographer Cornifer really is
Yeaahhh…
(Let’s just all ignore that a good 40% or more of the actual map was never drawn by Cornifer in the first place and that all his rather “notebook sketch” like mapping of hallownest get entirely replaced by the night itself
TLDR: Man cornifer’s such a good cartographer I love him
No but seriously we should appreciate the knight’s drawing skills more often)
Exactly how I feel. Cornifer is just a real one.
Damn, reediting every single background as well as high res screenshoting and connecting everything together?? Nook did insane amounts of work! Props to her!
People on scripterswars recreated the entire map way back in 2017 after some months of release. It has way less unnecessary details and it is wayyy more useful: it tells you the location of all grubs, bosses, benches, charms, and other stuff.
I like to think that the hollow knight map is canonically three dimensions, and sometimes hallways or rooms can bend into the third dimension in order to account for overlaps. I guess this is supported by that one telescope in City of Tears that allows you to view the world from a different angle, and by several cutscenes.
Rain World's map does actually try to represent just this sort of three-dimensionality in game, with rooms appearing on different layers and making many connections somewhat vague to represent long stretches of pipe not depicted in gameplay. It mostly works, even if it does make things a little more confusing to navigate. I think in retrospect I'm glad Hollow Knight didn't try to literally represent that.
That's what I always assumed too. It explains the Junk Pit passage and the White Palace looping around.
@@sithdude2436yeah I was wondering if the white palace really was that tall, then Ancient basin could be moved forward or backward from where city of tears is, and so that way the palace could either be a humongous skyscraper in an extremely large and high cave, or just be mostly built into the ceiling and the building is just connected to the ceiling of the cave.
I highly doubt what I said above about the palace is true though since we see the front of the palace and it really doesn’t look like it would be that tall, probably just how the game had to map it since it’s 2d and it shouldn’t make sense, or the palace was just much smaller than the possibly warped one in the dream world.
me too, but i really enjoy the thought of hallownest being narrow and pressed against glass looking like an ant farm like youre just looking at ur silly little bugs doing bug things
I like how you can still make hollowknigt content after all these years
Yes or we would go crazy
Could drop a 65 minute video about all breakable objects if he wanted
or a philosophical video essay about quantum grass
I would watch all his videos
It feels like he lost hope for silksong to release this year
28:00 I think the problem with overlapping rooms is that we're looking at a 3D environment through a 2D lense. The stag nest probably wouldn't actually clip into other areas if a z-axis could be better included.
Was about to say the same thing.
It also assumes that every room transition is the same length
Yes. I would like to point out that from the little intro sequence we can see that the path to dirtmouth is winding a bit, so if we assume that the length is shortened in game to make it 2d, then the length on other side of dirtmouth could also be shortened, meaning dirtmouth could be further away from crystal peak than it appears, meaning that the view from that observation room might actually be able to see the village far away
Rain world definitely implements the z axis much better than hollow knight lol
The real question: are the empty spaces between rooms made of void?
They're made of screen transitions, like hornet
Hornet is made of screen transitions confirmed
theyre made of hornet
stop
@@a-abelase9887 hortnet is transition representation confirmed??????
I don’t have any issue with all the hallways i always imagined sometimes between rooms there’d be a hallway and it’s skipped. Kinda like how a film doesn’t show every second of a character travelling somewhere
exactly my thinking
Yeh thou it slightly classes with the concept of map cartographing in the game. You often draw hallways, so why not draw the rest? That is why people usually use more the argument that technically "in lore" the map isnt all in an xy flat axis, since well, there is background that shows the world extends 3d too. Doesnt work 100% of the time, but works enought so ingame people usually dont notice the paradoxes.
Or there are things that are in front of or behind each other
I agree. I’ve always felt that it’s a good practice to differentiate how a game’s world is depicted in game vs. how it is in-universe. That what we see in game isn’t a perfectly literal representation of how it “really is”.
Take Peach’s Castle from SM64 for instance. Are we supposed to believe that most of her castle is just empty rooms with paintings strewn about? Probably not. It’s just an instance of Gameplay vs. Story Segregation.
It's the vertical hallways that I'm more concerned about, since they may break the lore. A vertical shaft is only traversable with mantis claw, so in locations where mantis claw might not have been attained, the knight might be able to traverse these shafts without mantis claw, which doesn't make sense.
It's interesting that you consider needing to add hallways and such as misalignments in the map. I kind of always assumed that there were implied hallways and such between rooms, rather than them being perfectly contiguous. It's really awesome to see the amazing work Nook put into this, though, my goodness!
Depends.
Some transitions match real well and could be expected to stitch.
Others have very different style and ambiances, making the space ellipse obvious.
I had the same feeling about the stag station or the hot spring in the forgotten crossroads, where entering it might actually take you to a different Z-depth to provide the space for the taller roof and the tunnelways.
Yeah, oftentimes I assumed that too!
hmm... I feel like horizontal hallways I can buy that for, but vertical and jagged hallways less so? Like any vertical shaft would require the mantis claw to be used to go up it, which some of the vertical transitions don't, and stuff that has to go up or down as well as side to side during a room transition feels like it would be a room if it was actually intended.
it seems more likely crossroads was made first relatively accurately, but then over time various things were added and maybe a few things remove and there simply wasn't space with other regions around to remodel as needed. it wasn't inexperience with the first map but rather general inexperience that the first section of the map suffers the worst from by merit of being around the longest.
Well said!
smell said
Smell waid
Ell'd wais
Say gex
9:19. The fact her screenshot has the False Knight falling through the floor shows just how much this project of hers was art. :)
I really enjoyed hearing about how they managed to fit the Infamous Tuck Rancid Egg Room into the map.
*Tuk
Tik@@mell7249
*Tusk
*Tunk
ya know, i just think a lot of "rooms that overlap" would be placed behind eachother, obviously its a 2D game but it has a lot of parralax and suggestions of 3D space, so i dont think its that bad that the map doesnt fully align 100% of the time
Be careful of what you say in front of him or he might punch you to the face
Imma gettin upset
@@mossbag69 i read that in an italian accent
so true@@Dow_v97
lol im keeping my comment there@@mossbag69
Nook's artistic abilities to make everything so seamless on the map.. it's just incredible
It is beautiful, a work of art.
Though I much prefer utilitarian maps.
Man... I feel like someone making something of this complexity is committing to a pretty thankless job, one most people might glance over and then walk away from. So it's kind of cool they get their work really delved into so more of us can appreciate everything that went into it
Maps being inaccurate is lore accurate
Corny is doing his best ;-;
@@anabsolutebuffoonHe's tired
Don't bully Corny :(
@@anabsolutebuffoonI mean, most of the map was drawn by the Knight
@@pamplemoo Corny laid down the foundations tho, forcing the knight to manage around that. I say blame Corny!
I'm so glad you put some focus on the infamous Tuk Egg Room. That room was the place that truly made the game for me. I've beat this game and all of its endings many times. I've achieved the full 112% thrice. Yet, throughout my entire Hollow Knight journey, nothing will ever parallel the pure ecstasy of my first time stumbling into the infamous Tuk Egg Room. I cried, prayed, and donated $2,000 to my local St. Jude's Children's Hospital branch the first time I saw that beautiful big bouncing boy perusing the garbage beneath the City of Tears. Thank you, Mossbag, for bringing forth into the public eye what is quite possibly the greatest achievement in game development history. I am forever indebted to you.
24:27
Did you immediately buy all 80-ish of his eggs?
i thought tuk was a lady
@@partypoltergeist I forgor💀
The Infamous Tuk Egg Room combines the grandeur of the White Palace, the mystery of the Void, the holiness of the Garbage Pit, the isolation of Kingdom's Edge and the terrifying atmosphere of Deepnest's cryptid-filled tunnels. Truly one of a kind.
what about the tuk egg room in steelsoul?
A fair bit of these can be accounted for by treating Hollow Knight as a two-dimensional adventure through an otherwise three-dimensional world. Just because the camera pans left on a room change doesn't mean the Knight had to have walked a perfectly straight line, the path could have angled without players being made aware. I think that particularly accounts for places like the White Palace and Soul Sanctum, and you can already see it basically canonized by the existence of doorway rooms and the Stag paths that take off outside the plane of the map.
Yeah the camera just rotates during the screen transition.
Also, can we PLEASE appreciate Nooks work? This is insane the amount of touchups and tweaks she had to do to make this look right. This is amazing.
isn't that literally what this entire video is about?
Thank you so much, I appreciate the appreciation 🙏
Bro I think we are lmfao
@@TheEmbracedOne It's a beautiful work, and a staggering amount of effort! You have my admiration for sure, I adore these kinds of maps. Gl on your game development!
@@TheEmbracedOneIRL Cornifer
I'd never have fully appreciated Nook's hard work if not for this analysis. Thanks for calling attention to a diligent artist/art appreciator.
People on scripterswars recreated the entire map way back in 2017 after some months of release. It has way less unnecessary details and it is wayyy more useful: it tells you the location of all grubs, bosses, benches, charms, and other stuff.
I kind of like how it’s imperfect - it feels more like cornifer and hollow knight actually hand drew the maps
Mossbag, i can't stress enough how sane your uploads keep me during the wait for Silksong. Thank you so much for everything you do for this wonderful community.
Silk song wouldn’t be here till the next generation
It's not real, you've been in a coma for 15 years, wake up, it's NOT real
also mossbag videos are perfect for getting sleep. Hollow Knight ost + the advantage of not being alone with my own thoughts
@@TutorialsGuyPlease never say that again. Any semblance of stability that remains in my mind is held together with used duct tape and a sticky substance I think might be glue.
I mean you could kill time by trying any rad
I can't believe Team Cherry didn't add vertical hallways. Hopefully Silksong solves this issue by adding more hallways
What is an elevator if not a vertical hallway?
I can't imagine how long it took to edit this video. Truly a masterpiece worth of the best UA-cam's Hollow Knight's best channel!
Big up!
I was going to say the same thing. The Map itself is a masterpiece but I have to give it to Mossbag for taking the time to break it down like he did. Good job to the both of them!
her replying with "fuck no" actually makes her more of a giga chad queen than before
who did?
@@beakboi8960 the map creator, nook, as stated at the end of the video
@@beakboi8960 I did (if you didn't watch the video you'll believe me)
@@seanseen_ nah bro that’s crazy, I can’t believe I forgot. Nice username btw
I am refunding my copy of Hollow Knight as I'm writing this.
same
So fast he time traveled to comment
@@fatcactis hes too powerful
1 day ago? WHAT
Darn srsly
I thought of the White palace as deeper in the Z-axis (assuming that X is horizontal and Y is vertical here), I always imagined that the entrance was it's own long hallway that goes deeper in, and didn't line up with anything because it was on a whole other plane. But then you'd have to make multiple composite maps to make what would ultimately just become a 3D map
The white palace literally exists in a dream, so I can excuse any inaccuracies.
Nook is a legend for putting all this together. The amount of work is staggering
noog ledge end pudding to gather... the amounb of blorb is stagging
@@TeeTirofrfr
You know I do kind of like how Silksong is taking a long time, because we get to see fun videos like this which probably wouldn't exist if Silksong released already! I don't think this is "scraping the bottom of the barrel", I think this is getting a chance to show off a cool thing that a HK fan did and giving her the spotlight she deserves for her hard work. How Nook did this is actually really interesting and cool and I admire her effort. I hope her own games she's developing goes well and I hope to see more fun videos like this from the HK fandom in the future!
Hell yes
he’s reached max levels of copium!! shut it down!!!!!
cope
Overlapping isnt a problem. It can easily be handwaved away with "You're underground, there are some slight curves/diagonals that you can't notice go toward/away from the camera
Despite the inconsistencies, if anything this video has just given me a renewed appreciation for how beautiful Hollow Knight's background art is
this interactive map is one of my favorite fan-made projects EVER. the sheer level of dedication and love that Nook put into making it as smoothly tied together as she could is simply gorgeous
I took a crack at it myself for a minute and it was an absolute nightmare. She's a damn hero.
This is a product of love. Unparalleled respect to Nook for the work put into this project.
Give this man a SilkSong, before he starts studying the phylogenetics of the different inhabitants of Hollow Knight !!
Seriously, cool video ! I really didn't expect a tidiness contest between the areas of Hollow Knight !
I mean, didn't he once decode the signs and the glyphs drawn on them. That doesn't seem too far fetched for mossbag at this point.
@@Blue14113 He mentioned a fan project that aimed to create a conlang in the style of Hallownest's apparent dialect, based on the signage around the world. It's been dubbed "Hallowspeak" and has its own website by the same name.
you've got me wanting to do this now...
I think that most of the overlapping rooms and misalignments can be handwaved away by saying they're in front of or behind each other, and that Hallownest isn't actually 2D and flat, only represented as such.
I always thought of the Pale King's workshop as just going the other way. Like, you walk down a corridor, and take two lefts, and now you're in a new corridor going back towards where you came from.
It still doesnt line up vertically tho
Then add stairs.
thank god you got this video out JUST in time before silksong comes out!! now the developers will have enough time to remake the map!! :D
I once had this "good idea" for a Minecraft project to create the entire map in creative (if the knight was the size of a Minecraft avatar). Now this didn't get too far as it really was a hassle to even get the outlines, but I did notice that it really was near-impossible to get the rooms to line up neatly, I had to extend some hallways or drops within the crossroads (the only part where I did stuff) to make it actually fit continuously
it's incredibly impressive how hallways added in post are so seamless and fit so well into hollow knight's design
With the White Palace, it's worth remembering that it could have gone deeper into the background rather than lying flat on the current map. With the workshop entrance, it's possible that the halls would be curved in some way. Or it's all just a dream, oh well.
1:20 can’t believe that team cherry foreshadowed nosk all the way back in the first trailer!
Bravo Ari!
This comment is funny asf, you deserve more likes
I always imagined those rooms being connected by hallways, just like Nook did. And that is so freaking awesome job, it's insane.
You don't actually visit White Palace, you visit a royal guard's dream representation of it... it's probably overdimensioned
That and, as funny as it would be, the actual White Palace as it was before the Infection was probably _not_ a gigantic death Labyrinth of buzzsaws.
I feel like that stuff was implemented when it was pulled into the Dream World and hidden behind a barrier.
This makes me appreciate Team Cherry's work and the Hollow Knight community even more.
I can't imagine the time it took them to make all of those ridiculously detailed rooms, pretty awesome people would take the time to make a map this big.
I feel like some room misalignments can be explained away with the room being in a different plane in the 3D space, like how the door rooms are in the background.
yeah no
Absolutely love fan projects like this, and also completely understand that "fuck no" at the end lmao. This is an impressive endeavor, but needless to say I very much understand why one would only want to do it *once.*
Holy shit Bardoon wasn't kidding when he said he was "too small to be a Wyrm", that thing is absolutely enormous!
Remember that one room in Greenpath that connects Hornet's arena with the Lake of Unn that everyone complains about because there's nothing there? Well maybe Team Cherry knew that other such connecting rooms must exist but left them out because they didn't want there to be too many rooms like that one.
First off, I'm so glad you got so many eyes on nook's project, mossbag. That's wicked cool of you! 😃
Second, thanks for taking us on that trip through the map and highlighting all of those extra/changed hallways.
Third, that's gotta be your best video ending. Ohmygod. 🤣
30:16 one thing about this room is that whenever I go in it with wayward compass, it always says I’m in a completely different area like kingdom’s edge or greenpath.
IIRC there are other compass oddities.
And the Grub map hidden at the Collector's nest also seems to have some valid representation.
The fact that this map and by extension Hollow Knight contains 307 rooms is honestly kind of mindblowing. The amount of work Nook put into this to connect everything in a seamless way is incredible. I’m shocked at how few rooms there are, Hallownest is huge and I would’ve thought it had 500 rooms, if not 1000. Though, I guess a lot the rooms in Hollow Knight are quite large, which is something I never really thought about.
I absolutely loved the in-depth look at the details and making of this map! More content like this! It's such a cool alternative look at a world we love so well.
Fun fact, the game Rain world (has a lot of similarities with HK) has a fully interactive map, made with screenshots that shows all the rooms and how they connect in ghe regions, the map even features the geometry of rooms the creature spawns in them and the in game file names for ALL of the rooms.
I just think thats cool
I love rain world but it was so hard to play lol
@micahjones7837 the map is so big, and you barely have a sense of where you are supposed to go. I think ive explored most of it, but I have to go back and finish the game, probably restart again
True but the map doesn’t really attempt to fit things together super well and the different areas are all given fully separate maps. Also the game kinda uses pipes to cheat with how it puts stuff together.
@@Thisisthegreatestatofalltime yes but the game usses the pipes to insert the 3rd dimension in a 2d game
@@joemency2242 it all serves to add to the theme of being a tiny unimportant creature in a world that is an inconceivable amount bigger than you
This man is singlehandedly keeping the Hollow Knight community fed while Team Cherry is cooking up Silk Song
Fireborn, Windette, BlueSR, Skurry, CcMacci, the developpers of Pale Court and the guy who beats GPZ every day till silksong releases: Are we a joke to you
@@Snt1_ They are a joke to me, not because their content is bad or anything, but just because I don't really watch them, therefore they don't exist to me.
@@WanderTheNomadyeah, but main comment mentioned the "Hollow Knight comunity" as a whole, therefore our individuality is irrelevant in this discussion.
@@ocean037 You fool, I am personally the whole of the "Hollow Knight community". It's just me. I am the community
@@dig8634agreed. Everybody knows WanderTheNomad is the hollow knight community
When this video started, I assumed the map was going to be a project handled by a full team or something. Like, one person per area. One gets Crossroads, one gets Deepnest, and so on and so forth. To learn one person took care of all of it, and even provides the necessary edits to make it look good AND make sense is just mind boggling. Kudos to Nook for taking on such a project!
So much weird, understated humor in this video.
And I hate weird things.
Thanks for showcasing this incredible work, and walking through all the challenges involved in making it!
I am shocked that the hollow knight map isnt a one to one copy or oklahoma
Would be hilarious is in a future interview the dev say this video specifically is the reason silk song took so long because they wanted the world to line up perfectly.
When I heard this map took 6 years, I was a bit doubtful, but seeing how much effort was needed to make it consistent, I can understand.
Yeah for real! Just going over the number of edits in the forgotten crossroads I was thinking “man I would have given up already at this point”. The dedication is remarkable.
Can we just take a moment to appreciate the effort MrBeast puts into his videos?
Truly
We could, if he did
MrBeast is a goated creator, truly.
yea cool vids
SO TRUE
to comment on 7:35 i think that the emperor's new groove is the greatest movie to ever come out of Disney
Then you see a map of a game like Rain World and realize that the map is separate into distinct LAYERS, meaning several rooms are in front or behind many others. This extra level of depth really makes the world feel more real, which is precisely what Rain World strives to do with its real-time ecosystem.
We Rain World players are just under every indie game video these days, ain't we?
@@captainfordo556 Why do you think it's not a good game? And do you mean that as in not a good game objectively, or as in not a good game for you?
@@Matthias129 Maybe they're a game journalist
Probably "Game not unfair in my favour - game bad" mentality xD
@@captainfordo556Bait used to be believable… 😮💨
Imagine if TC sees this and then says,"Okay,fine!" And then proceed to remake/retweak the entire Silksong map to avoid such misalignments/map lying.
"See you in 2026!"
My idea is that the maps aren’t broken, they’re just 3D. This is explored fully in Rain World with layering on the map, but in Hollow Knight the map is just an abstract 2D representation. In hollow knight, rooms appear to overlap because corridors and entrances are in front of or behind others, making rooms that sit behind or in front of one another. And the doorway thing is less about defined “internal” rooms and more about angles and rooms behind other rooms
As someone who aspires to code my own game in the HK style, watching educational and practical tutorials on world-building is very beneficial, especially given the amount of time and devotion required to create masterpieces like these
If u ever do it, put a plague doctor character named “Doc” in there and I promise I (Doc, aka Mud) will be your hardest fanboy and promote it when I am a multi millionaire and personally beat the shit out of anyone who critiques your game
@@mud4309 based
Same, HKalso inspires me to make a 2D game
"This room is just very weird, and weird things make me angry"
mossbag 2023
i honestly assumed there were hallways between a lot of the screen transitions and they weren’t directly smushed together. some definitely feel connected directly but most just feel like there is a little walk that they just didn’t feel the need to add because its just empty.
I’m so happy that lichensac had exposed this corrupt company, thank you
what?
@@shravan012you're not up to the latest team cherry lore?
@@emperortgp2424neither am I, what happened?
@@Hitmannnn863 They misaligned the map a bit!
You mean bogpocket right?
I actually noticed or at least presumed some misalignments but I always just thought of them as being a result of Hollownest being 2D. I imagined the rooms to never be exactly on top of each other but kinda in front of behind from our point of view. The rooms you walk through don't actually face exactly east or west but may turn a bit towards or away from the camera.
I imagine that the rooms aren't all on the same exact 2-dimensional plane, kind of like how rain world's map works.
If only Cornifer could sell me a map to leave the fog
sorry mom, i can’t make it to your funeral today, mossbag just uploaded a new video
Go to your mom's funeral!
Can absolutely confirm the theory of seeing the light of Dirtmouth. Having driven at night on many highways you can definitely see the glow of cities long before you can see the city itself.
Nook did an amazing job with everything, really an amazing work of art completing the puzzle. Thank you for showcasing such an amazing project and showing every change that had to be made to make it all perfect!
YES! More Content after all these months. Your videos are great no matter how long they take.
You see, many of these things can be explained by working off the wild theory that the universe of hollow knight is actually 3 dimensional
genuinely though the level of work put into this is astounding, massive props to Nook for doing not just the lining up of everything, but also using actual in game assets to make things work correctly
Honestly I’m so glad this video exists. I always struggled with my understanding of how everything seemed to line up, so I’m glad to know my confusion was justified
"this is sort of like real life, where object outside of you fov cease to exist"
MOSSBAG I LOVE YOU AND YOUR LACK OF OBJECT PERMANENCE
Mossbag doesn't lack object permanence. Objects only exist when mossbag looks at them. That's why I carry a locket with his picture with me wherever I go in order to not disappear.
@@obviousalias132 Since I know that I exist. Does that mean that mossbag is always watching? D:
@@HaibaneKuu in mossbag we trust
perhaps the pale king's workshop is mirrored and behind the background, a lot of rooms make more sense in 3d
Imagine if urban planners could take the same liberties Team Cherry took with Hollow Nest. It would be free real estate!
- ..."and this is my room"
- "Why are we whispering?"
- "I'm actually sharing a quantum euclidean space with my roommate and he's sleeping right now"
7:36
I want an immortal snail hollow knight mod. The player is invincible to normal enemies but the snail is always making a beeline straight for the player and if he touches you its game over.
The mode starts with a cutscene of the snail escaping his tungsten capsule with ominous music.
It doesn't have to move as slowly as a snail. But the constant dread of knowing that any backtracking could instantly end the run could be fun.
“Hallow knight works like real life, when you aren’t looking at it it isn’t loaded in” dude has zero object permanence
Huge respect for Nook for all that hard work. That's nuts!
The only conclusion one can draw from these changes, namely the re-scaling of rooms to make them fit, is that The Knight actually changes his size on a whim depending on his environment. I cant wait to see the video on all the lore ramifications this discovery has on the game.
Hey mossbag, i just wanted to thank you, i absolutely love your videos and you are probably by far the biggest reason why i even was able to finish this game.
Normally i have the habit of dropping games pretty frequently either if something new catched my interest or if I'm just too frustrated (people might call me casual haha ) anyway, your videos kept bringing me back and back at the game until i pretty recently finally finished the game with everything that didn't require the buzzsaw Palace or nightmare grim and just succeeding that far gave me some real sense of accomplishment and confidence. Something i had been really lacking at that time so i wanted to say thank you, especially since that accomplishment probably gave me just the necessary strength to finally seek help with my depression so hey it might actually be that your videos kinda saved my life ^^ thank you
This will be considered an ancient map after silksong comes out 💀
Yeah 🚜🩼🪬🕳🕳🕳🕳🕳🕳🕳
That is so 🧿🦠🔭🔫 true blud
If silksong comes out
i hope to the gods that Nook doesnt try to make a full Silksong map by herself, she's done enough XD
@@timberdoodle7657 it will
the Silksong is the friends we made along the way@@DamageMaximo
You'll be surprised how many areas overlap each other in the darksouls games. This video was fun to see how a 2d game can be laid out.
DS1 is mostly geographically consistent, aside from Tomb of the Giants, which clips into New Londo pretty significantly and also is nowhere near deep enough for the view into Ash Lake to actually exist. Aside from that, it's remarkably accurate, and the interconnections really do make geographical sense, and the existing inaccuracies are relatively minor and well-hidden. DS2 is... not spacially accurate, to say the least. It does a horrible job of actually covering those inconsistencies up, so it's blatantly obvious that the world makes no sense even when playing casually. DS3 also has quite a few inconsistencies, but unlike DS2, those inconsistencies are definitely intentional and very well-hidden. Basically every existing inaccuracy is in service of making the world feel larger than it really is, and it definitely works to the game's advantage to disguise how actually compact the game space is.
@@twistedgwazi5727 I think a lot of the inconsistencies in ds2 are probably intentional as well. Like, the infamous one, a lava lake at the top of a windmill. That's too obvious for devs to not have known. That *has* to be intentional. I think it works to highlight how messed up the world is, as long as you don't assume poor work from the devs and manage to see it from the perspective of a character in the world
Two bugs chillin in a hot tub (less than) 5 feet apart cause they're not straight
I guess you could say the map is…
Full of bugs
You could also say some, because the strange shape of the map, a lot of places apear a little too
Hollow
@@Yellow_Hastur you could say because it's mostly dark it's set at
Knight
alright alright
In conclusion, Hollow Knight is a game about bugs.
@@LieseFuryi keep hearing about this hollow knight guy, who is he?
I wonder if silksong will have the same map problems
I wonder if silksong
mossbag is going to milk silksong
No it's perfect
@@Polemimic milksong
I dont think its that big of a problem i dont think anyone would mind if silksong didnt fix this
personally ive always viewed the scene change loading as the knight travelling through some areas in the background (like the hallways being addrd by nook), which helped me understand why the rooms don't match exactly, as we just weren't showed the "gaps"
very good video though!!! made me think about this more (and also got me more amazed at nook's insane efforts)
This confirms Cornifer is perpetually drunk
I always just assumed that between every two room transitions, there were miles and miles of paths and adventures we don't get to see. That both clears up any map alignment paradoxes, and explains why enemies that fall through a transition don't come out the other side - they get lost in the interim
I love when he said "it's morbin' time" and morbed all over the nothing to do with the video.
this makes me feel validated for every time i got so lost when trying to follow the minimap (especially in the areas that needed the most changes)
i would actually be surprised if team cherry didnt have something at least similar to this while making the actual in game map
I'm a writer and...while we all have some drawings in the early part of our projects they get modified a lot over time. My current maps looks nothing like they used to.
Stuff was added, some places were teleported etc...
Yeah the above comments pretty much cover it. I'm sure consistency was a focus in the design phase, but various changes (some for gameplay, some for flow, some for clarity, etc.) would result in the end product being very different.
I will say, when you jump down the well the journey is longer than it looks, you can hop back up and its deeper than i assumed. I say thats what happens between areas. Cuts out the unimportant parts and gives you the most important parts.
Well who wants to mod the game and add in all of these lost secret hallways?
I'd love to see something like this for Rain World, but unfortunately the map is kind of cursed in that game because of the layers, so it's probably a lot trickier to manage.
At least Rain World does have the advantage that you have a lot more freedom to line things up, since even the in-game map just represents pipe connections as wobbly dotted lines to suggest that it's cutting out longer stretches of pipe. So it's at least *conceptually* possible to make a consistent "canonical" map ... even if you'd need some kind of 3D software to do it.
@Nerdule yeah that's true. I feel like it might take more effort though haha, even if it ended up fitting together more consistent
That's because Rain World's map layers are meant to simulate a more 3D world. None the less a map like this has already existed with the interactive map project for Rain World. Someone is going even crazier by remaking the entire map, height and all, in Minecraft.