The best Crests in Hollow Knight Silksong
The best Crests for Silksong's early, middle, and late game
Wondering which Crests you should be equipping in Hollow Knight Silksong? With Crests so spread around the world of Pharloom, knowing which to use at what point in your playthrough will make your progress that little bit more efficient. All the Crests have their good points, and can all carry you from awakening in Act 1 to the dark descent of Act 3. Some give you more Tools (sometimes literally) to overcome Silksong's challenges, while others provide consistent, passive bonuses that cannot be overlooked.
In this guide, we'll list the three Crests you should be equipping for the early, middle, and late game of Hollow Knight: Silksong. We'll discuss the remaining four Crests afterward and why you should at least experiment with them.
In this guide:
Reaper Crest: Best Act 1 and early game Crest
The Reaper's Crest beats out the Wanderer's Crest for best early-game choice thanks to the additional survivability it provides. The little Silk orbs it passively creates can provide a clutch heal when you'd otherwise not have one. The same is true if you rely on Silk Skills for a good portion of your damage and if you're good at avoiding taking hits yourself.
Silk is a precious resource, especially early on when you've not upgraded how much Hornet can hold. The fact that the Reaper's Crest also has a balanced Tool loadout — you can equip a pair of each available color — puts it over the edge. You might not have access to many tools for the first few hours of a playthrough, but having the freedom to equip most anything you come across for a while is a lovely bonus.
Architect Crest: Best Act 2 and mid game Crest
Never, ever underestimate the power of Tools in Silksong, and with the Architect Crest, you'll have access to a Crest dedicated to Tool use that also comes with some handy other features.
Beyond the Architect Crest giving you access to three red attack Tools, it also has a powerful charge attack that turns Hornet into a drill. Said drill deals a frankly absurd amount of damage, and when paired with some of the top offensive Tools in the game, there isn't much you can't take a chunk out of in a single use.
The Architect Crest also offers two yellow and blue slots apiece when fully upgraded, meaning you'll have a ton of buildcrafting options with it equipped. The one detriment to it is the lack of a Silk Skill. If you'd prefer saving your Silk for healing, that's more than enough reason to take the Architect Crest over any other.
The last thing that puts the Architect Crest over its mid-game rival, the Witch's Crest, is its relative ease of acquisition. You do need to purchase a small armory of Tools to open the door to the Crest, but it isn't locked behind any obscure quest steps. Just farm a cart-load of Rosaries and buy your way to success.
Witch Crest: Best Act 3 Crest
The Witch Crest overtakes the Architect Crest in Act 3 for two reasons. The first is speed. The Witch Crest healing effect is significantly shorter than other Crest animations, and that reduced time can and will save you from almost certain death if used correctly.
The second reason to choose the Witch Crest for Act 3 is its ability to potentially equip a whopping four blue Tools. The passive effects blue Tools provide can be as useful as, if not more useful than, active Tools, because you don't have to think about them. Want your Silk Skill attacks to crackle with purple lightning? And do you want them to be able to heal four masks of health and make the healing animation even shorter? Equip the Witch Crest and be amazed at the power you wield.
Perhaps the only issue you'll encounter with the Witch Crest is that you need to hit enemies with the tendrils you generate to heal. Spamming the healing animation in empty air is simply a waste of Silk. That the Witch Crest is locked behind Bilewater and one of the most disturbing quests in Silksong is another matter entirely.
The Rest of the Crests
The four remaining quests all have their uses and can easily carry you to the end of the game. We used the Reaper Crest for quite a while in our walkthrough, for instance. They're presented here in order of their overall usability and usefulness across a playthrough.
Wanderer Crest
The Wanderer Crest is the most vanilla of all the Crests in Silksong, but it's probably the best all-around option if you aren't using any of the ones mentioned above. Sure, you're losing out on a bit of attack range, but the higher attack speed allows for better free burst damage, and the simpler down slash makes for easier pogo-ing.
You can equip a healthy assortment of Tools across all colors, and a single Silk Skill, but the main benefit you gain from the Wanderer Crest is the moveset. And sometimes having consistency in the core mechanics of a game trumps any kind of fancy build or damage output setup you could concoct.
Hunter Crest
The starting Crest in Silksong is a perfectly functional choice, especially if you were able to acclimate to the awkward, diagonal down slash for platforming. Its passive ability, unlocked by upgrading the Crest in Weavenest Alta, gives a stacking damage bonus provided you don't get hit. While not flashy or complicated, it is as useful as it sounds.
Beast Crest
The Beast Crest loses out for a few reasons. First and foremost, it has no blue Tool slots. The lack of any passive bonuses or protections will only make your time in Silksong more dangerous and potentially frustrating.
You also must play hyper-aggressively with the Beast Crest, as the only way to heal is by dealing damage with the healing bind buff active. You get a nice damage bonus with it up, which is handy, but if you don't get any hits in, you've wasted resources, time, and potentially thrown away a fight.
The Beast Crest's down slash is also even more awkward to use than the Hunter's for platforming. It's not horrid once you get accustomed to it, but there are still many more preferable choices out there.
Shaman Crest
The Shaman's Crest is the least of the Crests in Silksong, and gets its regretful station for two reasons. First, you simply can't get the thing until you've ventured deep into Act 3, making its usefulness in a full playthrough almost nonexistent. It could be the greatest thing since sliced bread, but if there is no functional way to use it for multiple dozens of hours, it gets knocked down a peg.
The Shaman Crest's focus on Silk Skills is also a detriment, and not just because there are so few Silk Skills relative to Tools. As powerful as they can be, you need Silk to use them, and that resource has a bad habit of being depleted exactly when you need it most. With the right setup, you can passively generate enough Silk for a single Skill usage, but miss or poorly time it, and you're still out of luck.
It's for those reasons, among others, that you should focus on getting and getting used to playing with the three best Crests in Hollow Knight Silksong: the Reaper Crest, Architect Crest, and Witch's Crest. And if another one suits you better, don't hesitate to focus on mastering it above all others.
To keep better track of where you find most of the Crests, you'll want to know where to find all of Shakra's maps. There are lots of miscellaneous quests to complete in Silksong, as well, many of which award some nice gear or materials.
Read this next
- Ahead of Hollow Knight: Silksong's Sea of Sorrow expansion, Team Cherry have gotten their Traditional Chinese and German translation ducks in a row
- We may have glimpsed Silksong's Sea of Sorrow expansion in a six-year-old trailer
- Hollow Knight: Silksong's first big expansion, Sea of Sorrow, flows into our lives for free next year
