How Many Bosses Are in Hollow Knight: Silksong? Full List and Strategy Tips

Hollow Knight: Silksong has well over 40 bosses, though the exact count depends on which tracker you check and whether you count repeat encounters separately. Some are mandatory fights that block story progress, others are entirely optional hunts hidden across Pharloom, and a handful only appear if you’re brave enough to run Steel Soul Mode. Below is a breakdown of what’s confirmed so far, split by whether you can skip it, and what to expect going in.

How Many Bosses Are in Hollow Knight: Silksong?

There isn’t one agreed-upon number, and that’s a distinction worth explaining. Different trackers have counted the roster differently depending on how they define a “boss” versus a “mini-boss” or a repeated fight against the same enemy. One detailed guide puts the total at 48 bosses, split into 18 main bosses and 30 optional ones. The Fextralife wiki lists 44 main bosses plus 4 mini-bosses discovered so far. Meanwhile, the Hollow Knight Wiki counts 43 unique bosses, or 47 if you count fights that repeat against the same enemy in a different location or phase.

The safest way to think about it is “over 40 bosses,” with the exact figure still shifting as the community maps out every corner of the game. These lists are treated as works in progress rather than a finished tally, so don’t be surprised if the number changes slightly after future patches or as players find encounters tied to less obvious side paths. What’s consistent across every source is the split between mandatory story bosses and a much larger pool of optional or secret fights that reward exploration rather than progression.

Main Story Bosses You Must Defeat

The mandatory bosses are the ones standing between you and the next region, ability, or story beat. Silksong doesn’t force a single fixed order past the opening hours — most bosses can be fought in different sequences depending on which paths you explore first, so treat any “order” as a general playthrough flow rather than a strict checklist.

Moss Mother is the very first boss fight in the game and functions as a basic skill check. It’s designed to teach the core rhythm of dodging, punishing openings, and managing stamina before the game ramps up difficulty. From there, mandatory bosses tend to guard key locations or reward the abilities and traversal tools you need to keep progressing, which is what separates them from the optional roster. Because Silksong lets you choose which routes to open up first, you might reach some of these mandatory fights in a different order than another player exploring the same act.

A few practical points to keep in mind for main story bosses:

• They’re required — you cannot fully progress the campaign without beating them, unlike the optional roster.
• Some double as gatekeepers for new abilities, meaning you’ll want to be reasonably geared before attempting them.
• Route choice affects when you encounter certain bosses, so two players comparing notes may hit different fights at different points in the same act.
• Because exact names and sequencing can shift with updates, treat any specific boss order you find online as accurate for that version, not necessarily the current one.

If you’re aiming for a clean, low-stress first playthrough, prioritize clearing mandatory bosses tied to ability rewards before wandering off into optional territory — those abilities often make later fights, mandatory or not, noticeably more manageable.

Optional and Secret Bosses to Hunt Down

This is where the bulk of Silksong’s boss count lives. Depending on the source, anywhere from 30 to over 40 of the total encounters are optional rather than required for story progression. These range from clearly signposted arena fights to genuinely hidden bosses tucked behind secret paths, environmental puzzles, or areas you’d only find by backtracking with a new ability.

Not every optional boss stays available forever, though. Some fights can be skipped outright, while others can be substituted by choosing a different route through the same region — meaning you might fight one optional boss instead of another depending on how you approach an area, rather than facing both. That’s part of why total boss counts vary between sources: some trackers count substitute encounters as separate bosses, others don’t.

More importantly, a handful of optional bosses have a hard cutoff. Bosses that aren’t defeated during earlier acts can become black-threaded and permanently unfightable once the game moves past a certain point, such as Shakra and Garmond & Zaza. If you’re the type of player who wants to see every fight the game has to offer, this is the detail most likely to catch you off guard on a first run — skipping an optional boss in Act 1 or Act 2 isn’t always a “come back later” situation, since some encounters simply close the door once you advance far enough.

The practical takeaway: if a boss arena looks optional but interesting, it’s worth engaging with it in the act you find it rather than assuming you can return once you’re stronger. Some can wait, but you won’t always know which ones until it’s too late.

Boss Strategy Tips for Beginners

Silksong’s bosses stand apart from regular enemies through much larger health pools and more layered mechanics, so brute-forcing a fight rarely works the way it might against a standard mob. Success comes down to precision, recognizing attack patterns before reacting to them, and understanding what Hornet’s own toolkit can do in a given matchup.

A few general habits help across nearly every boss fight:

• Watch a full attack cycle before committing to aggression — most bosses telegraph their bigger, punishing moves clearly once you’ve seen them once or twice.
• Treat every fight as a mechanics check first and a reflex check second; understanding what a boss wants you to do is usually more useful than raw execution speed.
• Reassess your loadout of tools and abilities before repeat attempts rather than just retrying the same approach — Silksong’s kit is deep enough that a different tool can change how manageable an opening is.
• Don’t assume a fight is unbeatable after one or two attempts; large health pools mean fights take longer to read, not that your approach is necessarily wrong.

This general framework applies whether you’re facing a mandatory story boss or one of the optional encounters — the core skills of pattern recognition and ability mastery carry over across the whole roster.

Steel Soul Mode Exclusive Bosses

Steel Soul Mode is Silksong’s permadeath-style difficulty option, and it doesn’t just raise the stakes on existing fights — it introduces boss encounters not found anywhere in the standard game. The confirmed example is the Summoned Saviour, a fight exclusive to Steel Soul runs.

Because a single death ends a Steel Soul playthrough for good, encountering an exclusive boss like this carries far more pressure than the same fight would in a normal save file. If you’re considering Steel Soul Mode specifically to see everything Silksong has to offer, know that it adds unique content on top of the standard boss roster rather than simply reshuffling difficulty on familiar fights — treat it as its own challenge layer, not just a harder version of the base game.

Given how much the boss count still varies between trackers, the most reliable approach is to treat “over 40 bosses” as your working number, prioritize mandatory fights tied to ability rewards, and check known black-threading acts before skipping anything you might want to fight later.