A Hollow Knight: Silksong player morally opposed to cartography has made a discovery both enormous and fruitless: you can get a special map quill if you stubbornly explore most of the game without one.
The map quill, you may recall, is sold by map vendor Shakra at the very beginning of Silksong. The base quill is a white feather that lets you map out the world of Pharloom as you explore it, filling in traversed regions whenever you rest. Without the quill, you only ever have blocky outlines of areas to go off of, so it's an essential part of keeping track of where you've been and where you need to go.
But as PC Gamer spotted, Reddit user JessieWarren09 had other ideas. "I played for 20 hours without mapping for this," they said in a recent post. Their post is the first mention I've seen of a secret alternative quill which, according to the Silksong wiki, is unlocked by reaching Act 3 without acquiring the normal quill.
I played for 20 hours without mapping for this from r/Silksong
There are actually two secret quill variants, it seems, both acquired from the desk of Citadel Stage boss Trobbio. If you reach this desk in Act 2, you can obtain a red quill. In Act 3, the quill is purple, as JessieWarren's was. "I stole Trobbio's edgy purple quill, cause he doesn't deserve nice things," they write. Harsh, but not unreasonable.
Both quills function identically to the white quill. Once you get it, you can start filling in the map, and at this point in the game Hornet would have quite a backlog of maps to work through. The Citadel is the crowning area of Silksong, so in essence, you have to explore most of the game in order to get a special, do-nothing cosmetic for the inventory tool that is used to explore the game. It's like running a marathon barefoot and then winning a pair of purple shoes right before the finish line.
