Silksong player pops the hood, checks the gauges, and determines the best silk skill is one you get very early on: "This should surprise absolutely nobody"

Hollow Knight Silksong screenshot of Hornet sitting shocked in a chair.

Hollow Knight: Silksong mathematicians and meta goblins have once again taken a crowbar to Team Cherry's box of magic to reveal what is dishing out that sweet, sweet optimal DPS. This time, Hornet's silk skills are under the microscope, and the damage king by a disgusting margin is Thread Storm, a crowd favorite and a remarkably early unlock.

We can thank YouTuber Rusty, widely known for perilously long Elden Ring ranking videos, for these findings. Using normally concealed damage numbers combined with a few Crests and tools, he put all six silk skills against each other to find out what wins in a raw damage contest. The results are inescapable: Thread Storm is the best one, and it's not even close.

"This should surprise absolutely nobody," Rusty says of the newly crowned DPS king. And he's right. Thread Storm is one of the earliest silk skills you unlock – scooped up in Greymoor on the northeast side – and it's as comfy as it is powerful.

Thread Storm feels good the very first time you use it, and it never stops feeling good. It conjures a circular AoE of silk around Hornet, giving it good and predictable reach and making it useful for killing groups of mobs or whittling away at bosses from safer-than-melee distance.

For some reason, it also deals way more damage than everything else provided you squeeze in all the hits. With no other factors, it deals about 20% more damage than the max damage runner-up, Rune Rage, while also being more consistent. That damage gap only grows when you factor in boosts like the Shaman Crest and Volt Filament tool.

The gap is so obvious that, as Rusty points out in the video, speedrunner BlueSR – who recently set a new sub-4 hour speedrun record for Silksong's true ending – says Thread Storm, with that exact Crest and tool setup, is the quarterback of long speedruns. It's so good that it makes beating the game with an underleveled weapon much less punishing.

"Turns the Thread Storm into an absolute monster of DPS and allows us to adequately fight endgame bosses despite staying on Needle upgrade 2!" BlueSR writes. "It's absolutely insanely strong and due to the heal limitation, feels quite balanced."

If it's good enough for top speedrunners and veteran Elden Ring nerds, it's good enough for me.

Silksong is crushing Hollow Knight sales with 6 million downloads after 4 weeks, analyst reports – 4 million on Steam alone.