Skip to content
  • Announcements regarding Title2 legislative developments, new resources, and more!

    157 Topics
    157 Posts
    X
    My Steel Soul Mode Survival Guide for Hollow Knight: Silksong in 2026 Master Hollow Knight: Silksong Steel Soul Mode with brutal permadeath tips, unlock codes, and survival strategies for conquering Pharloom. I still remember my first Steel Soul Mode run in Hollow Knight: Silksong. It was early 2026, and I thought I knew every corner of Pharloom. Then permadeath reminded me that confidence is a trap. One bad dodge, one careless pogo, and everything I built was gone. I sat there, staring at the screen... and then I started again. That loop is brutal, but it is also why I keep coming back. If you are thinking about stepping into Steel Soul Mode, let me share what I have learned. What Is Steel Soul Mode? Steel Soul Mode is Hollow Knight: Silksong's hardest test. It features permadeath, so once you die, you restart the entire game. Every enemy and boss you defeated comes back. But this mode does not just recycle the base experience. Bosses can gain new attack patterns. The Moorwing, for example, might push into a fourth or fifth phase that throws even more attacks at you. Enemies may also appear in places you would never expect, forcing you to rethink old routes and old strategies. That unpredictability makes every run feel unique. It also makes every mistake feel permanent. How To Unlock Steel Soul Mode You can unlock Steel Soul Mode in two ways. The straightforward method is to simply play Hollow Knight: Silksong and beat it. The second method is a hidden code, and it is much faster. On the main menu, go to the Extras option. Once you are in the Extras menu, press the following buttons on your controller's D-pad: Up, Down, Up, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right. The screen should flash white for a moment. That flash is your signal that the game registered the code. Afterward, when you start a new game, you will see Steel Soul Mode listed under Classic Mode. Tips To Complete Steel Soul Mode When you combine a harder playstyle with permadeath, the whole game can feel impossible. Trust me, the first few hours will humble you. But with the right approach, Steel Soul Mode becomes a tense, thrilling dance instead of a wall. Acquire The Crest Of The Reaper Crests change how Hornet attacks and moves, and some let you equip more tools and items. The Crest of the Reaper is one of the best early picks for Steel Soul Mode because it helps you generate more Silk when you attack enemies. You can find it early in the Greymoor region. It sits north of the Moorwing boss fight and west of the Halfway House. Before you claim it, you need to survive a few waves of enemies. Whenever you heal, the Crest of the Reaper causes enemies to drop extra Silk orbs. You can collect those orbs by walking or jumping into them. That means you refill your Silk gauge much faster, which lets you heal or use skills more often. To get the most from this Crest, you might need to stay on the attack. As you hit enemies and successfully heal yourself, you build Silk significantly quicker. It rewards aggression, but only controlled aggression. Attempt Pogo Attacks Pogo attacks mean attacking downward while you are in the air. If you land those downward slashes, Hornet does a mini bounce that helps her avoid most attacks. When you time the bounce toward a nearby enemy, you can chain another Pogo attack and get a second bounce. Those bounces change the flow of a fight. You become more mobile, harder to hit, and better able to control space. In Steel Soul Mode, where one mistake ends the run, that mobility is priceless. ️ Pick Your Battles Benches are absent in Steel Soul Mode, so respawning is not an option. That makes every fight a risk. It would be smart to be more selective about what you fight. Not every enemy needs to be attacked. You can avoid many of them entirely. Attack only when it is necessary. For example, if you are low on Silk and need to heal, you can quickly strike a few enemies to regain the resource. By prioritizing your battles, you save strength for the fights that matter. Instead of wasting Silk on smaller enemies, you keep a safety net for the larger ones. Honestly, I have lost more runs than I care to admit because I got greedy against a random enemy. You know what? That is the point of Steel Soul Mode. It teaches patience. Tip Why It Helps Crest of the Reaper Generates extra Silk orbs when healing, letting you heal or use skills more often Pogo attacks Bounce off enemies to avoid damage and chain extra hits Pick your battles Conserves Silk and reduces the risk of permadeath Final Thoughts Steel Soul Mode in Hollow Knight: Silksong is not for everyone. It is punishing, unpredictable, and sometimes downright cruel. But if you love mastering a game to its bones, it is one of the most rewarding challenges you can take on in 2026. Take your time. Learn the patterns. Respect every enemy. And when you fall... well, you know what to do. Get back up, and try again. I will leave the rest for you to discover. Some lessons only permadeath can teach. ️ Half the battle with a game like Silksong is simply getting your hands on it at a fair price — especially when you are already planning to sink dozens of hours into a permadeath run. Between regional pricing differences, seasonal sales, and DLC bundles that appear out of nowhere, the number on the store page can shift more than you would expect. If you would rather not refresh a dozen storefronts every week hoping to catch a drop, [this price tracking tool]( handles that for you by quietly monitoring the games on your wishlist and letting you know the moment something is actually worth buying. For anyone who treats gaming as a long-term hobby rather than a one-off purchase, that kind of patience pays off in the same way Steel Soul Mode does. You wait for the right moment, and you commit only when the odds are in your favor. https://dealnesthq.com
  • Discuss all things digital accessibility here.

    2 Topics
    3 Posts
    E
    This question comes up constantly once organizations complete an accessibility audit. Someone runs a scan, finds out they have 30,000+ PDFs sitting in a document library or LMS, does the math on manual remediation, and realizes that finishing everything one document at a time could take years. So how are organizations actually getting through this without a multi-year backlog? A few patterns show up consistently in the ones that pull it off. 1. They stop treating every PDF the same Not all 30,000 documents are equal. The teams that move fast triage first: High traffic, high complexity (course materials, public forms, financial reports) → gets full attention, often human-reviewed High traffic, low complexity (simple flyers, single-column text docs) → near-fully automatable Low traffic, low complexity → automate and batch, don't overthink it Low traffic, rarely accessed archival content → may legitimately qualify for an archive exception depending on the applicable regulation, instead of full remediation Doing this sorting up front is what turns "30,000 documents" into "actually, 22,000 of these are simple and can go through automation almost untouched." 2. AI handles the mechanical 80%, humans handle the judgment 20% This is the actual unlock. Today’s modern document remediation platforms use AI to automate: Structural tagging (headings, lists, tables of contents, reading order) Alt text generation for images at scale, including specialized content like STEM diagrams, charts, and math notation Table structure detection and tagging Form field tagging Some platforms report automating roughly 90% of the tagging work this way. That's the difference between "a person opens each file and manually tags every element" and "a person reviews and approves what the system already did." One is measured in minutes per document; the other in hours. Humans still matter, reviewing AI-generated alt text for accuracy, handling genuinely irregular layouts, and doing final QA before anything ships. But they're reviewing, not building from scratch. 3. They stop outsourcing 1:1 and start batching Sending every file to a vendor for individual manual remediation doesn't scale any better than doing it in-house manually, you're still paying for human hours per document, just someone else's. Orgs that get through large backlogs faster typically use a hybrid model: self-service automated remediation for the easy majority, with outsourced expert remediation reserved for the genuinely complex minority (scanned documents, dense multilingual content, heavily irregular tables). 4. They build it into the pipeline instead of doing a one-time sprint The backlog only gets bigger if new inaccessible documents keep getting added while you're working through the old ones. Orgs that actually close the gap add automated remediation/tagging at publish time going forward, so the "thousands of PDFs" problem doesn't regenerate itself every semester or fiscal year. What this looks like at scale, in practice Publishers dealing with legacy content libraries in the millions of documents have reported turnaround times cut significantly and throughput increased by an order of magnitude when shifting from manual, post-production fixes to AI-driven workflows integrated earlier in the content pipeline, this is showing up right now with publishers racing to get ahead of the ADA Title II vendor requirements. Similarly, government and municipal document libraries, think meeting minutes, budget reports, public forms, are increasingly being processed this way rather than farmed out page-by-page. We've seen more organizations moving toward AI-assisted remediation because manual workflows simply aren't keeping up with document volume. Is that what you're seeing too?
  • Title II in Education

    A meeting-place for institution faculty, leadership, and school-board members alike.

    0 Topics
    0 Posts
    No new posts.
  • A place where Government colleagues can discuss Title II compliance and how best to serve constituents.

    0 Topics
    0 Posts
    No new posts.
  • Got a question? Ask away!

    0 Topics
    0 Posts
    No new posts.