Hollow Knight – Getting One Per Save Achievements in the Same Save

If you are trying to get achievements in Hollow Knight, but don’t want to have to deal with the Nail Smith once and do it all again just so you can make a different choice, or if you want to Banish Grimm and also Complete the Ritual, this quick guide will help you get those achievements in one save.

This guide assumes that you already know how to do the One Per Save achievements in Hollow Knight, and it may contain spoilers if you have not completed the game.

Basics of the Once Per Save Achievements

You will have to play Hollow Knight a few times through to get all the achievements anyway, but that’s ok as it’s such a beautiful game.

However, there are some tiresome achievements which you might not want to have to do twice. One being the Grimm Ritual ones for example.

You can choose to fight Nightmare King Grimm and get the Ritual achievement, or you can find Brumm and with his help Banish Grimm instead, getting a different achievement. You can only get one achievement per save, according to most achievement guides… but this isn’t the case with a bit of clever steam cloud sync swapping.

How to Get Two Achievements in One Save

This basically isn’t all that clever, it’s just a workaround involving steam cloud sync, which Hollow Knight uses.

In order to do this, all you need are two computers with Steam and Hollow Knight installed. If you don’t have two computers, you can probably find another way around but be warned that simply logging into your OS as a different user probably won’t work as HK saves all the save files in the same place regardless of User (at least in Windows that seems to be the case).

Ensure cloud saves are enabled first of all.

All you do is play the game until you are about to make one of the “one per save” choices (i.e.. what to do with the Nail Smith after you get the pure nail, or what to do after beating Troupe Master Grimm. You could also do with Zote, but it requires more play through and may not be worth it as you can get the Neglect achievement with Zote in about 20 mins of starting a new game, whereas Nail Smith and Grimm achievements will take a lot longer).

OK, so you are at the pivotal point… all you do is save, quit the game, go OFFLINE with steam and then make the choice and pop the achievement on your main machine. DO NOT GO ONLINE WITH THIS MACHINE YET.

After this, login to your second machine and go ONLINE with steam, play the game for a bit (no need to do anything major, just ensure it saves). Then go back to your main machine again and go back online.

Steam will prompt you asking if you want to upload the Older local file (with the first choice made, e.g. bye bye Nail Smith) or download the newer cloud file. Choose the second option to download the cloud save.

You will be back to the point of your game before you made the “once per save file” choice, but you will still have the achievement.

Great! Now you can do it again the other way and get both achievements in one save.

PS. Sorry if this guide is bit obvious or dull… it really isn’t much of a guide to be honest, just for saddos like me who like having all the achievements. PS, if you are a completionist and you are playing Hollow Knight, good luck my friends!

Helena Stamatina
About Helena Stamatina 1783 Articles
My first game was Naughty Dog’s Crash Bandicoot (PlayStation) back in 1996. And since then gaming has been my main hobby. I turned my passion for gaming into a job by starting my first geek blog in 2009. When I’m not working on the site, I play mostly on my PlayStation. But I also love outdoor activities and especially skiing.

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