Silksong's Sea of Sorrow expansion: what Team Cherry has confirmed so far
Team Cherry's free nautical expansion still has no release date, six months after Patch 5 was billed as the last big update before it.
Hollow Knight: Silksong passed its first anniversary on 4 September, and the expansion Team Cherry promised for 2026 still has no date. Sea of Sorrow, announced as a free addition for every owner, was revealed on 15 December 2025 and has not been mentioned by the studio since March. With under four months of the stated window left, here is everything the three-person Adelaide team has actually confirmed, and everything it has not.
Where Sea of Sorrow stands today
Team Cherry revealed the expansion in a holiday blog post alongside a 42-second animated teaser on its own YouTube channel. The post described a nautically themed expansion adding "new areas, bosses, tools, and more", promised it would be free for all players, and said further detail would arrive "shortly before" release. The studio deliberately kept everything else back, including the setting's relationship to Pharloom and how the expansion slots into an existing save.
The most recent update of any kind came on 17 March 2026, when Patch 5 (version 1.0.30000) went live on PC. Team Cherry framed that patch as the final tidying pass before the expansion, which implied the gap after it would be filled by Sea of Sorrow work rather than further maintenance. Since then the studio's blog, its Steam announcement feed and its YouTube channel have all been quiet, which is characteristic of a team that has historically gone silent while building and surfaced only when something is close to done.
Confirmed, unconfirmed and rumoured
The verified facts are short, and worth separating from the speculation that has filled the gap.
- Price: free for everyone who owns the game. Silksong itself is $19.99 on Steam, the PlayStation Store, the Microsoft Store and the Nintendo eShop.
- Window: 2026, with no month, quarter or event attached to it.
- Contents: new areas, new bosses, new tools, and a voyage "across and beneath the salt-stricken seas".
- Platforms: not stated separately, though the base game runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, PS4, PS5, Switch, Switch 2, Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S, and remains in Game Pass on PC, console and cloud.
Nothing else is official. There is no storefront listing for the expansion to watch: the only add-on attached to Silksong on Steam is the $11.99 official soundtrack. Team Cherry has not said how large Sea of Sorrow is, whether it adds a new playable path or simply extends the map, or whether the console build of Patch 5 that was described as "coming soon" in March has shipped. Claims that specific cut content from old Silksong trailers will return are reader and outlet speculation built on frame-by-frame readings of the teaser, not studio statements, and should be treated as rumour. The studio's own wording — a first expansion, with the game "supported with free expansions" — is the only basis for expecting more than one.
A year of strong numbers
The wait is happening from a position of unusual strength. Silksong launched on 4 September 2025 across every platform at once, including day one on Xbox Game Pass, and Team Cherry said in December that more than seven million people had bought it, "alongside millions more playing on Xbox Game Pass". The studio said the launch was heavy enough to crash the storefronts selling it.
Critical and player reception held up. The PC version sits at 90 on Metacritic, as surfaced on its Steam page, and Steam's own review data showed 422,094 user reviews at just under 90 per cent positive on 11 September 2026, a "Very Positive" rating. Valve's 2025 Steam Awards, voted by players, gave Silksong both Game of the Year and Best Game You Suck At.
“Patch 5 is intended as the last significant update before Silksong's upcoming major expansion: Sea of Sorrow.”Team Cherry, developer of Hollow Knight: Silksong, in the Patch 5 blog post (17 March 2026)
What the five patches changed
The post-launch record is worth reading as a guide to what Team Cherry does with feedback, because it moved on difficulty faster than its reputation suggested it would. Patch 1 on 12 September 2025 reduced the damage of early-game bosses Moorwing and Sister Splinter, cut mid-game Bellway and bench prices and raised rosary rewards. Later patches added dithering and film grain options, DualSense Edge support, and a switch to Unity's Input System in November that fixed rumble and controller recognition across a much wider range of pads.
Localisation absorbed most of the effort. After sustained criticism of the Simplified Chinese script, Team Cherry adopted the community translation by Team Cart Fix in November. Patch 5 then added a Traditional Chinese script from craft at indienova and a substantially revised German script from Tobias Gut, who worked on the original game, with the studio warning that renamed areas might not match older guides. Combat tuning in that patch touched the Last Judge, Savage Beastfly and Magma Bell, and added a bench beside Pale Lake.
What to watch, and where
Team Cherry's other 2026 commitment gives a sense of its bandwidth. On 6 February the studio shipped an upgraded Hollow Knight on Switch 2, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S with higher frame rates and resolutions, free for existing Switch, PS4 and Xbox owners, and patched the PC version with 21:9 and 16:10 support. That work was announced in the same post that revealed the expansion, and it has already landed, which leaves Sea of Sorrow as the outstanding item.
Because the studio has said detail will come only just before release, a date is likely to arrive with very little lead time, and probably through its own channels rather than a showcase. The places it has used every time so far are the Team Cherry blog, the Steam announcement feed on the game's store page, its YouTube channel and the official Silksong site. Anyone planning a return run has time: Patch 5 is the version the expansion will build on, so a playthrough started now will not be invalidated by whatever lands next.
Team Cherry Holiday Sign-off! Hollow Knight: Silksong - Sea of Sorrow revealed, the original Hollow Knight refreshed, and more! Read the blog post here: teamcherry.com.au/blog/holiday2025
— Team Cherry (@TeamCherryGames) on X
Official links
Mira leads previews at Gamers6. She has spent fifteen years playing co-op shooters badly and writing about them well, and she still keeps a spreadsheet of every weapon reload animation worth the frame count.
