I’ve been hitting the Monster Hunter World bottle pretty hard, and will try to get a review out soon. (Short review? Super fun! Get it!) That being said, these are some things that I found to be a total lifesaver as a total newcomer to Monster Hunter.
1) Eat.
The food you eat provides assorted buffs, alongside with boosts to your health for a certain period of time. Considering the fact that your health never increases (since you never level up like normal RPGs), and your maximum stamina gradually depletes over time, these food buffs may end up being the difference between a quest’s success or failure.
Also, they’re incredibly cheap, so don’t be stingy. Go eat!
PS: eat rations! They top up your max stamina mid-quest!
2) Take the stuff in the supply chest (but not all of it)
When you’re on a quest, there’s a supply chest in your tent, but another chest outside the tent. This outside chest comes with ‘free’ equipment you can use. The equipment is usually a basic set of potions and rations that you can use, but sometimes it comes with special items that you can use to clue yourself into what you’re fighting.
Your supply chest comes with antidotes? You’re fighting a monster that poisons. You have traps and tranq bombs? You need to capture the monster (in case you forgot). You may want to adjust your equipment accordingly.
Two additional points to note. First, the equipment with an asterisk beside it means they don’t carry over between quests, so feel free to use them as much as possible. Second, the chest may come with multiple stacks of whatever item. This is for multiplayer quests. Don’t take everything because that means your buddies don’t have anything to use.
3) Go on Investigations if you need to grind
Monster Hunter quests come in four flavours: Assigned, Optional, Investigations and Events.
Assigned quests are essentially your story quests; you need to complete them to progress with the story. Events are just that; quests that you have to complete during a specific time frame. Optional quests are quests that usually give you some boost after you complete them the first time (say they give you a special story item or open up more food types to eat).
Investigations are also optional quests, but they’re procedurally generated and give much better loot. So you only need to complete optional quests once, and then move on to investigations if you need to kill a specific monster multiple times.
One caveat is that the restrictions on investigations vary. Some give your 50 minutes to clear a quest, while others give you 15. Read the investigation so you don’t get surprised if you fail the quest after your first death.
4) Make Camp
Other than the quests mentioned above, you can go on expeditions in Monster Hunter. Expeditions are free-play times in each of the Monster Hunter maps. While they don’t technically bring in as much loot as the quests, there’s a lot of content hidden in them that you wouldn’t be able to access if you just stuck to questing.
One of the major things you can do on expeditions is find new camp spots. They make your subsequent quests so much more convenient. Especially because you can fast travel between them during your quest. If I’m not wrong, there’s four camps in the first two maps, and two in all the others.
5) Find the Grimalkynes
Another thing that appears on Expeditions are Grimalkynes. Palicoes that are native to the area, you will need to first track them down in each other areas, then complete a related quest before you get them.
Once you do though, you get many buffs to help you in your subsequent quests within the area. For example, you will be able to enlist their help when you find them later on during quests. You may even be able to convince a wandering small dinosaur to help you out.
Most importantly though, completing the quests gives your Palicoes new equipment to use. This ranges from a flashbang to and ability to increases the item drops from killing monsters. Great stuff. Special thanks for Gaijinhunter for coming up with the youtube guides I linked to above. I found them really useful.
The tip of the iceberg
We’re all less than a week in with Monster Hunter, so there’s a lot of stuff I haven’t learnt yet. Maybe there’ll be more like this in the future. What have you learnt about Monster Hunter?
