Things Monster Hunter Wilds Doesn't Tell You - Tips - Monster Hunter Wilds Guide - IGN (2025)

There’s a lot that Monster Hunter Wilds doesn’t tell you, and even when it does, there are more specifics to be learned or buried in menus. Here's everything it doesn't tell you and plenty of Monster Hunter Wilds tips to get you started.

Things MH Wilds Doesn't Tell You - Low Rank

For now, we're saving our High Rank tips to avoid spoilers. While a lot of our footage in this video is from High Rank hunts, it’s all stuff that’s applicable earlier in the game, and we’re using preorder bonus layered armor so we don’t give away some later game armor designs.

You Need to Eat to Keep Max Health and Stamina

If you’re wondering why your health and stamina bars aren’t filling all the way up, you probably need to eat. You can grill a meal in any camp or with your portable BBQ grill.

You can consume rations and other ingredients to make a full meal with added benefits, or you can simply grill raw meat by itself to just restore your max health and stamina bars. If you don’t have any rations, there will usually be some in the provided supplies on your Seikret that you can retrieve by hitting left on the dpad.

You can hold L1 at any point to see how long your current meal will give beneficial effects at the top left by your health bar, and it stops ticking down while in camp, so you don’t have to rush through your preparations quickly!

How to Get "It's So Tasty" Perfectly Grilled Meat

If you’re grilling meat by itself, there’s an associated minigame to making sure you get Well-done Steak, the best available. Make sure you hit the confirm button right as the song ends and the puff of smoke comes out of the fire and the steak changes color.

Then, press confirm along with the beat to make even chops to get the most amount of steak possible. You should see sparkles with each slice, and get 12 Well-Done Steaks when you're done!

Keep Your Large Monster Field Guide Handy

Gemma often tells you at the smithy that "preparation and knowledge are your two strongest weapons,” and that is actually practical advice. Your Large Monster Field Guide provides the latter as it will tell you enemy weakpoints and breakable areas, certain tells before attacks, which elements, status effects and items are most effective against them, and what materials you can expect along with their rarity in receiving them.

Some monsters require you to break or carve removable parts of their bodies such as tails in order to receive specific materials, so make sure to consult the guide before wasting time grinding them.

Not all of this info is available until you beat the monster for the first time, but it will help with repeated hunts. If you need to sever a tail in order to carve it, this can generally only be done with bladed weapons, slicing ammo, or certain special attacks (with the Bow, for example,) so prepare accordingly!

Weapons and Armor Are in Your Box From the Start

Though Alma helps you choose a weapon at the start, all 14 weapon types and a variety of armor are in your box from the very start of the game. Check it out by changing your equipment inside of your tent.

See our Weapons guide for descriptions and tutorials for each of them!

The armor all has the same defense, so choose what you like based on style or, more practically, armor skills. There’s even a set to maximize gathering if you want to go out to collect materials!

See our Armor guide as well, to learn everything you need to know, and to see the Armor Sets, if you're curious.

How Weapon and Armor Skills Work

The squares under each skill are the level of skill that particular piece contains, and if you go to the Skill Info Panel, it tells you the details of what each level of that skill does. Group Skills and Set Bonus Skills are special skills that only activate when a certain number of equipment pieces with those bonuses are equipped.

This 3 here means I need 3 pieces with that Group skill for it to work.

How (and Why) To Capture Monsters

Capturing endemic life is done by using the capture net after equipping it, but large monsters are captured by catching them in a trap, and then hitting them with tranq bombs, tranq ammo, or tranq throwing knives after they’re weak enough to be captured. A good indicator is when your Palico tells you they’re looking weak, if they're limping, or if there’s a skull symbol pulsing next to them on the minimap.

There Are Additional Weapon Tutorials

There are actually two places to find weapon tutorials and tips.The first is under Weapon Controls, where you can see Controls, Weapon Properties, and Recommended Combos. But go to the Play Guide to find the Tutorial List and the Tip List, which both offer additional, different information for each weapon. And remember, you can test out the weapons in the Training Area–you’ll have to manually enter here on foot to unlock the ability to fast travel here later.

You Can “Cheat” Charge Weapons

There’s nothing better than slamming a monster with a fully charged attack (soundup). But some charges can take a while, even with skills that make it faster equipped. Thankfully, several weapons with charge abilities can have their charges "cheated." For instance, Great Sword users can tackle in between charge phases to start charging a more powerful swing without letting the other ones go, so you can more quickly get to the coveted True Charged Slash. If you’re having trouble landing the Big Hit, there’s a good chance there’s a trick to getting there faster.

Make Inventory Management Simple With Loadouts

While in the Transfer Items menu, press in on the left stick to bring up the Manage Loadouts menu. Using a loadout will automatically put away everything not included in the loadout and restock everything that is. This makes prepping between quests a breeze!
There are some simple Loadouts to choose from already, too–we’d suggest adding Nulberries to Loadout 3 as a good start!

You can also set Loadouts for your equipment, too, by pressing in on the Left Stick when under Change Equipment. This will be more important later in the game when you’ve unlocked a wider variety of armor, weapons, and skills!

Every High-Rank Armor Set Is Layered Armor

This one is cheating a little bit since they tell you once you reach high rank, but don’t worry about crafting Layered Armor while still in Low Rank. Layered Armor in the Monster Hunter Series is just the look of an armor set without the stats, so you can continue to be fashionable while still getting the defense and skills you need. In Wilds, every set of High Rank armor that you craft doubles as Layered Armor, so you can toggle on the look of it while still equipping what you want. Equipment appearance can be changed in your tent.

Stop, Drop, and Roll (Or Just Stop and Drop)

You’ll spend much of your time hunting monsters while on fire, or afflicted with some other type of debilitation like Blastblight. Rolling significantly reduces the time of several status ailments, and you can even crouch in place to stop Bleeding. If you look up in the top left corner above your health, you can see the time drop or the status completely fade once you’ve dealt with it.

Buried in your Tip List under Fundamentals are more specifics on reducing these statuses.

Knockeddown? Seikret Will Save You

When knocked to the ground, you’ll sometimes be helpless to an enemy followup. If you’re not stunned or paralyzed, you can call for your Seikret while still prone, and they’ll pick you up with their nose and throw you onto their back, allowing you to get away and heal up before re-engaging.

How to Mount

You mount monsters by hitting them while you’re airborne. While there’s no jump button, you can jump by evading off of a ledge, or jumping off your Seikret. Triangle will do a standard air attack once you’re in the air, or you can do a special air attack by pressing Triangle and Circle together while riding.

You can also run or sprint up flat walls, and press triangle to do a special falling attack with most weapons. Keep an eye on the top right for options you have while wall running or airborne. Many weapons also have specific abilities that let them get airborne, such as the Sword and Shield’s Backstep Charged attack.

What to Do When Mounted

Mounting works a bit differently here than in the past. You can inflict wounds on monsters that take more damage, and you should inflict as many of these as possible by moving around the monster’s back with the left stick before performing a finisher. But there’s more. If you stay on their head, they’ll look for a way to knock you off, often by crashing into something nearby. You can’t make them turn, but they’ll likely run towards the nearest surface.

Use this to crash them into walls or thorns. Just make sure to keep an eye on your stamina, and hold the right trigger when they’re trying to buck you off, as denoted by the circle above pulsing red.

Look For Interactables To Pop Up

When riding between areas, keep an eye on the left side of the screen to see what can be gathered or interacted with. While on your Seikret, grab what you can by aiming your slinger with the left trigger and pressing the shown button. This will instantly equip slinger ammo if you target it, but will also grab any resources that you’ll always need like herbs, honey, or various mushrooms. Interactable traps also show up here, so you can tell one is close without having to scan the environment first. If you see a material pop up on your left but don’t see it, hold L2 and press up or down on the D-Pad to select it, then press O / B to gather it with your Hook Slinger!

Make It Count When You Cart

Getting KO’d by a monster, affectionately called “carting” by Monster Hunter players, will send you back to the nearest camp. I know it’s easy to feel rushed when on a time limit for a hunt, but use this time to resupply your materials, or change out weapons or gear if you need to. Just entering the tent will always automatically sharpen your weapons as well.

Be Certain About Affinity

The Affinity stat returns in Wilds, and still behaves differently than critical chance in most other video games. A positive affinity is your chance to critically hit an enemy, but a negative affinity is your chance to perform a weaker hit on your enemy than your weapon's stated damage. This is why many weapons with negative affinities have higher overall damage numbers than other weapons of the same rarity. It’s like using an axe in an old turn-based RPG– it may have a higher overall attack, but some of your hits will be duds.

Fast Travel is Available Immediately

Wilds technically tells you this eventually, but Fast Travel is available immediately. Open up your map and press right on the D-pad to select a Fast Travel list. This shows you every place you can fast travel to on your map–so let this serve as your reminder to get those pop-up camps in place, as they’ll often be closer to the location you want to get to than your base camp. And, speaking of the map…

The Map Is Highly Customizable

The map filters are extremely useful when trying to hunt down particular resources. Later in the game when trying to find specific resource-gathering points or endemic life, you can open the map, press right on the dpad, and filter all the icons by category. You can even send these custom filters to your minimap, and even set waypoints so your seikret will run to them automatically.

Scrolling left or right on a particular item or creature will flip between all their locations on the map. Doing a little bit of map legwork can save you a ton of time.

You Should Set Up Your Favorites Tab

If you press the button for the Sub-menu while on the pause screen, you can sort your tabs to keep them in the order you want, toggle some of them on and off, and choose which widgets you want on screen. One thing you should definitely do is choose Edit Tabs, check the star tab for Favorites, and then go to Edit Favorites to create your own pause screen with all the things you need. You can put your Item Pouch, Signal Ping, Large Monster Guide, or anything else you may need quick access to in way fewer button presses. Monster Hunter is complicated enough, so make sure to simplify where you can!

You Can Customize Your Seikret

So this was officially announced, but Wilds never actually tells you when or how you can customize your Seikret. After completing the main mission A Hunter’s Pride, aka Chapter 1 - 4, head to Kunafa village.

There’s a new little Seikret icon on the map to show you where to go to talk to Nona, which will then unlock the ability to edit your Seikret’s appearance both here, and under the Appearance Menu in your tent!

You Don’t Need to Complete Optional Objectives (but you should anyway)

Think of the Optional objectives that pop up on the right of the screen during a main story mission as a highlighted tutorial or bonus content. You won’t get extra rewards, but you will learn some cool stuff, either about hunting or about your NPC party members.

You Can Add Custom Text

to the Stickers In the Communication tab of your menu, scroll to the right to your Stickers. Press Triangle / Y to open up the Sub-menu to customize the text that appears with them! You can customize a lot of the communication here, so check it out, then customize a radial menu with your favorite Shoutouts, Stickers, Gestures and Poses to use effectively in multiplayer. Please use responsibly.

You Can Customize Your Hunter Profile

Go to the Info tab in the menu and choose Hunter Profile. Tab to the left to edit everything from your post to your background, and even your title and widgets. To edit your title, choose Edit Top Page Widgets, click on your title with X/A, then press Triangle/Y to edit it. You’ll unlock more titles, poses, backgrounds, and more as you play and accomplish certain tasks.

Smithy Menus

While forging armor at the Smith, press Y / Triangle to open the Sub-menu, then Toggle Comparison to directly compare your current armor to the prospective equipment piece–we personally prefer this view.

Speaking of the smithy, press R1 to tab to the Equipment Menu, so you can change and customize your equipment right there without needing to return to your tent.

About Special Items

Some items on the map with a question mark symbol are called Special Items and are akin to Account Items in Monster Hunter World, as they grant points to use in various ways. But they have another purpose, too.

You can trade some of these, like Shiny Treasures, for items such as meal ingredients from NPCs! Later on in the game, these are used to trade for special materials to unlock new armor, too, so it's always a good idea to gather them when you see 'em.

Pick Up What Monsters Drop

While monsters won’t drop crafting materials or Wyvern Tears like they used to, they’ll still drop shiny things on occasion: special slinger pods like Heavy Blunt Pods and Heavy Slicing Pods.

These can stun a monster with just one blow, and deal a surprising amount of damage, so make sure to pick them up and make use of them.

Play the Story Missions in Multiplayer

A Link Party is what you’ll want to be in if you want to play through the story with friends. This is the only way automatic invites are sent to everyone in a party, so it makes it much more streamlined. Don’t miss our full multiplayer guide for more details on this one, as there’s just too much to get into here.

A Midway Point

Slight SPOILER on game structure: the campaign almost acts as an extended tutorial. Many of Wilds' systems don't need to be engaged with until you see credits, after which you become much more self-guided between the additional story missions.

Don't worry too much about armor and weapon skills until you get there unless you’re struggling. Almost all of your equipment will be immediately replaced by something better.

If that seemed like a lot, don’t worry! It will all become second nature as you get used to the Monster Hunter loop.

High Rank Tips Coming Soon!