Preparations, setting off, tracking the monster Monster Hunter Generations Guide

Last update: 05 September 2016

You now know how to properly care for your character, its equipment and the necessary crafting materials, so you we can now move to the most interesting part - hunting monsters. You must first understand what every real hunter knows instinctively. Every (without any exceptions) hunt is divided into two parts - preparations and execution. Before the hunt begins you must decide what things you will need when you leave the village and prepare accordingly. It all depends on your target, as well as the way you want to deal with it.

Preparations

Before you leave the village you should equip your character with proper armor, as well as weapons that will make you most effective against the foe. Almost every monster in the game uses a different element (or several of them at once) and is vulnerable / resistant to some of them as well - such an information can be found on the internet and you should search for it before the hunt begins. This is a typical rock-paper-scissors game. However, it doesn't mean that taking a weapon with improper elements and armor with resistances to the wrong things won't allow you to finish the quest - it'll just make things a lot more difficult.

Another step of preparations to the hunt is equipping your character with the appropriate resources: healing / enhancing / cleansing potions, food rations, paintballs, ammunition, oils, bombs and so on. During the process you should also think how you want to deal with the monster. If it will be a typical hunt that ends with the death of the monster, you don't have to worry about additional equipment. If, however, you want to capture the beast alive, it will be necessary to take traps, tranq bombs, or even some additional materials that can be used to craft items on the field. There is a hard limit for the amount of items you can take on the battlefield, so you won't be able to equip your character like for a long castle siege. A part of the challenge associated with the hunt is how you will deal with the limited amount of space - or deficiency of resources.

Setting off

Properly geared, equipped and fed, you can finally set off on the hunt. The first thing you should always do after arriving on the hunting ground is to collect the free resources from the blue chest located in each encampment. At the beginning of the game this will allow you to decrease the amount of your own resources you will have to use during a hunt, but during more difficult ones the amount of items will decrease practically to zero, supplying you with a map and a goodbye smile. During such quests (at the end of the game) you can also find out that the hunt won't start in the encampment, but rather in one of the random locations on the map, making the quest even more difficult.

Let's talk about the encampment. As it was mentioned earlier, each one has a Transpurrter, a cat courier. Additionally, in each one of those you will find the three primary elements:

Field bed - it can be used at any moment to recover your character to full health and stamina (without exceeding the maximum values of those stats of your character).

Blue box - inside you will find free resources, such as a map, healing potions, food rations and so on.

Red box - you use it to store all of the items that are necessary to complete the quest, as well as special items that will give you Wycademy points as a reward.

Transpurrter - a cat courier who will transport some of the materials you've collected to the village, allowing you to acquire more of them during the whole quest.

Additionally, the encampment serves the purpose of a respawn point in case something went wrong during a hunt. Your character in MHGen won't die, but it can "faint" up to three times until the quest is failed and the character is automatically transported back to the village.

Tracking the monster

You start every hunt by tracking the monster. In most cases it's simply about checking all of the locations on the map until you find the beast. There, however, are other methods - some of the abilities of your character or your feline companions will cause the monsters to be visible (either for a short moment, or permanently) on the mini-map from the very beginning of the quest. Another method is to find a balloon from the cat observatory - waving at it will allow you temporarily see the monster on the mini-map.

After tracking the monster down another step should be to mark it with a paintball. This will allow you to easily track down the monster when it (sooner or later) decides to change the location. You simply throw the ball at the enemy - if the beast is hit, it will appear on the mini-map. Each paintball lasts only for a couple of minutes, which is why the process should be repeated from time to time. In a worst case scenario - when the monster is running away, paintball's effect wore off and you can't apply a new one - you can simply follow the monster's steps. The situation becomes more difficult if the monster you're hunting is a flying type - in that case you must observe its shadow and immediately follow it.