Monster Hunter Wilds - Cooking Explained

In Monster Hunter Wilds, cooking is a vital mechanic that provides hunters with essential buffs and advantages during their quests, hunts, or exploration. This comprehensive guide will walk you through the details of the cooking system, from preparing meals to understanding the benefits they grant you.

Cooking in Monster Hunter Wilds is more than just a way to enjoy nice food and satisfy your character's hunger; it is a strategic tool that can significantly impact your hunting. By preparing and consuming meals, you can acquire temporary boosts that enhance various attributes, making challenging hunts more manageable.

Food has always been part of Monster Hunter: not only do you get buffs, but you also get to enjoy wonderful time with your fellow hunters, and heartwarming meals cooked by your Palico friends! With Monster Hunter Wilds, this tradition does not stop.

Monster Hunter Wilds allows you to cook through various methods: Camp Cooking, Portable BBQ Grill, and Feasts. Which one you decide to use will depend on your location when you are in need of food!

At any Base Camp or in your Pop-Up Camp, you can enter your tent to access the cooking menu. Within the tent, select the Grill a Meal option from the BBQ Menu to prepare any dishes using available ingredients. This method has the benefit of being a safe environment free from monster interruptions.

Once you are in the cooking menu, you will have three choices:

• Recommended Meal
• Custom Meal
• Favorite Meals

The recommended meal will more or less tailor itself to your current equipment. These suggestions optimize buffs that align with your immediate needs and the ingredients you have. It will propose a specific meal and show you the benefits you can gain from it. Recommended meals are a good option for beginners who are still learning how cooking works.

You should always choose the Cook only with rations option in this section, as it will provide increased health and stamina, along with small buffs depending on the ration used. This allows you to have a good basic buff food while saving your other ingredients for bigger meals later on.

Custom Meals are your go-to option when you are looking for very specific buffs. Similar to the recommended meals, you can combine up to three ingredients to create personalized dishes. However, with Custom Meals, you have complete control over each ingredient, allowing you to create various unique meals. This lets you target particular attributes or resistances based on the upcoming hunt.

You can also pick a Finishing Touch ingredient that will grant you an additional Food Skill.

As the name suggests, the Favorite Meals tab is where you can save your most useful meals. Once you have created a few Custom Meals, you might find that one meal is especially helpful and you would like to re-use it in the future. You can save it in this tab, and whenever you need it, you can go back to the Favorite Meals tab to find your recipe.

You can save up to 40 meals this way. Additionally, these meals can be renamed, allowing you to label them according to the boost they provide.

This is another way of cooking that involves a mini-game. You can use the Grill Meat option when you want to cook raw meat in order to increase your stamina.

This one will open a mini-game:

1. Pull out a piece of meat
2. Fry it: be careful, you have to keep an eye on the meat. Be aware of the colour of the meat, it is truly like a steak, you need to wait long enough so it gets the perfect colour, but not too long or it will be too much done.
3. Follow the Tempo and the meat properly.
4. If you get a Tasty result, it means you did it all right!

A Raw Steak will increase your Stamina by 25% while a Well-done Steak will increase your Stamina by 50%.

For on-the-go hunters, the Portable BBQ Grill allows meal preparation in the field. To use it, you need to:

1. Find a safe location (or as secured as possible in the wilds) away from hostile creatures
2. Go to your inventory, select the Portable BBQ Grill
3. Deploy the Grill
4. Pick your meal: The system functions the same as Camp Cooking. You can take the recommended meal, custom one, or cook one of your favorite foods!

The Portable BBQ Grill is really useful during extended Hunts, when you do not have the possibility to go back to a camp or set up a Po-Up Camp, but still need some food.

Be aware that you can get attacked by monsters while cooking on the Portable BBQ Grill!

Feast are large meals that will grant you long-lasting buffs. You can participate in those once you reach a Village. Villagers will gather with you and provide a huge feast. Those offer powerful buffs that last longer than the usual ones. They also change depending on the village you cook it in, as each one will have their unique meals.

The more you increase your reputation with a village, the better the food options will be.

Make sure to get a feast before your biggest hunts, as they will give you the most significant buffs.

Meals are an important part of your Hunts. They will provide you with various buffs or defenses that you will need, especially for harder hunts! Here is an overview of all the various enhancements you can get from consuming meals:

• Health and Stamina Boosts: Meals can increase your maximum health and stamina, allowing you to live longer in battles, take more hits before needing to heal yourself, and perform more actions without getting tired.
• Attack and Defense Enhancements: Certain dishes provide boosts to your offensive and defensive capabilities, making your attacks more powerful and reducing the damage taken from monsters.
• Elemental Resistance: By selecting specific ingredients during Custom Meals, you can enhance your resistance to various elemental attacks, which is crucial when facing monsters with elemental affinities. For example, you can eat a Meal with Thunder resistance if you plan to face a Monster dealing Thunder damage.
• Special Food Skills: Meals can also grant unique skills, such as reduced stamina consumption during evasion or increased healing effects. These skills can be the difference between success and failure in challenging hunts. These are obtained by adding a Finishing Touch to your custom Meal.

Understanding the impact of each ingredient is essential for crafting meals that provide the buffs you want and need. Combining different food items can yield various effects:

• Meat: Attack, Health, and Stamina.
• Fish: Defense, Health, Stamina.
• Vegetables: Defense, Elemental Resistances, health, Stamina

Here is a list of all the ingredients available for Cooking in Monster Hunter Wilds:

You will also receive most of the ingredients at least once from various side quests.

Additionally, each village will offer you specific Meals: