As series veterans will know, cooking is one of the most important components of Monster Hunter Wilds. Not eating a meal before a hunt is like leaving the house in nothing but your underwear: You're exposing yourself to the elements and probably not going to have a good time because of it. Going foodless significantly reduces your stamina and health, as well as causing you to miss out on additional buffs to defense and elemental resistance.
Thankfully, cooking in Monster Hunter Wilds is a relatively straightforward task, though if you really want the most out of your meals, you'll have to work a tiny bit harder for them. Here's how to cook up an exquisite pre-hunt meal, as well as putting that extra razzle-dazzle on top by finding additional ingredients.
Looking for more hunting tips? Check out our Monster Hunter Wilds guide hub for all the G-Rank advice we've crafted so far.
How to cook in Monster Hunter Wilds
There are a couple of different ways you can cook in Monster Hunter Wilds:
- Cooking a meal from inside your tent at base camp or in Pop-up Camps
- Using the portable BBQ grill to cook a meal
- Using the portable BBQ grill to turn Raw Meat into steaks
The last option is only really for boosting your health and stamina gauges if you find your food buff falling off mid-fight, the first two options are the ones we care about the most.
Cooking a meal from inside your tent and from a portable BBQ grill offer the same features and benefits, so you can pick whichever one is more convenient for you. I usually try to eat from the tent before departing on a quest, but the portable grill is useful for times when I'm halfway across the map towards my target only to realise I forgot to eat.
Whichever location you choose for cooking, you have a further three options: Recommended meal, which lets the game determine which ingredients are used to cook the meal, Custom meal, which lets you choose your own ingredients and customise which status effects you receive, and Favorite meals, where you can save your go-to grub for quick selection from this menu.
And finally, every meal consists of up to three ingredients: Rations are the mandatory baseline of the meal with fish, meat, and veggies to choose from. Additional Ingredients contain food skills to give you the extra edge in battle along with an extra 20 minute buff duration, with Finishing Touches offering one additional, different food skill as well as additional elemental resistance.
Either let the game recommend ingredients, or choose them yourself and go ahead and start cooking. Only cooking with Rations will see the buff last for 30 minutes, while Additional Ingredients bump the timer up to 50 minutes. It seems like the timer only ticks down when you're outside of base camp, so use that to your advantage.
How to cook a Well-done Steak
Now while I said cooking full meals is more important, that doesn't mean you shouldn't know how to turn your Raw Meat into a Well-done Steak. You'll get Raw Meat from killing small monsters like the Ceratonoth, Dalthydon, and Gelidron.
Pop down your BBQ grill and select the Grill Meat option. Your hunter will plonk down the comically huge slab of whatever monster you killed and a song will start playing. If you're familiar with Poogie petting, you'll know you have to time your button press just right in order to successfully cook the meat.
Wait until your hunter flips it over, and then a few seconds later the meat will change to a darker shade of brown. Hit X/A on your controller and your hunter will start cutting it up along the jaunty tune, and you should be left with six Well-done Steaks as a reward. Eating one restores both stamina and health, as well as boosting both of their maximum gauges similar to meals.
If you accidentally mess up and leave it too long, you'll be left with Burnt Meat instead. It'll only restore a bit of stamina, without providing any healing effects or boosts to max gauges.
How to get ingredients
Rations come incredibly easily in Monster Hunter Wilds—most notably from regularly checking in with the Support Desk or Ingredient Center Felynes you find in base camps to get your supply. Pretty much all of your rations will come from playing the game naturally, so don't worry too much.
Additional Ingredients and Finishing Touches, however, require a little more effort. You'll get given a handful of these as quest rewards during the story, but eventually that supply dries up. Thankfully, there are a few different ways you can procure these ingredients:
- Using the Item Trade mechanic with villagers
- Drops from twinkling resource nodes such as Eastern Honey or Wild Seed Oil
- Catching fish like the Gravid Bowfin
- Rare monster drops such as the Truffle Du Conga
Villager trading will likely be your main resource for obtaining ingredients. Each base camp has one or two villagers who will offer regional delicacies in exchange for (often rare) materials, here are a few examples:
- Kunafa Cheese from Kunafa
- Droolshroom from the Wudwuds
- Mud Shrimp from Azuz
- Sild Garlic from Sild
- Fluffy Eggs from Suja
You'll also often get these by completing quests for each village. Eventually all of these traders will collate under Nata in high rank, saving you trekking from camp to camp in order to seek out the ingredients you want. Note that all of the regional delicacies are Additional Ingredients, though they'll sometimes also stock Finishing Touches like Monster Chili and Wild Herb.
However, Finishing Touches can also be obtained from gathering or, in a more unique case, dropped from a monster. You'll sometimes find twinkling resource nodes that spawn across the Forbidden Lands. While you'll usually only collect honey from a node, a twinkling node might instead give you some Eastern Honey.
Miscellaneous ingredients
The couple of outliers for cooking ingredients I can find are the Truffle Du Conga and the Jeweled Mullet Roe. Instead of trading with villagers or gathering, they both offer a more unique method of attainment.
The Truffle Du Conga is by far the most unusual cooking ingredient to procure, as it's a mushroom that can only be dug up by the Congalala. Try to keep an eye out on the ground whenever you're fighting one, or go noseying if one happens to get into a turf war on your travels. The Jeweled Mullet Roe, on the other hand, seems to be a rare drop when fishing. For our guide writer Sean, he was able to nab one after catching a Gravid Bowfin near the desert oasis in the Windward Plains.
Taking advantage of meal invitations
Cooking is mostly your hunter's job, but sometimes you'll actually be invited to a meal by the various villages. You should remember these from playing through the main story—each village offering a large spread, which then gives you a bunch of stat boosts and skills.
Thankfully these group feasts weren't a one-time deal, and villagers will occasionally invite you to return to indulge in the meal once more. They're well worth making the effort to head to when they pop up, especially as the offer goes away after a little while. Simply head to the corresponding village—it should tell you on the map that a villager wants to offer you a meal—and then speak to the NPC in question to successfully tuck in.
Meal invitations will refresh every so often, so check in once in a while to see if there's a buffet waiting for you anywhere.
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