Monster Hunter Wilds | Ultimate Food & BBQ Cooking Guide

Monster Hunter Wilds is Capcom's return to the Monster Hunter franchise, where every hunt tests your skills, patience, and creativity. Built on the foundations of its predecessors, it’s a memorable title that has enticed gamers with its relentless and intense quests and challenges. 

Cooking in Monster Hunters is more intricate than it initially seems. This guide covers all the basics, from unlocking cooking to mastering the BBQ grill minigame, understanding the ingredients, and maximizing meal benefits. 

Unlocking Cooking

Cooking becomes accessible early in Wilds when you’re low rank. After dealing with Quematrice, which blocks the supply team from reaching base camp, the camp gets updated and then you unlock cooking. This allows you to prepare meals to boost your health, stamina, and other stats.

How To Cook

To cook, you can use either a tent or a portable BBQ grill. Both methods will give you the same results, but a portable grill lets you cook in the open world, during hunts. But cooking mid-hunt can be fairly risky as monsters may attack you; using Ghillie Mantle can help you avoid being detected when you cook in the open wilderness.

BBQ Grill Minigame

To use the portable BBQ grill, you’ll need raw meat, which you can obtain by carving small monsters. The minigame involves cooking the meat until it changes color, and then you’ll have to cut it at the right time to produce Well-Done Steaks.

Perfectly cooked meat will give you 12 steaks, which gives you maximum health and stamina boosts. The steaks will also act as an emergency healing item when potions aren’t available or limited.

Ingredients and Rations

You can cook using rations or additional Ingredients. The rations are simplified versions of meat, fish, or veggies, providing basic stat boosts like attack buffs and elemental resistance. 

Adding ingredients enhances meals with food skills and extends buff durations. For example, a basic meal lasts for 30 minutes, but adding ingredients can extend it to about 50 minutes.

Checking Supplies and Trading

You can check and trade supplies in the item menu under the “Transfer Items” and “Item Pouch” sections. Food ingredients are marked with a knife and fork icon, whilst special themes used for trading have a blue page icon. 

You can get your hands on ingredients by trading special items with NPCs in different regions. The different tribes give you unique trades, and progressing through the story gives you more trading options.

Feasts

Feasts are special and are offered at various points in the story. They give you potent stat buffs that combine attack, defense, and elemental resistance boosts. Feasts also give you additional skills and ingredients as rewards.

Tribe Trading and Farming

Each region features different tribes that you can trade with. By progressing through the story, you unlock new trading opportunities. The village Intermediary is unlocked later in the game. It allows you to access all the item traders from one location, making the trading process less tedious. 

Farming special items is important for trading, and skills like Geologist and Botanist can increase the yield of gathered items.

Mission Rewards and Gathering Tops

Completing man and side quests rewards you with special cooking ingredients, gathering special items is important for trading, and creating a dedicated item load out for gathering can help maximize efficiency; using the map’s gathering filter makes it easy to locate specific items in different regions.

Rare Special Items and Upsurges

Rare special items can be found during special upsurges in different regions; these upsurges are marked on the map and they give you valuable ingredients. I’d suggest gathering these items whenever you can.

Support Ships and Bonfire

The support ship occasionally appears, and it offers you special goods for trade. Bonfire cooking is available at night in certain locations, allowing you to roast monster tails and other parts for valuable rewards like meat, immunizers, and unique items.

Ideal Meal Highlights

You can customize meals to be tailored for specific needs. A meal focused on damage may include meat for attack boosts. Meals can also be customized for stamina boosts, defense, or gathering efficiency. You can save your favorite meal load-outs that allow you to quickly prepare during hunts.

Cooking in Monster Hunter Wilds is a vital aspect of gameplay, providing essential stat boosts and healing. While the system is integrated, focusing on basic rations and gradually incorporating ingredients can ensure that you have a steady supply of buffs. 

Also, check out our Monster Hunter Wilds Review and other guides below:

• Monster Hunter Wilds Guide | Ultimate Food & BBQ Cooking Guide
• Monster Hunter Wilds Guide | Low-Rank Gear & Skill Guide