I’m deep in the end game of Monster Hunter World: Iceborne, my first replay of the game since its initial release in 2019, and I’m running up against a lot of the same pain points I did the first time. After cruising through both campaigns, leveling up my guiding lands, and farming Special Assignment monsters like Raging Brachydios, Safi’Jiva, and Alatreon for my best-in-slot gear, I’ve hit a giant, frustrating wall. Despite putting close to 100 hours in, I’m nowhere near where I need to be to take on the game’s final challenge, Fatalis, and I’ve got a long, grueling road to walk before I get there.
My biggest roadblock right now, and the one anyone is bound to come up against if you play Monster Hunter World long enough, is decorations. Completing my build requires some very specific and very rare decos, and despite playing for nearly four real-life days, I’m still missing a ton.
Farming decorations is brutal, but it was somehow even worse before Iceborne. In base Monster Hunter World, you had to start by acquiring Tempered monster investigations - an arcane process in and of itself that I won’t bother getting into - then repeat these hunts over and over for a chance to get two, three, or four random decos at a time. Considering some of the most important ones have a sub-one percent drop rate, this was an excruciating process.
Iceborne introduced Steamworks, a slot machine that has a chance to spit out tickets you can trade for piles and piles of decos, which speeds up the process a lot. The best way I’ve found to farm decorations is an event quest called Farewell to Zinogre, where you’ll fight a thunder puppy that drops lots of Steamworks fuel every time it leaves rage mode. After the fight you can take all the fuel back to Steamworks and pull the slot over and over (and over and over) hoping to get tickets, then cash all those tickets hoping to get the decorations you want. It’s a good way to get lots of decos at once, but the gambling mechanic on top of another gambling mechanic leaves a lot of room for disappointment and frustration. My loop the last few nights has been to fight Zinogre, yank a slot machine for five minutes, get disappointed by the decos, and repeat. I believe this is the best way to get decorations, but it’s pretty miserable.
That’s also really only good for base game decos. If you’re in the market for Iceborne’s four-slot decorations, which are even more rare and valuable, you need Sealed Feystones. There happens to be an event quest that guarantees two Sealed Feystones minimum - the best odds in the game - called The Wrath of Thunder Descends. Who are you hunting? That’s right, Zinogre.
At a certain point Monster Hunter World just becomes Zinogre Hunter. There’s other ways to farm decorations of course, but considering how rare the good ones are, you’ll likely never see them unless you’re taking advantage of the best odds possible, i.e., killing Zinogres. All that work to get an optimum build, and I’ve been reduced to a dog catcher.
Monster Hunter Rise virtually removes decoration farming by making them all craftable with easy-to-find resources, replacing that process instead with Talisman farming. For Wilds, I’m hoping for something in between the two. I like random decoration drops and the excitement of finding a powerful one that fits perfectly into my build, I just hate searching endlessly for the ones that have a 0.09 percent drop rate. I could fill the Grand Canyon with Antidote Jewels, yet I haven’t managed to find a single Critical Jewel 2 - and I need three of them.
I understand Monster Hunter needs a long tail. While not technically live service, this is the kind of game people play for thousands of hours, only stopping once the next iteration comes along. You want a long journey to your final build, but you also don’t want it to be impossible. There’s no shortage of things to do in Monster Hunter World. You can build and upgrade a weapon for every element. You can make end game builds for all the different weapons types. If you really need it to go on forever, you can learn to speedrun it. Decoration farming should not be the endless endgame of Monster Hunter World, and I shouldn’t have to play for 100 hours to get a Magazine Jewel for my Gunlance (I’m still searching).
