There are many things a good hunter should do to prepare for a successful hunt - bring along the right weapons and armor for the job, ensure they’ve got stocks of useful items, like curatives and ammo, scout out the area for exploitable terrain, establish a Pop-Up Camp to shorten respawn and resupply treks… but perhaps just as important as any other preparation is the matter of ensuring a hunter doesn’t go out to battle hungry! This page will discuss how meals and the Portable BBQ Grill work in Monster Hunter Wilds!

Page Breakdown¶

Unlocking the Portable BBQ Grill¶

During Chapter 1-2: Village of Whispering Winds, after following Y’Sai and gathering honey, but before hunting the Quematrice, you’ll unlock the vast majority of the game’s essential hunting tools, including the Portable BBQ Grill.

Cooking Meals¶

In Monster Hunter: World, the Portable BBQ Grill was primarily used to turn Raw Meat into Well-Done Steaks, which restored Stamina when consumed, while full meals were handled at the canteen at the main camp. Since Monster Hunter Wilds is more open-world, however, a more flexible solution was needed. After all, the base camps in regions aren’t a separate zone anymore and you won’t always just be able to grab a meal then zone-in to areas where a quest is taking place. Plus, let’s be honest, those cooking skits in Monster Hunter: World probably can’t be improved on.

The solution was simple enough - just allow hunters to cook their own meals via the Portable BBQ Grill. Once you’ve unlocked this device, use it just about anywhere and you’ll get two options: “Grill a Meal” and “Grill Meat”. The former should be familiar enough to Monster Hunter veterans, as it allows you to cook Raw Meat and get Well-Done Meat, but for the topic at hand we’re more interested in the former. Cooking meals will grant the hunter various boons depending on the ingredients used, but meals generally give the hunter a boost to their maximum health and stamina for a significant duration (usually running between 30 minutes and 60 minutes). In addition, meals can boost other stats (attack, defense, elemental resistances, etc.) and skills.

Opt to “Grill a Meal” and you’ll be able to choose between the “Recommended Meal”, “Custom Meal” or “Favorite Meals” options. The former scours your inventory for ingredients and cobbles together a meal, best used when you want to cook up something for general buffs but you don’t want to think about it too much, nor do you need any specific buffs. More interesting, however, are custom meals, which allows you to mix a ration and two other ingredients to create a meal.

Meal Ingredients and Effects¶

To cook a meal, all you need is a Ration. Rations will be periodically supplied by Tom at the Ingredient Center as the base camp in the Plains region (or by the Support Deck in any other base camp) and when used to create a meal can be used as a meat, fish or veggies, all of which give you minor boost to health and a massive boost to stamina, as well as other buffs (meat = attack, fish = defense, veggies = defense and elemental resistance). If you’re not doing anything important, cooking up a ration on its own is a cheap and efficient way to keep your health and stamina topped off. Pick an “Additional Ingredient” or a “Finishing Touch” and you’ll be able to add more ingredients to the meal to boost its effects and duration, in the former case mostly by adding food skills that grant various boons depending on the ingredient(s) used.

You can get these ingredients in all sorts of places - completing quests, looting herbs and mushrooms, capturing endemic life, and so on. The more regions you have access to, the more ingredients you’ll be able to collect, and while these are a good bit rarer than Rations, just about everything you do can grant you some sort of ingredient. If you’re low on ingredients and aren’t planning on doing anything challenging, just stick to Rations, or seek out other means of keeping your health and stamina topped off…

Well-Done Steaks¶

While your ability to gather Rations may be limited (although you’ll almost certainly accumulate more over time than you’ll use!), there’s an activity you can engage in to get as many calories as you wish - hunting! Crazy, right? Any variety of fleshy, succulent herbivore can, when killed and carved up, yield Raw Meat, a Monster Hunter staple, and with the use of a Portable BBQ Pit you can turn this meat into Well-Done Steaks. Just use the Portable BBQ Pit and pick the “Grill Meat” option and you’ll play a little minigame to cook the meat - just keep an eye on your hunter and stop cooking the meat when the outside browns, but before it burns to get Well-Done Steaks, after which the second phase of the minigame will begin - the slicing! Press the designated button when the hunter slices the meat and you’ll increase your gains, potentially carving a dozen Well-Done Steaks from a single chunk of Raw Meat.

Consuming Well-Done Steaks will heal your health and stamina, and while it’s not as significant a source of recovery as meals, if you need to top off your stamina gauge between phases of a hunt or just don’t want to expend rations and ingredients, it’s a good, sustainable alternative.