Wild Hearts: 5 Best Tips for Beginners

If you’ve played Death Stranding or Monster Hunter, you may have a bit of a head start on playing Wild Hearts. But to truly go for that home run, you’ll need to arm yourself with some tips and tricks unique to the new game. Wild Hearts is the newest co-op monster hunter in town that tasks you with slaying streams of gigantic, nature-infused beasts wreaking havoc on the land of Azuma. 

Wild Hearts offers extensive weapon variety, each unique from the other. It also puts a fun twist on previous monster hunter games you may have played via a crafting and building system called Karakuri. This allows you to craft new weapons, fast-travel across Azuma, and even conjure up new structures to attack or defend yourself in mid-battle. 

Wild Hearts can take a little getting used to, especially for newcomers to the genre. However, these Wild Hearts best tips for beginners should help close that gap for you with ease. 

5. Craft New Weapons

What’s hunting wild monsters without cool, new weapons to take them down with? The base ones can only do so much. Plus, crafting opens up lots of room to experiment with more varied types. Wild Hearts offers eight weapon types in total. However, you’re free to craft multiple versions of each type as you progress. 

These crafting variations unlock every time you take down a new mythical beast called Kemono. So, essentially, a beast's parts are used to craft new weapons. You can mix and match them however you’d like. The result is a variety of weapon load-outs that give you elevated damage, armor, elemental infusion, resistance stats, and even passive skills.

A quick tip to help guide your weapon crafting process is to craft more than one of each weapon from the eight different weapon classes. But if you’ve found a specific weapon class that suits your playstyle, feel free to forge multiple versions of it before slowly proceeding to other weapon types. That way, you have an advantage over whichever Kemono you encounter and can still have an advantage when you switch over to other weapons mid-battle. 

4. Try out Different Combos

Something that will become pretty evident while playing Wild Hearts is that randomly hitting buttons in hopes of somehow coming out alive won’t work. Each consecutive encounter with a Kemono is longer, more brutal, and goes up the learning curve. Instead, you could try out some trick combos, experimenting with the weapons and your playstyle to find what suits you best.

The best way is to mix and match the different moves each weapon can do. It might take some time and patience. But, when you do it correctly, you’ll find each weapon has a unique combo that, when pieced together, deals massive damage to a Kemono. 

If you’re feeling overwhelmed trying to figure out what’s what, feel free to check out the learner courses in Wild Hearts. These show you different combos and how to chain them together, including how to weave in the dragon karakuris to achieve the most damage output possible. Once you feel comfortable, get back into the main game and check out the differences.

3. Remember to Eat

It’s easy to forget to eat when you’re playing as an in-game character. However, Wild Hearts couldn’t stress enough the importance of eating enough, even though they don’t necessarily signal it to you directly. Eating is a good way to elevate your stats, from health to defense to offense, so any time you want to take on a Kemono, you probably gobble down something edible, even if only temporarily, to level up your skills.

So, how do you eat in Wild Hearts? Well, you hunt, harvest, and cook it. Some of the tools you can use to elevate your nutrition further are the Drying Rack and Pickling Jar Karakuri. These help you combine varied ingredients to create more powerful meals. The gauge on the food menu also signals how much more you can consume. So, always try to get to 100 for the best outcome.

2. Make Karakuri Your Best Friend 

You can’t really stress the importance of Karakuri enough in Wild Hearts, given that it’s one of the game's core gameplay elements. Karakuri is the structure you can conjure up in the game. They come in handy in various ways, from crafting new weapons to traversing Azuma to helping you fight enemies mid-battle. Put simply, you’re free to conjure up Karakuri anywhere at any time.

The basic karakuri is quite useful in combat. However, the dragon karakuri is even more useful in much more varied scenarios, given they’re more permanent structures than the basic ones. Take, for example, the fast-travel tents and forges. You’ll have to scout around to find the most optimal places to put up dragon karakuris.

Also, dragon karakuris are scarce resources. However, there’s a way to maximize them by claiming and upgrading as many dragon pits as you can by building dragon karakuris in dragon pits scattered all around the maps. That way, you can gain fast travel, a food court, and weapon-forging perks from them. You can also upgrade the dragon pits with huge mist and giant spring dust crystals, which you earn by completing missions.

1. Tsukumo, Your Friendly Companion

Wild Hearts offers not just one but a ton of orb-like critters called Tsukumos. They are hidden all around the map and can be a great deal of help during battle. Particularly, they help to distract Kemonos, create a healing mist, and generate the thread used to conjure the basic karakuris. 

If you feel they could do more, feel free to upgrade them by finding any of the 50 Tsukumos scattered in each map, and earning Old Cogs. Once you do, you’re able to upgrade a Tsukumo’s attack, defense, support, thread capacity, and more abilities.

So, what’s your take? Do you agree with our list of “Wild Hearts: best tips for beginners?” Are there other tips we should know about? Do let us know down in the comments or over on our socials here.