If you’re like me, a Monster Hunter Wilds quest probably takes you a few minutes to complete. Maybe even more, if you’re tackling one of the game’s tempered monsters. However, some players are using a cheeky cheesy strategy to complete hunt quests in a matter of seconds. Their secret? Poison ammo.
It all relies on a small collision between player tools and open hunting design. You see, while walking around the various zones, monsters can be damaged by other entities that aren’t the player. This includes poison ailments, which can continuously hurt monsters without the player’s involvement. As such, triggering poison damage-over-time on a Monster will not trigger a hunt quest. This makes sense! It would be especially annoying to be thrust into a hunt quest you don’t want to do just because a monster got itself poisoned on the other side of the map.
However, a consequence of this design is that players can shoot a monster with poison ammo freely without triggering a quest. Even while the monster is throwing out attacks at you! As long as you don’t hit the monster with anything else, you can fight a monster without the quest timer starting. Once you’ve poisoned a monster so much so that they’re on a tiny amount of HP, you can pull out another ammo type or weapon and start the fight for real. This allows you to start a hunt quest, then kill the monster within mere seconds.
You can watch this in action in the video embedded above. This tactic has allowed players to boast absurd clear times. Take this post, where Twitter user Shincry posted a screenshot of a roughly one second Tempered Chatacabra kill time. They then linked to a video of a hunter whittling down the Chatacabra in the arena, before putting them to sleep with sleep ammo. Then, they dropped two tranq bombs to prep the monster for capture, initiated the hunt, then put a shock trap down to instantly complete the quest. Boom. A 1.53 second hunt.
This doesn’t really hurt anyone, if anything it’s a longer method of actually completing quests. Nonetheless, it’s a fun example of player ingenuity – try it out yourself!