Monster Hunter Wilds gets even better in an instant with a few simple tweaks

There are a lot of Monster Hunter Wilds options at your disposal, so here are the ones you’ll want to change to make the RPG even better.

Monster Hunter Wilds is a fantastic game. I’ve now put around 100 hours into the mammoth new Capcom RPG, and I’m expecting to play much more of it over the coming months, especially as new monsters begin to arrive in the free title updates. If you’re just getting started, however, there’s one thing I’d recommend all players do as early as possible. It might not be quite as interesting as smacking Rey Dau over the head with that new hammer you’ve just built, but it’ll make a world of difference to your experience.

The Monster Hunter Wilds options menu is vast. If you’re a series veteran, you may already be familiar with some of the most important tweaks, but I found myself making a dramatic number of changes right from the early hours of the RPG. These aren’t about graphics or performance, although we have tested the best Monster Hunter Wilds settings to help you there, but they might be even more game changing. While fiddling about in menus isn’t the most exciting task, I’ve picked out a few alterations I’d recommend checking.

As mentioned in my Monster Hunter Wilds review, I’d prioritize heading to the ‘controls’ tab and turning off ‘auto-sheathe.’ This stops you from automatically putting your weapon away if you haven’t attacked for a short while. Personally, I also like to set my dash controls to ‘R1 only’ so that I don’t sheathe my sword accidentally by clicking the left stick. Switching ‘hold confirmation duration’ to short will mean you need to keep buttons pressed for less time, which is useful if you alter your ‘call Seikret controls’ so you can bring them in with the circle button (handy if you are used to Rise’s Palamute).

Speaking of your trusty mount, I switched the ‘Seikret manual controls’ to type two, which puts you in charge of steering, and switched off ‘Seikret auto-explore’ on page three of ‘game settings’ to stop it wandering about by itself. There’s a case to be made for the feature if you want to use a ranged weapon while riding on its back, but remember that you can always press up on the directional pad to go into auto-move mode if you have a target set.

If you’re a radial menu user, give ‘item use controls’ type two a chance. It requires you to click the right stick to use consumables instead of letting it go, and, while I stuck with the default for a long, long time in Monster Hunter World, I think the alternate option is much more reliable in a pinch. The expanded item bar is also a beautiful addition, and you can change how you activate it (I like type three, holding R1 and L1 together) and how quickly the cursor scrolls. I’d recommend learning to use a mix of both the radial menu and item bar for best results.

There are a tremendous number of camera settings if you’d like to tweak every individual facet of adjusting your view, and it can be important to get those right with how mobile a lot of the Monster Hunter Wilds monsters are. By far the most important, however, is ‘camera distance: zoom’ – turn it all the way up to ten to get the widest possible perspective. It’s not a big jump, but every little helps. You’ll probably also want to disable ‘focus camera,’ which has a tendency to drag your viewpoint in directions you don’t want. Head back to the third page of game settings to find ‘obscured hunter visibility’ and you can adjust the silhouette color shown when your character is hidden from view if you don’t like the default white.

One of the most important options long-time players will appreciate is the ‘weapon attack power display’ (page three of game settings). The default option to ‘display with coefficient’ works like Monster Hunter World, applying modifiers to represent different weapon types. This means slow, heavy hitters such as the Hammer and Great Sword will show far larger damage stats than the Dual Blades, for example. If you’d rather make more direct comparisons between your arsenal, however, you can turn this off and see the base values.

Those are the main adjustments to note, but there are a few more. Game settings page three also includes the option to hide your head armor, if you want to appreciate the character you spent an hour building when you started. Just below it, ‘support hunter settings’ lets you limit the abilities of NPC companions if you want to keep all the coolest action to yourself. The top of page one, meanwhile, allows you to show decimal values on your damage numbers for a more accurate read of your DPS. If you’d like Focus Mode to be a toggle, there’s the option on the second page of controls.

To round things out, a setting I wouldn’t change at the start but did later on is the ‘monster sighting camera’ on page four of the camera tab. This gives you a cinematic introduction when you reach your opponent, but when you get more into farming mode you might find it actually disrupts your attempts at a fast initial strike. As one final reminder, I’ll reiterate that Monster Hunter Wilds’ brightness calibration settings are actually quite good. If you have a tendency to crank up the levels like I do, you’ll find the game rather washed out, so trust in the on-screen instructions and you’ll end up with something much prettier to the eye.

Still trying to decide which of the Monster Hunter Wilds weapons is right for you? Let us help. Then take a look through all our best Monster Hunter Wilds character codes if you need some assistance in creating a good-looking protagonist.

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