Wild Hearts Forge Guide

While taking on a multitude of Giant Kemono, you’ll find yourself gathering a wide variety of materials. These can be put to use crafting new weapons and armor sets at the forge, giving you the strength to take on harder hunts. In our Wild Hearts Forge Guide, we’ll go over the basics of crafting new weapon and armor pieces, and the various systems tied to each.

Wild Hearts Weapon Upgrading

Choosing the weapon forge option at Natsume’s forge or one you’ve placed will open up the weapon crafting menu. Here, you can create the base form of a weapon by selecting the “+” icon. This gives you the most basic type of the weapon you select, which can then be upgraded further in the weapon tree.

The weapon tree is an interconnected web of weapon nodes. Weapons that require materials from Kemono you haven’t fought before will be represented by “?” icons. Otherwise, you’ll be able to see the icon of the main Kemono that the weapon is based on. Each weapon can have 2 damage stats, one representing raw damage, while the other is elemental. Raw damage is good against all Kemono, while elemental damage is useful if you know a specific Kemono’s weakness. The third stat listed is critical hit rate, which determines the chance of doing extra damage — a negative value means that you actually have a chance to do less damage.

The main thing to keep in mind with the weapon tree is that, unlike most hunting games, you can upgrade in any direction. This means that, as long as you upgrade in one uninterrupted line, it’s possible to start going back up the upgrade tree. As for why this is helpful, this is where weapon skills come into play.

Wild Hearts Weapon Skills

Most weapons come with Inherent Skills and Inherited Skills. Inherent Skills are unique to that weapon, and cannot be transferred when upgrading. Inherited Skills on the other hand can be transferred, though the amount of these skills a weapon can carry depends on its rarity — all weapons from 3 stars onwards have 5 Inherited Skill slots.

This means that you could go to one side of the weapon tree, get a skill you need, then snake all the way to the other side of the tree to land on the final weapon you want to use. It’s also possible to reverse upgrades and get the materials you used back, though this does not allow you to keep Inherited Skills from the upgrades you’re rolling back.

It is possible to take multiple Inherited Skills of the same type, though they will still take up multiple slots rather than combining into one.

Wild Hearts Armor Forging

While weapons are crafted via one large upgrade tree, armor pieces are completely separate from each other. You can mix and match different armor pieces, getting any relevant skills or elemental resistances that you want. However, some armor skills are locked behind the Path system.

Wild Hearts Human-Path and Kemono-Path

At the bottom of the armor forge screen is your current “Path”. The values this can have from left to right are as follows: Pure Human, Human, Centered, Kemono, and Pure Kemono. While your Path doesn’t change your stats in any way, it does determine whether you can use certain skills.

These Path specific skills will have the relevant icon next to them in the armor description, and are grayed out if you are not using the correct Path. If your current Path is Pure Human, this also allows you to use Human-Path skills — the same applies for Pure Kemono and Kemono-Path skills.

While a lot of regular armor pieces will influence your Path, you can swing it further by modifying certain armor pieces. Human-Path and Kemono-Path modified armor has the same skills as the regular versions, just with a Path value based on the modification you used. Not all armor can be modified this way, but it’s useful if you need to reach a certain Path value to activate a skill you need.

Wild Hearts Armor Skins

Armor can be turned into cosmetic skins via the Cladding system, though you won't gain access to this until after the main story. Talking to Yataro (next to the forge in Minato) after the main story is over will give you the option to create said cladding, though the process will require a lot of time and materials. There are 3 key parts to creating cladding:

• The regular version of the armor, which will be consumed to make the cladding. Make sure you have multiple copies of the armor if you plan to use it later.
• Magical Orbs: These are dropped by Volatile and Deeply Volatile Kemono, which can only be fought in Chapter 5. Some are specific to each area, while others are dropped by certain Kemono.
• Gold: You need a lot of Gold to create even a single set of Cladding, with even the cheapest pieces costing 5,000.

Due to these high costs, it's reccommended that you only think of creating Cladding once you already have a gearset that can take down Volatile and Deeply Volatile Kemono effectively.