Monster Hunter: World guide to understanding your HUD

Your HUD in Monster Hunter: World provides you with a lot of information. It’s a great tool to help you make sense of your world, your options and your ability to fight. You just have to figure out what it’s saying. In this guide, we’ll break down everything you’ll see on your screen while you play.

Everything on your HUD

Capcom

1. Clock. Normally, this is a day/night indicator — a sun means it’s daytime and a moon means it’s nighttime. When you are on a timed quest, this becomes a countdown — you have until the blue hand reaches the red mark to complete your task.
2. Health, stamina and status effects. When you’re not in combat and haven’t taken damage in a while, these will collapse and hide the gauge, so heal and replenish your stamina (the yellow bar) often. You’ll also see any current status effects as icons above your health (green) bar.
3. Weapon sharpness. Your weapon will lose its edge as you use it. When it’s completely dull — a mostly-empty red gauge — your attacks will bounce off of monsters without dealing any damage. Use a whetstone (or equivalent item) to sharpen and restore your weapon.
4. Weapon special attack charge. Certain weapons like the long sword or charge blade have a powerful attack that you charge up and unleash.
5. Palico status. This is the current health and status of your palico.
6. Nearby items. When your scoutflies find something interesting nearby, it will show up here.
7. Minimap and combat status. Your minimap works like you’d expect — showing a zoomed version of the larger map — but there’s another layer to this area of your HUD. There is a colored ring around the map. When the ring is white or invisible, everything is normal. When the ring turns black and expands, a monster has become aware of you. When it’s red, a monster wants to eat you. When it’s purple, a monster wants to eat you, but you’re currently hidden from it.
8. Camera focus controls. You can cycle through targets for your camera to lock on to here.
9. Control hints. In the top right, there’s a helpful cheat sheet of the controls available to you.
10. Objectives. If you’re on a quest with an objective (or objectives), they’ll appear here as a checklist.
11. Recent activity. Things you’ve picked up, auto-crafted, multiplayer messages and bounty progress will all show up here.
12. Item bar. The items you have available to use in your pouch. Use left and right on the D-pad or your platform’s labeled buttons to cycle through them, or hold down L1/LB to pull up radial menus.
13. Current slinger ammo. You can only collect one type of slinger ammo at a time. This shows what you currently have loaded into your slinger (and how many you have).