Monster Hunter: World guide: Item management, item pouch and item box

There are countless items and materials to find in Monster Hunter: World. From mushrooms to insects to plants and dung, everything will either help you on your hunts or become a crafting item. This guide will explain the items you can pick up and how you’ll (spend a ton of your time trying to) manage them.

What to pick up

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Pick up everything — especially early on in Monster Hunter: World. Until you get a feel for what you need and what you actually use, everything is valuable and important.

We’ve broken down the things you can pick up into four categories below. Each category has a distinct icon color when you see it on your screen.

Items

This is a pretty broad category. It includes the things you use like potions and traps as well as the crafting materials you need to make those things. In the wild, these items have a green icon. Items make up the majority of what you’ll find.

Early on, it’s smart to pick up everything, just in case. As you grow more comfortable with the game, you’ll learn what you actually need to pick up and how to be more selective.

If you never use a ranged weapon, you need to craft ammo or coatings, for example. That means there are a number of herbs and plants you can (relatively) safely ignore or pick up less often. Just make sure to check the crafting list (discussed blow) thoroughly before you discount something altogether.

Slinger ammo

Slinger ammo has a blue icon. These items, including rocks, redpits and watermoss, are ammunition for your slingshot. You can only carry one type at, so picking up every single slinger ammo you pass is only going to constantly swap out your inventory. Pick or seek out something useful and stick with it.

Instant-use items

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There are also instant-use items scattered around the world like vitalilies and wiggly litchis. You don’t store these items. You use them immediately, and they to offer buffs to your health or stamina.

Monster materials

Monster materials like carcasses and monster traces like footprints have a yellow-orange icon. Traces will earn you research points and help you track monsters. After you kill a monster, you can carve it to collect materials. You can use these to make weapons and armor or cook them at the canteen.

Monster materials don’t go into your item pouch or box. They’re stored automatically. You can’t get at them through your item box, though. You’ll be able to check on them at the smithy in Astera’s workshop when you want to make or upgrade gear, or you can see them when you choose to sell items from your item box.

Your item pouch and item box

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Your item pouch contains the items you always have available to use. Its storage capacity is limited. Your item box is for long-term, high-quantity storage, but you can only access it from certain places.

Both your item pouch and your item box are separated into item and ammo/coatings categories. There is room in your item pouch for 24 different items and 16 varieties of ammo or coatings. Each item has a stack limit, though. For example, you can only carry 10 potions at a time and one shock trap.

Your item box has (at minimum) 100 slots for items and 100 slots for ammo and coatings. (If there’s a limit to the individual stacks, we haven’t found it yet). You can access your item box from any campsite, your room or a number of locations around town. From one of these locations, you can move items from your pouch to your box and vice versa.

An important habit to get into is visiting your item box before (and after) every quest and expedition. Empty out all of the stuff you picked up that’s taking up room in your pouch and store it in your box.

Crafting and auto-crafting

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All of those things you pick up are going to keep piling up and filling your pouch until you can figure out how best to use them. Sometimes, that means combining it with something else to make it (more) useful. And that’s where the crafting list comes in.

The crafting list will show you a list of all of the things it’s possible to make in Monster Hunter: World. If you go to the crafting list from your pouch (or just when you’re out in the world), you’ll only be crafting from the items in your pouch. When you choose the crafting list from your item box, you’ll only be crafting with the items in your box, which does not include what you have in your pouch.

Auto-crafting

A wonderfully useful feature of the crafting list is the ability to turn auto-crafting on or off. This means that any time you have all of the ingredients necessary for a craftable item, it’ll get made automatically. The most obvious and most useful example of this is automatically turning (unusable) herbs into health-restoring potions. From there, you can add on layers that automatically craft new items from those items, like combining potions and honey to get a mega potion.

When you get a chance, take a moment to run through the list of every craftable item and look at what is set to auto-craft by default. There’s a lot you can turn off depending on your playstyle, which will free up those resources for other things.

The obvious things to keep auto-crafting are potions and antidotes. If you’re a ranged weapon player, you can auto-craft ammo, saving you some stress. Later in the game, as the environment and monsters get more complex, you’ll come to rely on the environmental and status effect-related items a lot more.