Monster Hunter: World guide: Making sense of your menus

Like a lot of things in Monster Hunter: World, your menus give you an intimidating number of options. And like everything in the game, you have to put in some work to understand those options. This guide is here to help you through that work. We’ve listed all of the menu items (except for the system options) below and included a brief explanation of what they do.

Items and Equipment menu

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• Crafting list. This lets you access crafting wherever you, but only for items in your pouch.
• Item pouch. Examine and manage the items currently in your pouch. You can also share items from your pouch with other players in multiplayer.
• Receive items. If a member of your party in a multiplayer game gives you an item, you choose to receive it here.
• Customize radial menu. This gives you the option to change the way your item bar behaves. This is a fairly complex concept, so check out our guide to understanding your radial menu.
• Equipment info. This gives you a detailed breakdown of your armor and weapon stats, skills and buffs. There’s a lot going on here, so until you better understand it, just know that bigger numbers are better.

Quest menu

The contents of this menu change depending on whether or not you’re currently on a quest.

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• Quest info. If you’re on a quest — an assigned, optional or investigation quest — this option opens your wildlife map with the quest objectives.
• Abandon quest. This lets you choose to end your current quest. You keep any items you’ve picked up, but you won’t get any completion rewards (obviously).
• Return from expedition. If you’re out wandering the world and are ready to head back to town, you’ve got several options. You can talk to the handler, use your map or choose this option from the menu.
• Fire SOS flare. On any quest or expedition where you get in over your head, you can fire off an SOS flare to call for help. Anyone at a quest board can respond to your flare and come help you.
• Research points. This displays the research points you’ve earned during the current quest.
• Join requests. This is where you manage other players’ requests to join your quest.
• Party settings. Lets you adjust things like party size for a quest you’ve posted.

Info menu

• Hunter’s notes. This is your notebook with information on areas, monsters and your controls. You’ll get more detailed notes on monsters as you increase your monster research level.
• Palico info. Lets you examine the stats and equipment loadout of your companion.
• Resource Center. Check on the bounties, investigations and deliveries you have open at the Resource Center. You can’t manage — register new bounties or investigations — anything here, though. You need to head back to Astera for that.
• Wishlist. Check on your progress toward making the items on your wishlist.
• Guild card. Your in-game profile. It includes your stats, history and current gear. In multiplayer, you can share this like a business card.
• Play guide. Despite being buried a couple menus deep, this is an incredibly useful option. You can find all of the loading screen tips and tutorials you’ve seen in the game.

Communication menu

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• Gestures. Choose from your poses and actions.
• Shoutouts. Drop some useful phrases into the multiplayer activity stream (on the right side of the screen).
• Stickers. Stickers are like Monster Hunter: World’s version of emoji. These also drop into the activity stream.
• Chat. This option lets you examine the activity stream (including gestures, shoutouts, stickers and anything the game drops in like bounty progress).
• Player list. Check out the people in your online session.
• Invite a friend. Invite someone to your online session.
• Recently played. Try to find a session you played in recently.
• Squads. Manage and examine the squads you belong to.