How to make your Wild Hearts stamina bar slightly less useless

In Wild Hearts, your hunter has a stamina gauge that pops up in certain situations. Since your can’t improve any of your hunter’s stats directly, you’ll need to rely on skills from your weapons, armor, and talismans.

Our Wild Hearts stamina guide will explain when stamina matters and teaches you how to increase your stamina through armor, weapon, and talisman skills.

When your stamina matters in Wild Hearts

Stamina isn’t a huge part of Wild Hearts. It does not come up while you’re sprinting, for instance. It only comes up in a few circumstances:

• Climbing (some) cliffs out in the world as you explore (much like Breath of the Wild)
• Dodging
• Grabbing onto Kemono to reach weak points (kind of like Shadow of the Colossus) with Hunter’s Arm

Image: Omega Force/Koei Tecmo/Electronic Arts via Polygon

When you’re doing any of those things, you’ll see a curved gauge pop up to the right of your hunter, and it will drain as you continue doing whatever triggered it in the first place. When it runs out, you’ll let go of what you’re climbing (and fall) or be unable to dodge any more.

How to improve stamina in Wild Hearts

Your stamina gauge is, let’s say, limited at first. You can’t actually increase stamina in Wild Hearts, but you can improve it, and that’s by minimizing how quickly it drains with skills.

Image: Omega Force/Koei Tecmo/Electronic Arts via Polygon

You’ll get these skills from armor, weapons, and talismans (talismen?). You can see the effect of each skill by hitting the Y/triangle button when you’re looking at gear in your menus.

There are a few weapon skills that apply here, like:

• Fillip — Inhibits stamina loss when health is low
• Leeway — Inhibits stamina loss while in good health
• Grab Master — Reduces stamina loss while grabbing on or similar
• Bare Threads — Inhibits stamina loss when Karakuri thread has run out
• Reactive Expert — Greatly reduces stamina loss when using ukemi to take an attack well
• Fusion Stalwart — Inhibits stamina depletion for a while after conjuring a Fusion Karakuri

Some armor skills overlap with weapon skills, but there are a few unique to armor, like:

• Presence of Mind (Roaming Bard Uwagi) — Inhibits stamina loss when only a single life thread remains
• Core Boost (Grithide Loincloth) — Increases maximum stamina
• Dodge Master (Veteran Tekkō) — Inhibits stamina loss when dodging attacks or similar

You can also pick up stamina-related skills from talismans, like:

• Fatigue Recovery — Increases stamina recovery speed

Each of the skills have a percentage associated with them — that’s how much it improves your maximum Stamina, or the rate at which it drains and recovers.

For more help with Wild Hearts, read our beginners guide and explainers on multiplayer, fast travel, stamina, and building camps.