It is with considerable shame that I admit that, even after playing 47 hours for my Monster Hunter Wilds review and putting in another chunk since restarting the game on PC, I had no idea you could quickly gather a whole mess of items in Monster Hunter Wilds by selecting them in the slinger menu instead of rooting around like a hog after truffles.
Reddit user MidshipEnd brought this feature to my attention, continuing a line of landmark breakthroughs on par with humans discovering fire and landing on the moon. "You can gather with the slinger without looking at the material by selecting them with the d-pad when you're in range," as they succinctly put it. One reply captures my thoughts well: "Insane find im ngl."
PSA: You can gather with the slinger without looking at the material by selecting them with the d-pad when you're in range from r/MHWilds
Obviously I booted up Monster Hunter Wilds immediately to test this. It's as easy and useful as it sounds. Assuming you're playing with a controller, just stand relatively near gatherable or interactable elements with your weapon unequipped, hold the button for aiming / Focus Mode, and use the D-pad and Circle / B to select, harvest, or trigger all the nearby thing-a-majigs in the environment like a Fallout Mister Handy in a farming sim. You don't even have to look toward your targets. These hands are omni-directional.
As someone who spent much of the Monster Hunter Wilds campaign emulating Time Crisis by manually sniping bugs and herbs while my Seikret walked me through fixed narrative sections, this menu-based gathering is a game-changer. Apart from mining ore, which I still prefer to do in batches by physically approaching rocks, this is probably the most efficient way to gather.
You don't have to separate the important mushrooms from the background mushrooms of the game's thickly detailed environments, and you can do all your gathering in one quick batch from the comfort of your Seikret saddle. Monster Hunter Wilds has already ruined me with seamless quests, generous investigations, and Seikret Uber, so I'm embracing this quality-of-life win.
Our Monster Hunter beginner's guide will tell you everything else you ought to know about Capcom's monstrous action RPG.
