In Monster Hunter Stories 3 there are all kinds of ways to improve your rider - leveling, decorations, new arms and armor, but with Monsties, aside from leveling, their power is entirely based on their genes! While some traits are more or less set in stone - including resistances and attack type, almost everything else can be shaped by the monster’s genes, including the actual skills they’ll use in combat and a variety of passive genes that further influence status and elemental resistances, health and stamina regen, Kinship gauge growth, damage mitigation and more. This page will discuss how genes work in Monster Hunter Stories 3, including bingo bonuses and how to get rare genes.

Page Breakdown¶

The Gene Grid¶

Every Monstie has a 3x3 gene grid that will appear on the bottom right of the screen when you’re viewing a Monstie’s stats, and by default a newly hatched Monstie will generally have 4-6 of these slots filled up. All of a Monstie’s attacks will consume a gene slot, as well other nice-to-have passive abilities, like Atk Boost, Def Boost, Health Boost, Self-Heal (regen), Soul Kinship (Kinship gauge fill rate), Inflict Rate Up, Divine Blessing (chance to take half damage), elemental resistances and status resistances, to name a few. Monsties can have nine genes equipped at a time, and via the Rite of Channeling genes can be added, removed or traded as desired, for free.

Rite of Channeling - Transferring Genes¶

Early in the main questline you’ll unlock the Rite of Channeling, which allows you to transfer genes between Monsties. Just because you hatch a potent Monstie doesn’t mean it’ll come with all the genes you want, and even “weak” Monsties may, if their habitat rank is high enough and you get a rainbow egg, have genes your rarer, more fearsome looking Monsties lack.

Take humble Ratha, for example - primarily a fire elemental Monstie considered irreparably rare in-game, but it starts the game with very basic, generic genes. You’re forced to keep Ratha in your party the entire game and even use it in several late-game main quest battles, and while they’re all winnable enough just so long as Ratha is leveled (hard to avoid, since he’s in the party the whole game), you can make Ratha much beefier by entering any Camp, selecting the “Stables” option and moving genes from others Monsties over to him. You don’t even have to get too crazy with buildcrafting, just give Ratha obvious things like:

• Fire Atk Boost (XL)
• Health Boost (XL)
• Self-Heal (XL)
• Soul Kinship (XL)

…will make Ratha much more potent. Where do you get such genes? From other Monsties, of course! It’s a time consuming endeavor, but necessary for endgame content - raid Monster Dens, steal and hatch the eggs you find within, release the newborn Monsties into habitats to increase their rank up to Rank S, then repeat the process to obtain more powerful Monsties. The higher the ranks of monsters in an area, the rarer the eggs you’ll get, which come in three tiers: fairly potent (regular), very potent (gold glow when harvesting) and highly potent (rainbow glow when harvesting).

You can have up to 700 Monsties in your stable at a time, and the more rainbow eggs you harvest, the more rare genes you’ll have at your disposal. There’s also no limit or cost to moving genes between Monsties, so you can just “stock up” on the rare genes you want to keep by moving them to “mule” Monsties you want to keep for no other purpose. The only limitation to this is you cannot put the same gene on a single Monstie. It’s also worth noting genes of the same type will not stack, so there’s no point in having Health Boost (L) and Health Boost (XL) on the same Monstie - you can do it and enjoy Bingo bonuses for doing so, but your passive parameters will just get the XL effect, not the XL and L effects combined.

Gene Rarity¶

High rank, rainbow eggs have a good chance of having rare genes, which can be noted at a glance by the border the gene has on the gene grid. Skill genes typically only come in one rarity, but each Monstie has a signature skill that, if high enough rank, can be replaced by a more potent version of the skill. For example, Anjanath has the “Burning Fang” skill, which will be replaced by “Burning Skill+” at high ranks. The icon for such improved genes will have an “S” on them on the gene grid, making them easy to spot, but most skills do not get such an enhancement, and while they’re nice to have, their importance is somewhat muted compared to the wide array of passive genes.

Speaking of passive genes, these have a more regular and obvious grading system, regularly coming in several tiered rarities. These are indicated by both a letter grade at the end of the gene’s name and by a colored border around the gene icon itself, as follows:

• (S) Bronze
• (M) Silver
• (L) Gold
• (XL) Platinum

Rainbow eggs tend to always have at least one or two gold genes (L), with a chance of a platinum gene (XL). Different Monstie types can have a variety of passive genes, however; say you want the Non-Elem Atk Boost gene and you choose to farm Glypceros eggs for it. You may instead get genes like Elemental Breaker, Den Protector, Darkness Resistance, Non-Elem Def Boost, Salt in Wound or Antivenom genes, instead. Point is, you may not have to farm the right Monstie to get the genes you want, but you’ll have to farm the right Monstie multiple times to ensure that gene actually appears in the rarity you want, if at all! Check out the Habitat Restoration and Egg Farming page for more tips on farming efficiently!

Locked Genes and Catalyst Keys¶

Low-level Monsties (really anything below Lv60, depending on the Monstie species) may have certain gene slots locked by default. This is indicated by a padlock icon on the gene slot, and this can be applied randomly to passive genes, skill genes or even empty gene slots! You can remove these locks by hitting the requisite level or by consuming Catalyst Keys, which can be farmed after eating Eleanor’s “Mouthwateringly meaty broth!” meal (available after completing her second side story) or purchased from Merchant Melynx. Generally, however, it’s easier to stick a low-level Monstie in your party, running into monsters on the field and auto-defeating them to ensure your trainee Monstie gets a load of EXP without having to do any real work.

Locked genes are not active, cannot be used in combat and cannot be moved or exchanged via the Rite of Channeling.

Gene Types and Bingo Bonuses¶

Not only do genes individually give you bonuses, they can yield collective bonuses, as well. The 3x3 gene grid is also a Bingo board and the colors and symbols on them can be arranged horizontally, diagonally and vertically to make Bingos, giving you further bonuses. This will often be a secondary consideration when choosing what genes to put on a Monstie, but if you want to, say, max out fire damage on a Monstie, filling its board with red genes will ultimately get you a +150% boost to fire damage, which is not an insignificant boon

In addition to the colors and symbols on genes giving you boosts when forming Bingos, Monsties also get bonuses based on the number of Bingos they have, which can be seen on the same screen where the gene grid itself is viewable. The exact bonuses vary by Monstie species and typically are unlocked at 2, 3 and 5 Bingos and include boons such as Speed, Starting Stamina, Stamina Recovery, Crit Rate, Wyvernfell damage.

Finally, we’d be remiss if you didn’t mention Free Bingo Genes, which can rarely spawn in a Monstie’s gene pool (again, the rarer the egg, the higher the chance). These rainbow colored genes provide no effects by themselves, but they count as every color and type of gene for the purposes of forming Bingos. Place them in the center of a gene grid and arrange your other genes accordingly to make it easier to complete Bingos and rack up more bonuses!… if you can afford the tradeoff of having a dud gene, that is.

All in all, genes are an important way to customize and strengthen your Monsties. Put different skills on them to give them access to new attack types, like a Speed or Technique skill on a Monstie that otherwise only has access to Power skills, give them buffs to boost their stats, make them good generalist Monsties or purposefully stack genes to turn them into efficient killers against one kind of foe! Generalists work fine most of the time, but some strong opponents may force you to build specifically around them to resist the ailments they inflict, the damage types they deal, or to just overpower them quickly!