In a series called Monster Hunter it should be no surprise that you often end up in violent confrontations with giant critters - that’s kind of the core concept of the series. But all this monster wrangling is cast in the light of conservationism, so you don’t feel bad about beating up big frogs, birds and lizards and raiding their nests for eggs!. Hatching these pilfered monster eggs and strategically releasing the young monsters back into the wilderness can benefit you in numerous ways, including allowing you to find (and tame) stronger monsters with rarer genes, and perhaps even create new mutant strains of monsters! This page will cover how to efficiently farm specific monster eggs and how to get gold and rainbow egg variants in Monster Hunter Stories 3!

Page Breakdown¶

Habitat Restoration Guide¶

Each major area in the game (Azuria, Canalta Timberlands, Tarkuan and Serathis) has several subregions, each with five indigenous monster species you can find, fight and/or plunder the nests of. If you encounter a monster on the field, you’ll be able to fight it and if you defeat it you’ll gain materials which can be used to craft bizarre arms and armor that will in turn help you defeat stronger monsters. It’s a tried-and-true formula that keeps Monster Hunter fans returning to the series in their millions.

In Monster Hunter Stories 3, however, you’ve got an incentive to keep some monsters intact, as you’ll need to leverage the strength of tamed Monsties to assist you in battle, and leveling up will only get you so far. To truly get the most out of your Monsties you will need to restore their native habitats to strengthen the gene pool, resulting in stronger monsters roaming about, with superior genes, and perhaps the odd mutant variant. This is a bit of an involved process and the finer details aren’t always intuitive, but for starters we’ll focus on the basics: You need to search Monster Dens for eggs, hatch those eggs, then release the hatched Monsties back into the wild to improve the rank of other monsters of the same type in a region.

Camps and Feral Monsters¶

Before you can go about restoring a habitat you must first set up a Camp in a region, which in turn is done by defeating a Feral Monster in the region. Some of these will be done via main quests, with the first being a Feral Yian Kut-Ku encountered during the main quest The Princess of Vermeil. Many Feral Monsters are optional, and in some cases, quite a bit more powerful than normal monsters in the region, so you may have no choice but to return later in the game when you’re strong enough to deal with them!

Defeat the Feral Monster in a region and you’ll be able to start releasing hatched Monsties there to rank them up. It’s worth noting, however, that you can farm eggs and fight monsters in a region before dealing with the Feral Monster there, you just can’t release Monsties into said region. Camps are set up automatically upon defeating a Feral Monster, and you can hatch eggs (via the “Stables” menu) and release Monsties via the “Habitat Restoration” menu, among other things.

Monster Dens and Egg Farming¶

Hatching eggs and releasing Monsties may require a Camp, but the eggs themselves come from Monster Dens. Regions will be randomly populated with Monster Dens when you fast travel back from a different region, rest or reload, and the core concept is simple: enter one of these caves, find the nest, grab an egg, then exit the Monster Den to acquire said egg. Of course if things were that simple, it wouldn’t be much fun, so let’s get into the many layers of nuance and complexity here.

First, note that there are four types of Monster Dens: normal Monster Dens (white icons on the map), rare Monster Dens (yellow icon), super rare Monster Dens (blue icon) and Retreat Dens (green icon). For now just note that Retreat Dens don’t appear randomly the same way other Monster Dens do, and there are some slight variations between the first three Monster Dens and Retreat Dens which will be discussed later. Inside all Monster Dens are semi-randomized resources strewn about (possibly including chests) and at least one nest.

Harvesting eggs is simple, go up to a nest and search it and you’ll root around for an egg. The egg you’ll get is random both in the monster type it belongs to and its quality; the egg of any monster native to the region can be found in any nest and the quality of said egg can be either fairly potent (no glow when picking it up), very potent (golden glow) or highly potent (rainbow glow). The quality of the egg mostly determines the [Genes] the hatched monster will have - higher quality eggs can have rarer genes, and are hence better. This plays a big role in late-game Monstie performance, but for now note that 1) almost every gene in the game can be transferred between Monsties 2) the stats of the Monstie itself (genes notwithstanding) are the same regardless of egg quality and 3) monsters can be leveled up and ranked up later. The takeaway? You want higher quality eggs for their genes, but the actual long-term strength of the Monstie is, in almost every case, not determined by the egg’s quality. You can take your generic early-game Tobi-Kadachi and make a killer out of it, if you wish.

You can harvest each nest you find multiple times - the exact number is random, but eventually Rudy will start getting anxious, first giving you warnings before preventing you from picking up any more eggs. Each time you pick up a new egg, the old one is discarded forever, but each egg draw can be a different egg type and/or quality. Aside from being arbitrarily forced to stop farming for eggs by Rudy, another more obvious risk exists - the monster who calls the den home. When you enter a den a monster may be randomly roaming about, sleeping near the nest, or nowhere in sight - but if you grab too many eggs, a monster may spawn, spot you, or wake up, and unsurprisingly they’re none too happy to see you rooting about in the nest. These monsters will attack if they spot you and they tend to be leveled up to or near the player’s level, potentially making them stronger than normal variants. If you’re defeated by a monster in a den, you’ll lose any eggs you may have grabbed and will be expelled from the Monster Den. You’ll have the weigh the benefits of searching for specific eggs with the danger of being attacked if you get too greedy.

It’s also worth noting that the monsters native to a region will not be revealed in the “Habitat Restoration” menu until you’ve found one of their eggs - the monsters that happen to be roaming about said region aren’t always counted as one of its native species. If you find an egg named something generic like “fanged wyvern egg” or “leviathan egg”, this is a sign that you’ve never hatched such a monster before - you should probably take these eggs and hatch them just to reveal the monster in the “Habitat Restoration” page. If you’ve already hatched a variant of a monster before, you’ll be told specifically what the monster egg is when you pick it up, “Rathian Egg”, “Plesioth Egg”, etc.

So to recap the steps in this process:

• Defeat Feral Monsters to establish a Camp in a region
• Enter Monster Dens and steal eggs from the nest(s) within
• Escape Monster Den and hatch eggs at Camp
• Hatching an egg reveals what region(s) that Monstie is native to
• Release Monsties in the region they’re native to in order to increase their rank
• Profit?

We should probably talk about that whole “profit” bit at the end here to justify why we’re going through so much bother…

Habitat Restoration and Monster Rank Benefits¶

When you hatch an egg, that Monstie will be added to your stable, and you can add the Monstie to your party, [change out genes via the “Rite of Channeling”] or release the Monstie. Why would you ever release a Monstie? Two reasons: to add that Monstie to the population of a region or, more to the point of this page, to increase the Ecosystem Rank of native Monsties.

When you’re in the “Habitat Restoration” menu, select a region and you’ll see a list of the native Monsties on the bottom right of the screen, represented by their icons. Undiscovered Monsties will be listed as question marks (hatch one of their eggs to reveal them on this chart), but note there are two pages to this chart - the five leftmost icons are for native Monsties and the rightmost page - “Restoration Slots” - are for non-native Monsties. Release a non-native Monstie into a region and it may spawn there going forward, and in some cases Mutations may occur, resulting in an entirely new type of Monstie spawning in the region (taking up another Restoration Slot). This is beyond the scope of this page, however, so we’ll be focusing on ranking up native Monsties and the benefits they provide.

Every time you release a native Monstie, that monster type’s rank will increase in that region. For example, the Sunpetal Plains has five native monsters: Nerscylla, Glypceros, Royal Ludroth, Yian Kut-Ku and Velocidrome. All of these will start at Rank C, but hatch some, say, Nerscylla eggs and release them in the Sunpetal Plains and the Nerscylla rank will increase, maxing out at Rank S. This has numerous effects, as follows:

• Higher Rank Monsties will hatch at higher levels.
• It’ll be easier to get higher-quality eggs if a monster’s rank is high (more gold/rainbow eggs).
• Higher Rank Monsties may have an S-rank skill.
• More Environmental Skills will be unlocked.
• Environmental stat bonuses may be applied.
• Monstie may have special dual-element genes.

Basically, the more Rank S monsters in a region, the higher level they’ll be when they hatch, the easier it’ll be to get gold and rainbow eggs, and hence the rarer genes they’ll possess upon hatching. Even if you don’t want a specific Monstie in your party, you may want another Monstie to have some of their genes, and since you usually only have to release several of each type of Monstie per type and region to get them to Rank S… well, it’s a fair bit of work, but it’s also one of the few ways to get stronger Monsties.

Egg Farming Guide¶

Now that you know how to farm monster eggs and and why you should bother, we’ll discuss how to do so with some modicum of efficiency. While running into random Monster Dens and plucking eggs out of nests will work - and it’s not a bad idea, especially early on and in new regions where most if not all native monsters are Rank C and/or undiscovered entirely - in the long term there’s a better way to go about farming higher quality eggs from specific monsters.

When you defeat a monster in the field there’s a chance they’ll retreat to their den, creating a Retreat Den (green icon) nearby. This has some pros and cons:

• Each Retreat Den will almost always have two nests
• The defeated monster will be inside, sleeping, will rarely wake up, and may allow you to harvest dozens of eggs from each nest
• The quality of the eggs harvested seems higher than standard Monster Dens (may be Rank dependant)
• You will only get eggs of the defeated monster’s type (bad?)
• You will ALWAYS get eggs of the defeated monster’s type (good!)

If you want to boost a specific monster’s rank in a region, just defeat it in the field until it retreats to its den, grab two eggs, hatch and release them - doing this two or three times (releasing 4-6 hatched Monsties) should be enough to take any monster from Rank C to Rank S. Plus you’ll get experience and monster materials while you do this. Once a monster is Rank S, you can repeat the process again and farm these Retreat Dens for Very Potent (gold) or Highly Potent (rainbow) eggs with a very high rate of success - it’s somewhat rare that, with a bit of farming, you should ever have to leave the den of a Rank S monster without two rainbow eggs! This of course means an excellent Monstie to use in combat or to harvest rare genes from!

It can be a bit tricky to find some specific monsters in the field, with some variants only spawning in one or two locations on a map. Fast traveling back to a Camp should respawn them, but it does take a bit of running back and forth to accomplish… but you can and should usually need to rank up several monsters in a region at a time, so there’s no real reason you can’t just fight every monster who isn’t Rank S en route and make proper runs out of this. It’s worth noting, however, that some monsters might not regularly spawn on maps, like the Dreadqueen Rathian in the Sunpetal Plains, so you may just have to suffer the slog of raiding normal Monster Dens in these odd situations. Also, defeating a monster on the field doesn’t guarantee it’ll flee to a Retreat Den - you can equip certain [Decorations] and eat certain meals to boost your chances, but some grinding will be in order.

Finally, you’ll likely face another “problem” by farming monsters and eggs - over-leveling. This isn’t a terrible thing, since it’s one of the few ways to increase your strength, provides a marginal edge at best, and many monsters in a region will be quite high-level anyways, forcing you to ignore them until later. But once you several levels higher than a monster, you’ll auto-defeat them when you ambush them in the field, and monsters defeated this way will never flee to Retreat Dens. The solution is simple: just run into them on the field to start a battle normally, then press + to auto-win the battle. Despite functionally be the same as ambushing them on the field, monsters defeated in this manner can scurry away to Retreat Dens, yield more EXP, and it only takes a few seconds longer than defeating them on the field!

So again, super quick summary:

• Defeat monsters (without auto-killing them on the field) until they flee to a Retreat Den.
• Harvest eggs in said Retreat Den (2x eggs per den)
• Hatch and release Monsties until the monster is Rank S
• Farm more eggs, looking for rainbow eggs
• Hatch eggs to get powerful Monsties with rare genes
• Get tons of materials and EXP in the process!