Wild Hearts | How to Craft the Best Weapons (Weapon Upgrade Guide)

Like most other monster-hunting games, Wild Hearts boasts a wide selection of badass weapons to learn and master. Whether it’s the Bladed Wagasa and its unparalleled ability to parry Kemono attacks, the Main Cannon’s magic explosions or the Karakuri’s Staff’s multitude of forms, weapons are at the heart of this game.

This is why it pleases me to say that Wild Hearts has one of the more interesting weapon upgrade systems in the monster hunter genre. Despite it being a bit overwhelming at first glance, the upgrade system in this game is a smart and creative innovation that pushes players towards unique ways of build crafting and making their weapons feel distinct. Once you’ve understood it, weapons in Wild Hearts feel like they become tailor-made for just you. 

Here is how to craft the best weapons in Wild Hearts as we go over weapon upgrading and skill inheritance. 

Want more Wild Hearts coverage and articles? You can find more here on KeenGamer:

1. Wild Hearts | Human-Path and Kemono-Path Affinity Explained
2. Wild Hearts | Amaterasu Monster Guide
3. Wild Hearts | Sapscourge Monster Guide
4. Wild Hearts | Master of the Skies Achievement/Trophy Guide

How to Make and Upgrade Weapons

First, let’s discuss the basics of weapon crafting and upgrading.

To begin you must make a base template of one of Wild Hearts’ eight different weapons on the Forge Weapons tab at either Natsume or a Workbench. This will begin as just a boring weapon with middling stats, but it will be the template for all of your other weapon upgrades. 

Select your base weapon again from the Forge Weapons screen and you’ll see that there are multiple paths that you upgrade it. Each of these connects to a different set of upgrades, all with their own attack stats, skills, elemental affinities and more. You can view the entire upgrade tree for each weapon from the start, but you won’t be able to see specifics until you have encountered certain Kemono (who drop the materials needed to make different weapons). 

Each upgrade asks you to provide a series of materials before it can be created: these are usually Kemono parts alongside some ore and gold. The Kemono required for the upgrade will usually relate to the weapon in some way (Fire Kemono are likely to produce a weapon with a Fire element, for example). As you play through the game you will fight new Kemono who drop new parts, which will allow you to craft new weapons. Remember to check back on your weapon after every new hunt to see if something new catches your eye.

Starting at Base

Inherent and Inherited Skills

Of the most interesting and impressive features of the Wild Hearts weapon system is the way that weapons can gain different skills. When you craft a new version of a weapon it will sometimes come with two types of skill: Inherent and Inherited.

Inherent skills are skills exclusive to that specific weapon which become active when equipped. There is a wide variety of these on almost every weapon ranging from the ability to apply Poison to providing a percentage chance to reduce damage. These exist to give each weapon a unique use case and reason to be wielded outside of their damage or element.

Inherent and Inherited Skill Difference

Then there are Inherited Skills. These are skills that you can pass on from weapon to weapon, allowing the new weapon to “inherit” other skills. Plainly put, this allows you to take the skills on your older, weaker weapons and carry them over to stronger ones where they will see more use. There are plenty of early-game weapons that come will some pretty useful skills to inherit, ones that you would ordinarily have to abandon as the game grows more difficult.

Together, this system can be used to make some really unique weapons. You may see a weapon with an Inherent Skill that would work really well for your build or playstyle. From that, you can begin working backwards to try and find different weapons that you can inherit other skills on to craft the perfect Kemono-hunting tool. This system introduces an incredible amount of variety into the weapons while still giving you a reason to chase specific weapons. 

Inheriting Skills

Branch Build Crafting

Once you’ve figured out how this forging system works, it is a complete game changer. You start thinking less about collecting a massive arsenal of weapons and more about creating a curated set of specialised tools, ones with a bunch of powerful perks to suit your build. 

If you want to build for more base attacks to take down monsters faster, you can focus on finding the branch that takes you past all of the Savage or Critical skills. Then, if you want to have a more specialised build focused on your weapon, you can take the upgrade path that gives you those. You can even stack as many armour affinity perks on a single weapon if you plan on using it on a Pure-Human or Pure-Kemono Path build, giving you a ton of powerful perks that are usually locked behind strict requirements. 

You should still craft a variety of weapons for a variety of different loadouts, of course: having one weapon of each element will surely help in Hunts, after all. However, from the way that the upgrade tree is implemented, you’re clearly not supposed to go out and make a brand-new weapon every time. Instead, you should nurture it and carry it through so it can become the best version of itself. 

This is genuinely such a fantastic system that truly opens up the Hunt in so many different ways. While it can be a bit clunky at first and the urge to keep making new base weapons will always linger, you should certainly engage with this part of Wild Hearts.

Hunters Need the Best

Example: The Parry Focused Wagasa

Let’s give an example. I want to craft a Battle Blade Wagasa that will emphasise the parry and spindance gauge, allowing me to become an offensive monster that can turn all of my opponent’s attacks back with ease. 

I would begin by making a basic Bladed Wagasa and then turn it into an Edgestone Bladed Wagasa, instead. This gives me access to the tree that has the Water element, which just so happens to have a bunch of skills that can be used in my build. From here I would craft:

1. The Freshet Bladed Wagasa and go all the way until the Dog Star Bladed Wagasa. I would inherit the Dodge Master and Reactive Expert skills on every weapon once I have them.
2. Then craft the Bladed Wagasa of Nature’s Splendor and continue crafting weapons on the right branch until the Ivy Crescent Bladed Wagasa.
3. Head down the Sporetail tree to create the Red Blum Bladed Wasaga, picking up Savage as an Inherited Skill.
4. Finally, I would craft the Amber Bladed Wasaga, making sure to inherit all of the skills I previously acquired.

While not perfect (and pretty long), this path would give me a bunch of skills and abilities to aid in my hunts. The final weapon I crafted has the Inherent Skills Parasol Dance: Fury and Destruction Art, making Kemono parts easier to break and rewarding me with more attacks every time I build the spindance gauge by parrying. Alongside those Inherent Skills, I also picked up Dodge Master, Reactive Expert, Savage and Parry Perfection as Inherited Skills that can help out with every aspect of combat that I want to focus on. 

Wagasa Build Example

This is only one option, too. I could go down a completely different path with the same starting Wagasa, perhaps picking skills that boost my raw attack and damage capabilities. There is so much flexibility here: you just need the time (and the abundance of Kemono parts) to make it sing. 

And that was everything you needed to make the very best weapons, all with plenty of inherited skills, in Wild Hearts. Happy hunting!