Monster Hunter World guide: Assigned quests

As you play Monster Hunter: World, you’re never short of things to do. There are people to meet, monsters to hunt, mushrooms to collect and the New World to explore. These activities are associated with activities like investigations, bounties, expeditions and assigned quests. Keeping track of everything being asked of you — and learning what you can ignore — takes practice.

This guide will focus on the quests that lead you along the main story of Monster Hunter: World: assigned quests.

WHAT IS AN ASSIGNED QUEST?

The main story of Monster Hunter: World plays out through a series of assigned quests. They’re hard to miss, mostly because there’s always someone yelling at you about starting the next one. The quest-giver or start point is marked with a big red icon, and you’ll have a tracker in the top right corner of your HUD.

You don’t have to put in any work to find the next assigned quest and you don’t have to worry about managing them (unlike bounties and investigation quests). You’ll pick them up from an NPC (usually your handler or the commander), then head out to complete them by posting the quest. Once the quest is done, you can start to prepare for the next one.

Assigned quests are how you do your job as a hunter of monsters for the Commission and progress through the game. These quests open up new areas, introduce new monsters and unlock new gear and content for vendors.

Just because you’re focused on the main story doesn’t mean you can’t accomplish other things at the same time. You can make progress on bounties while you’re on your quest, or you can collect footprints and trigger new investigation quests.

WHEN TO DO THE NEXT ASSIGNED QUEST

Your next story mission shows up just as soon as you finish the last one. Most of the time, the dialog and the (constant) reminders make it sound pretty dire and immediate. But rushing into the next big challenge without spending some time preparing, improving and upgrading will lead to frustration.

The challenges you face as Monster Hunter: World’s story advances increase in difficulty faster than your gear improves. And the materials you gather during the assigned quests won’t be enough to improve your gear to they level you’ll need for the next one. That means you’ll need to spend some time between assigned quests upgrading your gear or crafting new stuff, replenishing your item pouch and visiting Astera’s vendors.. And to do all that, you’ll need to run some of Monster Hunter: World’s other activities like bounties and investigation quests. This is something we call the unspoken loop.

There’s no firm answer for how much upgrading you have to do to be prepared for your next story quest. If your last mission was absurdly easy, you might be able to press onward, but otherwise you’re going to want to improve your gear at least a little. Thirty minutes to an hour (or more) between quests is not unreasonable. We wrote more about this in our guide to the unspoken loop.

Just make sure you don’t spend too much time improving your gear. When you finally get back to the main story, you’ll probably unlock new gear that will outpace your current loadout no matter how much upgrading you’ve done.