Items

Everything worth owning in this game comes out of a hole in the ground, and you are usually allowed to take one thing out of it. That makes the skill here identification rather than acquisition: knowing which den you are standing in, and what the shell in front of you is going to become, before you commit the trip home. Our three pages in this bucket line up as three containers, so that is how this guide runs.

Three containers, three tells

Reading a shell before you pick it up

Shells are not decorated at random. Run down our egg list and the markings sort themselves by monster family: every Flying Wyvern shell in it, all twenty of them from Rathalos to White Monoblos, wears zebra stripes; Brute Wyverns get zigzags; Fanged Beasts get splotches; Bird Wyverns get patches; Leviathans get curved bands; the two Herbivores get ovals. Colour is what separates relatives inside a family, which is why a Soulseer Mizutsune shell keeps the purple-on-white of the standard one and simply darkens it.

That is enough to answer the question you actually have in the nest, which is whether the shell in your hands is the one you walked in for. If you are chasing a specific adult, our retreat guide is the faster route, since a beaten monster leads you to a den that only contains its own kind.

The nose test, and the one-egg rule

Pattern tells you the species. Weight and smell tell you the quality, and Navirou will say both out loud as you lift each egg. Heavy and sweet points at better genes, which means a Monstie that grows into more than its siblings. A nest can often be searched more than once, so it is worth turning over everything on offer before you decide, because you may only carry a single egg back out. Rare nests sometimes post a guard as well, and a fight on the way out is part of the price.

Get the egg home and the stables handle the rest: hatch it there, park the ones you are not fielding there, and shuffle your party from the same place.

Everdens and what caps are for

Bottle Caps are the second currency, separate from your Zennies, and they exist because the Melynx Inc. merchant refuses to take normal money. There is one of these vendors in every village, its shelves rotate, and hairstyles, armor and weapons all sit behind the cap price. Everdens are where the caps live, in chests holding somewhere between six and ten of them, sometimes more. Because Everdens never move, the sensible play is to write down where they are on the first pass and return once your team can handle what guards them; a Monstie with Nest-Search will paint the dens onto your map and save you the notebook.

Quests pay in caps too, whether picked up from the board or from an NPC who stops you in the street. The X Marks the Spot treasure hunt is the clearest example we have written up, ending in ten caps, three Golden Chunks, 5,000 zenny and a little experience for three map clues. Five of those caps will buy the Mahanna outfit from Melynx Inc., which is one of the two routes into layered looks described in our armor guide.

The rarest tier of den

Elder Dragon shells sit only in Super Rare High-Rank dens, and those spawn wherever they like. There is no map pin to chase, so the loop is to refresh the zone until one appears, walk in, follow the mini-map to the nest and start searching. The shortcut is the Expedition Ticket (SR), bought from Melynx Inc. with the caps you have been collecting: it puts you into co-op expeditions through Jungle, Woodland and Snowy Mt dens, plus the Desert, Flowery and Volcanic ones, which is a much steadier supply of rare nests than wandering hopefully around your own map.

Both routes want the same preparation, and it is the same preparation the rest of the game wants: a party that wins the clash on type. That is set out on the combat systems page, with everything else on the Monster Hunter Stories 2 hub.