How to use Qurious Crafting in Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak

Qurious Crafting - Qurio infesting Malzeno's wings
(Image credit: Capcom)

Curious about Qurious Crafting? Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak recently received its title update, adding new monsters like the Lucent Nargacuga and the Seething Bazelgeuse, but more importantly, a new system that lets you reroll armor and boost weapons. Honestly, it's a bit of a game changer, especially in terms of rerolling armor.

You can buff weapons in a similar way to Ramp Up from the base game, adding stats into affinity, element damage, or just pure attack. Qurious Armor Crafting, on the other hand, is more akin to the Melding Pot that you already use to roll talismans. Essentially, you use a special material to unlock armor augments and perform a reroll, potentially altering your stats or adding skills.

In this Qurious Crafting guide, I'll explain how to unlock the Anomaly Investigations you need, where to get Amber Essence, and how to actually make the new system work. If you're new to Monster Hunter Rise, you might also want to know how to start Sunbreak, some tips about what's new in the expansion, or how to get all of the Sunbreak secret armor.

How to unlock Qurious Crafting

(Image credit: Capcom)

Since Qurious Crafting is an endgame feature, you'll first have to defeat Gaismagorm and get to MR10. This will open up Afflicted Monster hunts, and once you've beaten the Afflicted Arzuros, you'll unlock Anomaly Investigations. Simply select one from the randomised quest pool with Chichae and when you complete it, Qurious Crafting for both weapons and armor will have opened up at Minayle the Blacksmith.

Qurious Crafting: How to buff weapons

(Image credit: Capcom)

You craft Sunbreak's best weapons with Afflicted Materials, so it's probably a good idea to forge one of these before you consider investing too heavily in upgrades, especially as unlocking a weapon for augment also costs Afflicted Materials. Here's a brief rundown of how it works:

  • Select a weapon in Qurious Crafting and enable augmentation by paying with Afflicted Materials.
  • This unlocks three Anomaly Slots and potential buffs depending on the weapon. These include boosts to attack, affinity, elemental damage, sharpness, or even a slot upgrade for rampage decorations.
  • You can purchase two different levels of each upgrade with Afflicted Materials and slot them into your weapon, which takes up some of the Anomaly Slots. You can then unlock two more slots with Afflicted Materials.

It's a system that's very similar to altering Buddy Skills; there are buffs to select, but you only have a certain number of slots to work with, so you have to choose wisely and tweak towards your playstyle.

Qurious Crafting: How to reroll armor

The stronger system by far is Qurious Armor Crafting, since it gives you a chance to buff resistances, defense, and add new armor skills and decoration slots. You're going to need another resource in order to do this, though: Amber Essence. You get Amber Essence by completing Anomaly Investigations and it's used to unlock armor augmentation and perform rerolls. As with weapons, you'll want to make sure you have high rarity armor you're willing to invest in first. Here's how the process works:

  • Complete an Anomaly Investigation to earn either Amber Essence+ if you have rarity nine armor, or Prime Amber Essence for rarity ten. These will be listed as rewards on the monster's quest page. You'll have to unlock more investigations to get Prime Amber Essence.
  • Head to Minayle and use the Amber Essence to unlock augmentation for an armor piece.
  • Now you can use any Amber Essence to augment your armor, which will potentially reroll its resistances, defense, decoration slots, or will add skills. These rerolls can also remove skills and reduce stats as well, making them a bit of a trade-off.
  • If you like the new rerolled version, you can select it, but if you'd prefer to keep your old reroll, you can choose that instead.

You can also complete Research Requests for Bahari where you hunt specific Afflicted Monsters. When you hunt ten of these monsters, you'll be rewarded with Investigation Coins that you can use in his shop to purchase a number of items, including Amber Essence.

How to unlock more Anomaly Investigations

Rare Afflicted Monster materials only come from high level Anomaly Investigations, and you'll have to unlock these by breaking parts on Afflicted Monsters and gathering Qurio-infested items during the afflicted hunts. You can recognise these items as there will be little red fireflies hovering around them.

Anomaly Investigations are randomised, but they still have a level system, so these are vital if you want to unlock better hunts. If you find a random Anomaly Investigation that you really like, you can lock it in order to farm multiple times.

Sean Martin
Guides Writer

Sean's first PC games were Full Throttle and Total Annihilation and his taste has stayed much the same since. When not scouring games for secrets or bashing his head against puzzles, you'll find him revisiting old Total War campaigns, agonizing over his Destiny 2 fit, or still trying to finish the Horus Heresy. Sean has also written for EDGE, Eurogamer, PCGamesN, Wireframe, EGMNOW, and Inverse.