How to Unlock and Use Augmentations in Monster Hunter: World

Augmentations in Monster Hunter: World are a powerful way to improve your gear and weapons. Knowing how to unlock Augmentations can be vital to improving your rank as a Hunter. Even knowing how to use Augmentations in Monster Hunter: World is important. With all that in mind, here’s everything you need to know about how Augmentation works in Monster Hunter: World.

What is Augmentation?

First, let’s focus on the what. Augmentation is essentially a way for players to place additional buffs on their weapons and armor, giving you the option to raise your power level past what it would normally be locked at. It’s an end-game thing, which means you won’t unlock it for a while, so be ready to work your way up to it. As an example, when you first start crafting your own armor and upgrading it, you’ll only be able to upgrade it a certain number of times before you can no longer add Armor Spheres to it. Augmenting allows you to bypass this limit, giving you even more power.

When it comes to weapons, though, Augmentation works the same way, allowing you to increase the different stats that you have available to you, like base attack value, affinity, and even gives you the ability to add on additional buffs like the ability to regenerate health with any successful hits on monsters. It’s a nice way to upgrade your gear beyond the basic levels and will be vital as you try to take on the more difficult monsters out there.

The most basic way to look at Augmentations is to look at them as a way to build out your character to fit your playstyle or the situations that you’re going into. This can also allow you to negate any weaknesses a weapon or gear set might have, allowing you to more easily even out the odds.

How to Unlock Augmentation

This is the fun part. While Augmentation is an important way to improve your weapons and gear, it isn’t something you’re going to unlock without a little work. First, you’re going to need to defeat the final boss of the game. This will unlock your Hunter Rank, allowing you to complete more quests to level up even further. Keep doing this until you get to Hunter Rank 29. At this point you’ll be given the quest “Beyond the Blasting Scales”.

You will need to complete this quest—which tasks you with hunting two Bazelguese—in order to unlock your Hunter Rank again. With your Hunter Rank unlocked, continue completing quests until you reach Hunter Rank 49. This might take a while, so be patient and just have fun.

When you reach Hunter Rank 49, you’ll be given the quest “Thunderous Rumble in the Highlands”, which will task you with hunting a Kirin. Take down the Kirin and you’ll find your Hunter Rank unlocked for the last time, giving you even more options to take on higher level enemies. At this point you can finally start to collect the items that you need to start augmenting your weapons and armor. In order to augment weapons you will need to upgrade them to the final tier of their upgrade tree, so make sure you’re working on that along the way.

Types of Augmentation

There are currently five ways that you can augment weapons in Monster Hunter: World. These five ways are all important, and you’ll want to use the augmentations that make the most sense for your playstyle. We’ve listed them all out below, so take a look to see what kind of augmentations are available.

• Affinity Increase – This augmentation adds an additional 10% Affinity to the weapon it is granted to.
• Attack Increase – One of the most basic forms of augmentation, this upgrade will raise the basic damage power of the weapon, giving it a higher base damage.
• Slot Upgrade – Adding this augmentation to a weapon will give you an additional decoration slot to work with on that weapon.
• Defense Increase – This augmentation grants an additional 10 points of defense to the weapon and adds a change to reduce any incoming damage that you take.
• Health Regen – The final augmentation available, this will allow you to regenerate health as you land attacks on monsters, granting an active health regen bonus.

The nice thing about augmentations is that each weapon will offer a different amount of augmentation slots, allowing you to add more than one augmentation—or even double up on certain augmentations. This gives you a nice amount of workaround to toy with. When it comes to armor, though, you only have one augmentation option and that is to remove the Upgrade Limit, which will allow you to sink more Armor Spheres into the piece, granting additional armor defense to that piece.

How to Augment Gear

Okay, so now you know how to unlock augmentations and even what types there are. The final piece of the puzzle is finding out how to augment your weapons and gear. Like other upgrades, you’ll need to get your hands on some rare items in order to make augmentations happen. Now, the type of item you need is going to be based on the overall rarity of your gear. For example, lower rarity gear will take regular Streamstones—the item needed to augment gear—while higher tier gear will require even rarer Streamstones called Gleaming Streamstones.

So how do you get your hands on these Streamstones? Well, in order to get Streamstones you are going to need to hunt tempered monsters. These very powerful monsters are rare—some of the rarest you’ll come across in game—which means you’ll need to grind quite a bit if you want to really dive into the augmentation system in Monster Hunter: World. Some of the basic quests you come across while unlocking augmentation will require you to hunt tempered monsters, which means you should already have a pretty good taste of the kind of challenge that they offer.

Streamstones and Gleaming Streamstones aren’t the only augmentation items available either, though. In fact, if you want to upgrade any of your weapons with augmentations, then you’re going to need to get your hands on something called Hero’s Streamstones. These exceptionally rare items can only drop from hunting tempered Elder Dragons, which are by far the most dangerous enemies you will ever encounter in Monster Hunter: World. Make sure you bring your friends along for these battles, and be ready to grind, as these rare drops aren’t guaranteed, and you aren’t guaranteed to get the ones that you’re looking for, which means it could take several attempted to get your hands on them. If you’re looking to upgrade something like a Lance with an augmentation, then you’re going to need to score yourself a Hero’s Streamstone: Lance, and then get the other necessary items to unlock the augmentation all the way.

Now that you know everything about augmentations make sure you check out our Monster Hunter: World guide and be sure to head over to our guide on how to get poison sac and our full-length item and recipe list.