To access Qurious Crafting, you’ll need to hunt monsters using the new Anomalous Investigation system. This guide will walk you through unlocking investigations, raising your Anomaly Research Level, and powering up your Sunbreak builds with the new Qurious Crafting Augments.
How to unlock Anomaly Investigations and Qurious Crafting
To unlock Anomaly Quests and Investigations, you need to reach Master Rank 10. You will need to complete Sunbreak’s main story and defeat Gaismagorm to uncap your Master Rank, then run a few more hunts to reach MR10. At MR10, you will receive an Urgent Quest to hunt an Afflicted Arzuros. Complete that quest uncap your rank again and gain access to Anomaly Quests and Anomaly Investigations. If you’ve been grinding Sunbreak since launch, you will already be familiar with Anomaly Quests. These hunts send you after power Afflicted Monsters that reward unique Afflicted Materials. Previously, these materials were only used to complete Rarity 10 weapon upgrades and craft certain decorations. Now, you can also use those materials for weapon augments. After completing your first Anomaly Investigation, speak to the smithy in Elgado to unlock Qurious Crafting. This new system lets you use afflicted materials to augment weapons and armor. We’ll break these down in detail shortly. Anomaly Investigations are a new system that will be somewhat familiar to Monster Hunter World veterans. Investigations have randomized targets, time limits, and maximum allowed faints. The target monster from an investigation will drop the usual afflicted materials, plus a new material called Amber Essence, which you can use to augment your armor. Higher level investigations are tougher, but drop more rare materials that you will need for more expensive augments.
How to augment weapons and best weapon augments
To augment weapons in Sunbreak, first, visit the Qurious Weapon Crafting tab at the smithy. Then, select the weapon you wish to augment. You must first enable augmentation by selecting a combination of afflicted materials to reach 20 points, with rarer materials contributing more points. See the above image for an example. Once you enable augmentation on a weapon, you’ll be met with a list of possible augments. Each weapon has the Attack Boost, Affinity Boost, Sharpness, and Rampage Slot upgrade augment available. Weapons with elemental or status damage also have access to the Elemental Boost and Status Boos augments. Each augment costs a variety of afflicted materials and takes up augment slots. Weapons have 5 augment slots, with three unlocked by default. You can spend afflicted materials on unlocking the fourth and fifth slots. The best weapon augments depend strongly on your build, but a few options are generically powerful:
You can’t go wrong with Attack Boost on any weapon Affinity Boost is also strong on weapons that you can’t normally hit 100% affinity on Elemental Boost is a good choice for your elemental weapons, and is particularly strong on weapons like Dual Blades and Power Element Phial Charge Blades that scale well with added elemental damage
On many weapons that need a point of Handicraft to reach purple sharpness, you can now replace Handicraft with the Sharpness Boost augment to free up a slot on your armor. Speaking of slots, the Rampage Slot Upgrade augment is a must on weapons with level 1 Rampage slots. Before Qurious Crafting, weapons with level 1 Rampage slots were non-meta by default, since they could not use the very powerful anti-species Rampage decorations, which require level 2 slots. Weapon trees like Gore Magala and Furious Rajang should now be more competitive with a slot upgrade. The Rampage Slot upgrade augment may also be useful for elemental weapons and Switch Axes that can get more value out of the level 3 Elembane and Switcher jewels than anti-species in some matchups. However, since Rampage Slot Upgrade takes up four augment slots, you will probably get as much or more value out of Attack and Elemental boost augments in many cases.
Armor augments explained and what to roll for
Armor augments are a brand new system that gives players a long-term grind with the potential for some extreme build optimizations. You can augment armor using Amber Essence. Each time you augment an armor piece, a number of potential stat changes are randomly rolled. Potential outcomes include increases and reductions to the armor’s defense, elemental resists, slots, and even skill points. Thankfully, there is no need to fear negative results; you can choose to keep either the newly rolled augment or stick with what you have. So, your goal is to farm up Amber Essence in Anomaly Investigations, then roll your armor for upgrades to your builds. But what kind of upgrades should you be looking for? That answer is a bit more complicated. In general, you want armor augments that add useful skills to your build without removing skill points that you need. Sometimes that’s as simple as rolling comfortable, quality-of-life skills like Spiribird Caller or Speed Eating. Additional slots or slot upgrades are always a plus too. Even a level 1 slot has value, allowing for points of skills like Defiance or Stun Resistance. Points of high-value damage skills like Weakness Exploit or Attack Boost are also universally desirable. If your build is already capping these skills out, you have a chance to get creative. You can use any freed-up slots on your armor to invest in skills like Focus, Wirebug Whisperer, and Offensive Guard that may have previously been hard to max. Sometimes you’ll even be able to swap out entire armor pieces if you can roll their skills onto a different piece in your build. Basically, any augment that adds useful skill points is a good augment. This typically comes at the cost of some defense and resists, but those losses are marginal. Better skills just about always outweigh worse defenses. Even if you do get a particularly bad roll, you can always reject it to keep your previous augment and keep on rolling. That’s everything you need to start augmenting your gear with Qurious Crafting in Sunbreak! Random rolls mean there is a big grind ahead, but a good armor augment can lead to unprecedented build flexibilty. If you’re still working through the Sunbreak story, check out our guide to unlocking all switch skills in Sunbreak for some power-ups.
