MH Outlanders Field Guide: Camps, Ziplines, Catapults & Traps

Why this world needs devices

Monster Hunter Outlanders replaces the series' small, separately loaded zones with one continuous map spanning forest, canyon and cliff terrain. That change is the reason the game has field devices at all: on foot or on a mount, crossing a valley to reach a bone pile costs minutes, and that cost repeats every time you move between a camp and a hunting ground. Devices are how the world is meant to be crossed — the game places some of them for you and lets you build the rest.

Building is simple. You gather wood and ore from hunting, felling trees and mining up to the required count, then open the build panel with the icon on the right side of the screen and place what you want. Placement is only refused when the spot is obstructed, and you can build outside of combat, so setting up before a hunt is normal rather than a special mode.

Camps: what to build, and the combinations that work

Your camp is where devices live, and it unlocks early: finish the opening gathering quests, bank the basic materials they ask for, and the build panel opens. You then drop devices onto empty ground inside the camp area — choose the type first, then the position.

Single devices do very little on their own, which is why the useful camp layouts are pairings:

• Supply box plus watchtower. The supply box keeps your hunting items topped up and the watchtower shows how monsters are distributed in the surrounding area. Together they turn the camp into a staging point: restock, check what is nearby, then leave.
• Zipline start plus supply box. For short hunting trips this is the combination that pays — a zipline point at camp cuts the trip out and back to almost nothing, and the box means you never have to return just for consumables.
• One defensive device. Early on, a modest defensive structure is enough to stop the camp area from being a liability.

Resist building everything at once in your first days. One supply box plus one simple defensive device covers the basic need with far less material and fewer decisions than a full layout, and you can expand once you know which camp you actually use.

Frontline outposts: the base that keeps producing

A frontline outpost looks like an extra camp, but it works on a different principle. A camp is a staging point you return to; an outpost is a production site that keeps gathering while you are somewhere else. It has to be placed and then upgraded with wood before it does anything, and the point of the whole system is to turn field materials into steady income instead of making you run the same route by hand every day.

Placement decides whether it was worth building. Put it in the middle of the high-value gathering routes so that one loop out of it finds monsters on the way out and materials on the way back. Avoid open flats, where a monster can charge you with nowhere to break line of sight. And if a map has a nest you farm often, do not put the outpost at the nest mouth — put it on the high ground to the side, so that when a fight goes wrong you can zipline out instead of walking the long way round.

What you build follows the same logic as a camp, in a fixed rough order:

• Supply box first, then the workbench, then the watchtower. The tower marks the surrounding temperature zones, which tells you which nearby area is worth hunting next.
• Leave one grid slot empty. You will want it for a field catapult, and a layout with every slot filled leaves no room for the one device that matters most.
• Assign allies with a purpose: one for damage, one for support, one for utility. A Palico gathering herbs earns its place, and the tower's own upgrade shortens how long the outpost takes to build out. Any ally you dispatch must already have a forged weapon — sending one out with a placeholder wastes the slot.

Two habits make outposts pay. First, claim the output yourself — rewards do not arrive automatically, so open the outpost panel and collect, ideally every time you pass through after a hunt. Players who leave an outpost on a route they already run report roughly 40% more gathered energy than farming the same ground by hand. Second, treat the outpost as a forward base: eat before a nest hunt and swap your loadout there, and when you are knocked out you respawn at the outpost rather than travelling back to town.

Upgrading to level 2 unlocks automatic hunting, which keeps producing materials while you are busy — worth pushing through before a limited-time event, when you would otherwise have to choose between the event and your farming.

Ziplines: the backbone of cross-terrain travel

Ziplines are the game's answer to vertical terrain. Nodes are pre-placed at height differences and at points where the map changes terrain, and a single tap fires the hook — the hit detection is generous, so you never need precise aim. Crossing to a bone pile on the far side of a valley in the sunken forest, for example, is roughly a three-minute walk around the riverbed and about ten seconds on a line.

What makes them more than transport is that you can act mid-slide: aim your sling at a monster's weak point while travelling, or drop off the line into an aerial slash. That turns a movement tool into an opening move.

• Cut off a fleeing monster instead of chasing it across the map on foot.
• Close on monsters that fight from high ground without taking chip damage on the climb.
• Leave a fight you are losing — the slide outruns anything pursuing you.

They are not flawless. Node spacing in dense forest can be close enough that re-launching repeatedly is slower than walking, some mountain lines stop halfway and leave you climbing the rest, and in combat an accidental hook can drag you into a monster's attack range instead of out of it. Treat the nodes as a route to learn rather than a button to press whenever one lights up.

The field catapult: the tool that fills damage gaps

The field catapult is available from your first one-star hunt and stays useful to the end of the game. You pick up ammo types in the field, tap to aim at a weak point, and fire — no stick-heavy aiming and no unlock gate, which makes it one of the most forgiving tools on a phone.

Its value is that it fills the gaps your weapon leaves. Both its damage and its part-damage are fixed, so they are not reduced by a monster's hardened or enraged hide; it can therefore still force a stagger at stages where your weapon's own hits have stopped cutting through. Carrying the right round turns it into a control tool as well: a paralysis round on a fast monster buys the whole team a window, and horn and tail breaks that melee struggles to reach are a few shots away.

In a group it is close to standard practice to have one player dedicated to control, loaded with the appropriate rounds — teams running that way report noticeably faster material farming. Its limits are real, though: single-shot damage is low enough that it is never a main weapon, and reloading locks you in place for a moment, so a greedy reload is how you get caught. Late on, if you are chasing maximum output, an attack-boosting item may be the better use of the slot.

Lasso traps: the environmental trap

A lasso trap is an environmental device rather than something you throw. It triggers when a monster steps into the prepared area and physically binds it, limiting its movement for a few moments. That gives it three jobs in a fight:

• Create an attack window at a moment you choose rather than one you wait for.
• Block a special ability — flight and burrowing both stop being options while the monster is held.
• Change the monster's path, pulling it away from an area you want kept clear, or into one you have prepared.

Against large bosses the value is obvious, and the system rewards you for using it: each successful trigger builds energy, and a full energy gauge lets you release a dedicated secret technique, which makes the trap part of an environment–item–skill loop rather than a one-off gadget. In co-op, traps and control rounds can be chained so they hold several parts of a monster's behaviour at once — that is usually how high-difficulty quests are made manageable.

Environment and ecology: reading the terrain

Beyond the devices you build, the maps carry their own tools and their own hazards, and both are meant to be used. The coral highland above the sunken forest is the clearest example: it is stacked in vertical layers — damp coral caves at the bottom, open coral forest in the middle, a wind-scoured plateau at the top — with updrafts to glide on and bands of flammable gas threaded through it.

Aesoland is split into distinct regions rather than one continuous map, and which region you are in changes which devices pay off. Three are documented well enough to plan around, and each one rewards a different preparation:

• Scorched Sands. A vast, scorching desert of rolling dunes and jagged rock, with brutal day-to-night temperature swings and frequent mirages and sandstorms. The surviving oases are the only lifeline, so the wildlife fights over water and territory — expect wandering, resource-hungry monsters rather than fixed patrols.
• Volcanic Zone. The highest-pressure terrain in the game, stacked into three levels: a lower lava channel, a middle scorched-rock terrace and an upper sulfur-vent shelf, joined by lava flows, fumaroles and fractured rock bridges. It is fire-monster country, and its ore seams are the main source of Radiantite and dragon-crystal material — so a heat-resistant set pays for itself quickly here.
• Coral Plateau. The floating, layered coral region described above. It sits between beginner and advanced hunting, which makes it the best place to rehearse environment kills before you spend a gated hunt on them.

No official English region names have been published yet, so we translate the in-game names ourselves and use the same wording consistently across the site.

In the Volcanic Zone, mapping comes before hunting. Put one frontline outpost on the south side of the lower lava channel and a second on the west of the middle terrace, then keep the upper shelf clear for airborne fire monsters to launch from and land. The live rock bridges are the trap to respect: the centre of the span gives way on a roughly ninety-minute cycle, so cross it on the move rather than resting on it. Radiantite seams read as a bright orange glow along the wall cracks at night — easy to spot, but Radiant species patrol the deposits, so clear them with a sonic bomb before you mine. A bellows platform at the base of a sulfur shaft and a catapult wedged into a broken bridge together cut the round trip between the lower and upper levels roughly in half.

The environmental elements that actually change a hunt:

• Gas vents are a free trap. Throw a firestone into a gas band as a monster passes and the cloud ignites, burning the target, draining its toughness and forcing it down — no lasso trap required.
• Sleeping coral puts a monster under when you draw it through the right patch, which is an opening you did not have to spend a consumable on.
• Active coral worms attach an attack buff to whoever picks them up, and are worth a small detour before a big fight.
• Reflective shell walls cut both ways. They bounce a flash-fighting monster's glare straight back at it, but standing in the open when it fires means being blinded twice over. Fight from the shell grooves, not the open flat.
• Vertical tells matter. Monsters telegraph their aerial attacks — a body swelling with stored gas, a neck retracting before a flash — and those windows are best answered with ranged damage or a catapult line from below.

Monsters also move between regions rather than staying in a fixed zone: a burrowing species from the deeper valleys wanders up into the coral caves, and small herbivores track the coral growth. That cross-region traffic is part of the map rather than a random event, and it is why an outpost placed on a route between two terrain types sees a steadier supply of hunts than one tucked into a corner.

Bellows platforms: vertical mobility

The bellows platform is the cheapest movement device and the one worth building early. It gives a short burst of lift — enough to clear a vertical gap, hop a canyon or step over a ground hazard, and enough to reach high ground without a climb.

Its best use is as the first link in a chain rather than on its own: bellows to float over a canyon or a danger zone, then a zipline or catapult to cover the distance fast. The same lift works as a panic button when a boss is winding up an area attack across the ground you are standing on. It is built from the usual wood and ore, and it can be placed outside combat like any other device.

Mounts: traversal only, and that matters

The game does have a mount system, and it is deliberately limited: mounts are pure traversal. They have no combat ability at all, and the moment you enter a fight the mount disappears automatically. Using one is not a tactical choice — it is how you make a large map feel small.

• Early on, the glider is your only aerial option and supports gliding and free traversal of the map.
• Later, a capture system lets you tame flying monsters as personal mounts, replacing the basic glider with more flexible aerial movement.
• On the ground, dragon-type mounts are the main option — including one you can catch in the starting map — and they cross terrain obstacles far faster than walking. Mount models are automatically scaled down so they stay agile around you.

Do not confuse mounts with Buddies. A Buddy follows you into the hunt and fights alongside you; a mount carries you there and then steps aside. The adventurers & companions overview covers what the Buddies actually do.

The egg-delivery challenge

The egg-delivery challenge is the map's carry quest: take an egg from a nest and get it to a drop-off point without being knocked over. It reads as a small side activity, but the failure states are strict — a direct hit, a fall, or dropping off a cliff all end the attempt, and the egg goes down with you.

What separates a clean run from a messy one:

• Plan the line before you touch the egg. Scouting the nest area first shows you which route is short, sheltered, and not overlooked.
• Expect to be chased. Carrying the egg advertises where you are, and the monsters nearby will follow. Check behind you as often as ahead.
• Use the devices. Ziplines and catapults cut the distance far more than running does, and a bellows platform clears terrain that would otherwise force a slow detour. This is the one activity where the traversal kit is the answer rather than a convenience.
• Lure, do not fight. Pulling a monster off the line and then taking the gap is faster and safer than trying to clear it out.
• Pack light. Weight slows you down and makes a stumble more likely, so keep the loadout built for movement and carry something for roars — a roar that staggers you costs the same as being hit.
• In a group, split the jobs. One player draws the attention, one carries. Trying to do both is how runs fail.

Trial expeditions: climbing the tower

Trial expeditions are the game's long-session challenge: a tower of floors, each holding different monsters, cleared one after another. They exist to give a hunt a longer arc than a single quest, and they test how you build a loadout and use a weapon more than they test raw reflexes.

The shape of it, as the test builds describe it:

• The first dozen floors are a tutorial in disguise. Attacks are simple and damage is low, which makes them the cheapest place in the game to learn a monster's weak points and drill a weapon's basic loop.
• There is a difficulty wall. Once the character passes level 20 the floors get noticeably harsher, and each floor's monsters carry their own attributes — which is where stacking raw damage stops working and matching weapons and armour to the element in front of you starts to matter.
• Every floor rerolls modifiers. Clearing one refreshes a set of effects: attack up, elemental damage up, but also negatives such as extended cooldowns. It is what keeps repeated runs from being identical, and it is worth reading the roll before you commit to a loadout.
• Spending is not the gate. Materials from clears forge straight into usable gear, so a free player climbing a few floors a day can still assemble a finished set.
• It goes up to four players. Party members can revive each other and share supplies, and the tower is easier to push in a group once the floors get punishing.

The dragon arena: a timed contest

The dragon arena is the game's competitive mode. It puts elite monsters in a single arena and scores you on speed rather than survival — rank points scale with how quickly you clear, so the whole mode is about compressing the fight rather than playing it safe.

• Weapons can be swapped inside the arena. Bring your strongest, then change to answer the boss in front of you. Ranged options pay off heavily against anything that spends time airborne, and heavy, slow weapons are better shared across a team than used alone.
• Score is shared, not individual. Team score is pooled when the target dies, so there is no reason to compete with your own party for damage.
• Clearing fast is the point. Time lost to repositioning or a staggered attack cycle costs rank directly; find the shortest punish loop your weapon has and repeat it.

Arena encounters vary — some stage a single elite monster, others put two in the ring at once. When there are two, the approach that works is to separate them: focus the weaker one first, bank your largest attacks for it, and save your burst for the moments when the faster one is locked into an animation. Aerial monsters and wide counter attacks are the two situations that most often end a run, so plan for both before you queue.

What to build first

Device	What it solves	Priority
Supply box	Hunting items stay topped up at camp	Build first
Bellows platform	Vertical gaps, canyon crossings, emergency lift	Build early — it is cheap
Zipline start point	Round trips between camp and hunting ground	Once you hunt from one camp often
Watchtower	Nearby monster distribution while exploring	If you scout as much as you hunt
Defensive device	Keeps the camp area from being a liability	One is enough
Lasso trap	Control during fights against large monsters	Once you hunt big monsters regularly

Carry the field catapult everywhere from your first hunt, and treat everything else as camp infrastructure you build to save time rather than to add damage. If you are still deciding what to do on day one, the beginner guide covers the first two hours in order, and if you plan to run the tower or the arena with others, the co-op guide covers party setup and joint hunts.