When Does Decoration Farming Actually Start?

You can slot basic decorations during Low Rank, but real farming does not begin until you hit Hunter Rank 40. At HR 40, Arkveld investigations unlock in the quest pool, and those investigations carry Rarity 6+ decorations as rewards. Everything before that is just using whatever drops into your lap. Don’t waste time grinding Low Rank investigations for decorations—push through the story instead.

Once you cross that HR 40 threshold and complete the mandatory High Rank Arkveld investigation, the full decoration reward tables open up.

The Two Pillars: Investigations and Melding

You have two main routes to decorations in Wilds. Both feed into each other, and you should be running them in parallel.

Investigation Farming

Investigations are repeatable quests generated from tracking and hunting monsters in the open world. Each investigation lists its potential decoration rewards before you start it, including the rarity and slot level of each possible drop.

Here is what matters:

• Save good investigations. Select the monster on your map, hit “Create Quest,” and spend Guild Points to lock it in. You get up to three runs per saved investigation.
• Look for 4+ yellow (attack-type) decorations in the reward pool. Those are the hardest to get elsewhere.
• Multi-monster investigations tend to have larger reward pools. More monsters means more loot lines.
• Avoid Tempered monster investigations if your goal is decorations. Tempered hunts reward Artian weapon materials, not decoration orbs. This trips up a lot of players who assume harder equals better drops.
• The single best investigation for decoration volume is the HR 40 Arkveld hunt. It drops the highest number of decorations from any single investigation in the game.

Run your saved investigations until you exhaust their three uses, then generate new ones by tracking monsters in the Windward Plains or Scarlet Forest.

Melding Pot (Wyverian Melding)

The Melding Pot at Suja, Peaks of Accord, lets you convert materials and unused decorations into new ones. Talk to Vio to access it.

There are three tiers of meldable orbs:

Orb Type	Cost	Possible Output
Mystery Orb	4 Melding Points	Level 1 decoration only
Glowing Orb	10 Melding Points	Level 1 or 2 decoration
Ancient Orb - Armor	90 Melding Points	Level 1, 2, or 3 decoration
Ancient Orb - Sword	150 Melding Points	Level 1, 2, or 3 decoration

Ancient Orbs are what you want for endgame. They can roll Level 3 decorations, which sometimes pack multiple skills into a single slot. The costs went up after Title Update 1 (Sword went from 120 to 150 pts, Armor from 60 to 90 pts), but they are still the best use of your Melding Points.

What to feed the pot: Recycle duplicate decorations. Every skill caps at a certain level—Iron Skin caps at 3, meaning you never need more than three Def Lock Jewels. Anything beyond that is pure melding fodder.

The Nightflower Pollen Route (Gold Melding Ticket Farm)

This is the best optimized farm for high-end decorations through melding. Gold Melding Tickets are the premium input for Wyverian Melding, and the fastest way to get them involves Nightflower Pollen.

Step-by-step:

1. Rest at your tent until the day before a Full Moon arrives.
2. Rest again until evening.
3. Accept the optional quest from Alma called “The Desert Knows Not the Sea” (a Tempered Balahara fight).
4. During the quest, head to Area 10 and then Area 3 in Windward Plains. Both areas contain Ephemeral Blossom flowers that only appear during Full Moon nights.
5. Gather both Ephemeral Blossoms for two Nightflower Pollen.
6. End the quest via the menu. You keep the pollen.
7. Repeat.

Trading the pollen: Speak to Nata or Sekka at the trader and check what they offer for Nightflower Pollen. If Gold Melding Tickets are not in their current inventory, rest and check again—their stock rotates.

One Gold Melding Ticket yields 10 Weapon Decorations or 20 Armor Decorations through the Melding Pot. This makes the Nightflower loop the single fastest way to stockpile high-level decorations outside of pure investigation grinding.

Priority Decorations to Target

Not all decorations deserve equal grind time. Here is what you should prioritize for endgame builds, in rough order of impact:

Tier 1 — Build-Defining (Farm These First)

• Tenderizer Jewel (Weakness Exploit) — 50% affinity on weak/wounded parts at Level 3. The foundation of every damage build.
• Expert Jewel (Critical Eye) — Stack until you hit exactly 100% affinity on wounded parts when combined with WEX. Do not go over.
• Critical Jewel (Critical Boost) — Makes your crits hit harder. You want Level 3.
• Attack Jewel (Attack Boost) — The classic. Attack Boost 4 is the sweet spot for the affinity bonus.

Tier 2 — High Value

• Crit Element decorations — Essential if you run elemental weapons. Dramatically increases elemental crit damage.
• Elemental Attack Jewels (Fire, Water, Thunder, Ice, Dragon) — For dedicated elemental builds.
• Charger Jewel (Focus) — Speeds up gauge fill for Great Sword, Long Sword, Switch Axe, and Charge Blade.

Tier 3 — Comfort and Survivability

• Resistance Jewels (elemental resistances) — Dramatically reduce damage from specific elements. Swap these in for tough matchups.
• Vitality Jewel (Health Boost) — Extra HP is never wasted in harder content.
• Steadfast Jewel (Stun Resistance) — Prevents stun-locks that lead to carts.
• Wide-Range Jewels — For multiplayer support builds.

The meta build skeleton for nearly every weapon type is Weakness Exploit 3 + Attack Boost 4 + Critical Boost 3 + Critical Eye (enough to reach 100% affinity on wounds). Get those decorations first, then branch into weapon-specific or comfort skills.

Tips to Speed Up Your Grind

• Run investigations during Full Moon nights. You can pick up Ephemeral Blossoms between hunt encounters for Nightflower Pollen even while doing normal investigations.
• Bulk recycle at the Melding Pot. After every 5-6 investigation runs, dump your duplicate decorations. Do not hoard them.
• Elder Dragon investigations drop rare decorations at roughly 3x the rate of standard monster hunts. Prioritize these when they appear.
• Check the investigation board after every hunt. New investigations generate from your tracking data, and good ones disappear if you do not save them.
• Do not meld Mystery or Glowing Orbs once you have access to Ancient Orbs. The lower tiers cannot produce Level 3 decorations, and your Melding Points are better spent on Ancient Orbs even though they cost more per roll.

Patch Notes and Current State

As of Title Update 4, the decoration pool has expanded but the core farming loop remains the same. The main change that impacted farming was the Title Update 1 cost increase on Ancient Orbs (Sword: 120 to 150 pts, Armor: 60 to 90 pts). This made the Nightflower Pollen route relatively more valuable since Gold Melding Tickets bypass Melding Point costs entirely.

No patches have nerfed the Nightflower farm or the investigation save-and-repeat method. Both are still fully functional.

Summary

Push to HR 40. Farm the Arkveld investigation first for sheer decoration volume. Run the Nightflower Pollen loop on Full Moon nights for Gold Melding Tickets. Feed duplicates into the Melding Pot for Ancient Orb rolls. Prioritize Weakness Exploit, Critical Eye, Critical Boost, and Attack Boost decorations above everything else. That is the fastest path to a complete endgame build.