Better Wishlist

A Brief Preface — The Typical Experience

In Monster Hunter Rise, some crafting recipes require not only a specific set of fixed materials to craft an item but can also require an arbitrary amount of materials that the player may freely choose from a specific category. This is indeed a nice feature as it allows for more flexible crafting, however, the way that Capcom chose to handle wishlist notifications in lieu of this feature isn't the best. With this system, there are two types of wishlist notifications that a player can see when returning to the village:

The "required materials gathered" notification

This notification is sent when you have all of the fixed, explicitly listed materials for an item recipe. For example:

The "required material types gathered" notification

This notification is sent when you have a sufficient amount of materials from the material category for an item recipe (if it has one). For example:

Simple enough, right? Sure, but unfortunately the game doesn't explain this connection to you when it introduces material types in crafting which, as I'll get into below, can lead to some confusion. Further still, this presentation method falls a bit short in practice.

Where Things Can Go Wrong

With how the current system works, a player is very likely to find themselves in a situation where they have enough of the category materials for an item recipe but don't quite have everything needed for the primary, fixed portion of the recipe. Upon returning to the village, the player will be greeted with a "required material types gathered" message. The first few times this happens, the player may be misled into believing that they can now craft this item, and so rush to the smithy only to find that they're still missing a primary material.

This is the same situation that I'm sure many players (myself included) found themselves in during their early hours in Rise. It is quite easy for a new player to not know that there are indeed two separate wishlist notifications.

So how is a player to know when they can actually craft an item with category materials? You wait until you get both notification types at the same time, of course! That's right, the game actually sends separate notifications for when you acquire enough materials for their respective part of the recipe. This is unintuitive as it is, and to make matters worse, the "materials gathered" message can appear several messages apart from the "material types gathered" message if you have a lot of things on your wishlist!

While less likely, the opposite scenario can happen as well; a player can receive the "materials gathered" message, but not have enough c