It’s the Appreciation Festival in MHW right now, and I’ll be honest, I can barely keep track of all the special events and things to do.  The game really does a poor job of explaining half of it’s systems.

Anyhow, this festival comes with a bunch of things to do, items to craft, and stuff to hunt.  This often results in some sort of token that can be exchanged for something else.  VIP tickets give you access to some cosmetics, gratitude tickets to gear.  The really interesting bit is melding tickets.

MHW has a Melder, a person who takes things you don’t want, puts them into a pot, and randomly spews something out.  Something you may want, but not very often.  Normally, this is done through a combination of a catalyst (rare drop) and some points (the items you don’t want).  It takes a lot of time to get all those things sorted out, and it was a very long tail in the base game.  Even in IB to be honest, since the rare drops were from the late game.

But now we have Steel, Silver, and Gold Melding tickets.  These are used for a 1:1 decoration swap.  Still random, but extremely generous.  The more important part here is that these tickets are rewards from the Steamworks… a mini game that normally only gets used once a day for a melding reward.  Well now a single cycle of this minigame should reward a dozen steel, 5 silver, and 1 gold ticket.  Steel doesn’t reward very good decorations, but silver and gold do.  Silver in particular contains all the rare drops from the base game (Ironwall and Mind’s Eye), making it a ridiculous source of decorations.  The problem is getting fuel for the Steamworks.

Enter the guiding lands and Dragonvein drops.  With minimal effort, you should be able to get ~30,000 fuel in an hour.  Since it takes ~800 fuel to do a cycle… the math is in your favor.  I run a similar cycle to the one in the video below.

Botanist, Geologist, Master Gatherer, and Intimidator are all required.  Gillie and Temporal Mantles as help.  The respawn times of the nodes means that you can do 2 zones at a time, if you’re collecting both bones and ore (only ore is of value for fuel).   I get further optimization by collecting the local Grimalkyne, who will loot more on your behalf.

End result is that after 1 Guiding Lands run, I ended up with 4 Ironwall decorations.  A decoration I couldn’t get after 100+ hours of trying in the base game.

Appreciation Fest indeed.