How To Raise A Monster (Best Methods) - Monster Rancher 1
Raising your monster is the main gameplay loop of the Monster Rancher series and it's very important you do it correctly if you want a powerful monster. In this game monsters only live to be about 5 - 7 years old depending on the type of monster you have. With the right training methods you will be able to get the most out of your monster's short life.
Before we jump into the best training methods I'd like to point out the fact that Monster Rancher 1 is a bit different from the other games in this series. In this game there are only 4 Heavy Work drills that you can run and 2 of the 4 are made for monsters that use Intelligence as their main damage stat.
Heavy Work tasks that boost Intelligence also boost your Skill and Speed, these 3 stats are a vital combination for a powerful monster and there is no equivalent for Power based monsters. For this reason Intelligence based monsters are always going to be superior in this game.
The next very important thing I need to tell you about is items, specifically Taffy and Mint Leaf. In order to maximize your monster's stat gains during their lifespan you will need to use a lot of items. Taffy and Mangos will reduce their fatigue and Mint Leaf will reduce their stress. For a detailed explanation of what these stats do I recommend you check out my Fatigue and Stress Guide for Monster Rancher 1.
I usually never use Mangos because it just adds more tedium to your gameplay for a minor -10 fatigue a week.
Using items like Taffy and Mint Leaf will allow you to recover fatigue and stress without ever having to rest your monster. This is extremely important because Rest takes a whole week and that time starts to add up over your monster’s entire life if you do it every month. At first, the best regimen for raising your monster will include feeding it Taffy every single week while spamming Heavy Work so that it never has to Rest. Once you max out Intelligence you’ll start doing Light Work to increase your other important stats.
The best training regimen
As I stated earlier, the best monsters in this game are going to be those that use Intelligence as their main stat. The reason these are the best monsters are because of the Mailman and Circus Work tasks. Mailman raises Intelligence and Skill and the Circus Task raises Intelligence and Speed. Seeing as how the 3 most important stats for an INT based monster are Intelligence, Speed and Skill — you can probably start to see why this type of monster is superior in this game.
While we’re still on the topic of what the most important stats are, below I have included a quick list outlining the top 3 most important stats depending on the type of monster you are raising.
POW Monsters Important Stats:
#1 Power
#2 Skill
#3 Speed or Defense
Intelligence Monsters Important Stats:
#1 Intelligence
#2 Skill
#3 Speed
Usually what I like to do for the first 2 years of a monster’s life is to spam the Mailman and Circus tasks. If you eat a Taffy every single week you can do these tasks weekly. You’ll also want to feed your monster Meat each month since it reduces their Stress by 10 along with extending their life by 1 week each time you eat it.
Mint Leaf you should give to your monster once a month, usually on the last day of the month or give it to your monster once every other month if you have the 2nd Ranch Upgrade. The 2nd Ranch Upgrade will reduce your monster’s Stress by -2 each week which adds up to -8 each month. It’s a big deal over a long period of time. Here is what your regimen will look like:
(Month 1) All Mailman or Circus Heavy Work:
Week 1: Meat + Taffy
Week 2: Taffy
Week 3: Taffy
Week 4: Taffy
(Month 2) All Heavy Work Again
Week 1: Meat + Taffy
Week 2: Taffy
Week 3: Taffy
Week 4: Taffy + Mint Leaf
Note: As previously stated, without the 2nd Ranch upgrade you will want to do Mint Leaf on the 4th week of every month.
Guard Work on Pixie
Once you cap your Intelligence then it’s time to start doing Light Work instead of Heavy Work. Those of you who are raising a Power monster will be doing mostly Light Work every single week so your feeding regimen will look like my chart below. Keep in mind that doing this regimen will very slowly build a monster's stress unless you have the 2nd Ranch Upgrade.
With the 2nd Ranch Upgrade you don't have to worry about building up Stress on a Light Work regimen as long as you feed Meat to your monster each week.
All Light Work:
Week 1: Meat
Week 2: Nothing
Week 3: Taffy
Week 4: Nothing
Month 2:
Week 1: Meat + Taffy
Week 2: Nothing
Week 3: Taffy
Week 4: Nothing
The last bit of advice id like to give you is going to be subjective. Usually you will lower your monster’s defense to 1 when you spam the Mailman job and that’s too low for battle. Also, depending on what monster you choose you may have 80-100 life which I also think is too low.
Once you get Intelligence to 900~, Speed to 650+ and Skill to 500+ I recommend that you run some work tasks to raise your Defense back to 100 and Life to 170-230. Make sure you are done with the Mailman job before you start raising Defense again so that you do not waste time. This all is somewhat optional and it mostly comes down to personal preference.
Some people build pure Speed monsters and just cross their fingers that the 1% chance to get hit never happens but I like having enough Defense and Life to take a single hit. Especially if you're playing on the Steam version and aren't cheesing each battle with save states on an emulator, being able to survive a hit is very important.
Raising A Power Monster
Even though Power monsters are subpar in this game you still need to raise one to clear obstacles on Expeditions. I do not recommend you compete in the Big 4 Tournaments with this monster because the tournaments will actually be a challenge this way. It will also take almost 5 years to make your monster strong enough to compete in these tournaments, at which point your monster will either be done with its prime life phase or almost done with it.
In this game the only thing you should use a Power monster for is to clear obstacles on Expeditions. To clear all of the obstacles in each of the 3 Expeditions you’ll need at least 600 Power. For the locations of all the POW obstacles I recommend you use Legend Cup’s Expedition Map page. It may take 2 trips for some Expeditions but you should still be able to do all of them in the lifespan of a single monster.
As far as raising a Power monster goes, I recommend doing a few months of all Heavy Work then switching to pretty much all Light Work. Build is a good Heavy Work to run a few times but it lowers Speed which is very bad, you don't want 1 Speed on a monster because then every single attack will hit. I'd recommend lowering Speed to 50 at the least.
The other Heavy Work task is Mine which raises Life and Defense but lowers Skill. You definitely don't want your Skill to be low because then you'll never be able to hit an enemy during battle. Lowering Skill is an even worse idea than lowering Speed. The biggest downside of both these Heavy Work tasks is you need to make sure you raise the stats you lower back up to an ok range. For this reason I don't recommend you drop them down to 1 as it'll just take longer to raise them back up.
Once you finish your Heavy Work tasks simply focus on running Light Work to raise the stat you want to raise. Assuming that you feed your monster Meat every week and have the 2nd Ranch Upgrade you will never have to use Mint Leaf. Just use Taffy every time Holly says, “your monster seems well” at the start of the day.
Other Notes:
- You don't want to have 0 defense on your monster, the Mailman task will lower your DEF to 1 if you run it enough times which is fine. Just make sure you do Guard work to raise it back to 50-100. I recommend you drop your DEF down to 1 then increase it once you are done with Intelligence.
- If you are raising a monster specifically to do battle with you’ll want a Speed stat that’s 600-800 or more. Expedition monsters will want a higher Skill stat.
- Keep in mind that every stat has diminishing returns in this game. The first 200 of a stat are typically the most important. You will notice this with the defense stat, with 100 defense the hits you take aren't extreme but with 1 defense every hit is basically a one shot.
- The Steam Version of this game has a few changes, one of which that is important is that monsters gain more or less of a stat depending on their life stage. Monsters in their prime gain more than adolescent or elderly monsters. This is how future Monster Rancher games work too but this system wasn't added in their first release -- so they added it into the Steam remaster.