What is the point of Paintballs in Monster Hunter Wilds? If you’re here, you might have noticed a curious little item sitting in your item wheel: a pink paintball loaded into your Slinger. That’s odd.
Apparently, not many Monster Hunter Wilds players are aware that paintballs have a long history in the series. They were once an essential tool for hunting monsters, back when there was no detailed minimap that showed the monster’s location from the start. Hunters had to first track down their target (which would normally last 5-10 minutes), and before it inevitably ran away again, they would throw a paintball at it to mark its position on the map.
It was a design choice that reflected the times, with little concern for player convenience. Paintballs, whetstones, and even the lengthy animation after drinking a potion were all part of older Monster Hunter entries. Thankfully, the series has since moved on from those “dated” mechanics.
So if paintballs are a relic of the past, why are they in Monster Hunter Wilds? They were absent in Monster Hunter World, Iceborne, Rise, and Sunbreak. Why bring them back now?
It’s a puzzling decision for Capcom to reintroduce what seems like an obsolete mechanic. There is no real need for paintballs in Wilds, since the minimap reveals all flora and fauna instantly. Perhaps paintballs were tied to a gameplay system during early playtests, which Capcom later removed, but the item itself remained.
That said, paintballs do have a function in Wilds, albeit trivial. While older players might assume they are for tracking monsters, here they serve as a multiplayer “ping” system. Equipping paintballs to your slinger and shooting them at a target will mark that spot for your teammates. It can be a quick way to signal what you want to do, or more practically, to tag a monster’s tail so your team can focus on cutting it off.
Some players also use them to track a specific monster in a pack. For example, marking the Alpha Doshaguma makes it easier to focus the hunt, or during quests with multiple targets, you can tag the one you want to take down first.
But what’s the point? Even with these uses, the feature still feels underdeveloped in Wilds. Perhaps it will find a stronger purpose in future updates, especially if the anticipated Title Update 3 this autumn introduces a Siege monster.
For now, paintballs remain one of those quirks that newer players may find unnecessary, a small remnant of Monster Hunter’s past that does not fully mesh with Wilds’ modern, streamlined gameplay.
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