How to Easily Obtain Great Gear in Monster Menu: The Scavenger’s Cookbook

Monster Menu: The Scavenger’s Cookbook is set up in an unusual way. Instead of a traditional leveling system, so much of the experience relies on creating hundreds of specific meals to maximize a characters potential. While this is enough to beat lower difficulties, and even then it’s still difficult, there are some tricks to make this a lot easier. In this guide we will explain how to easily obtain great gear in Monster Menu: The Scavenger’s Cookbook. It might not be enough to trivialize the experience, but can give you a massive advantage in higher tier and post game content.

How to Easily Obtain Great Gear in Monster Menu: The Scavenger’s Cookbook

Set Up

Upon hitting an end point, or reaching a roadblock, go into System and change the difficulty to Nightmare.

After doing this, enter the deepest point you have access to. If you unlocked Mirage Floor 1, it’s better to do Lower Floor 5 instead. Mirage is only a better option when enemies are in the same level range or higher than Lower Floor 5, which happens around floor 35.

Upon entering the location, ignore every enemy in favor of collecting chests. Depending on your luck you can get a sizable amount of these before an enemy attacks, or more likely, one turns out to be a mimic. Once you die, restart the level and repeat until you have so much gear it’s impossible to move, discard enough weight to move, and then die. When you return to base, examine everything, disassemble worthless gear, and repeat until you get desired gear.

When Should You Do This?

Honestly, the best time is after finishing the post-game dungeon. As previously mentioned, Floor 1 of Mirage has enemies in the 30 range. You kill one on easy and everyone should be level 20 or more, with that number quickly increasing as enemies die. This makes it shockingly easy to survive Mirage, especially due to the large number of materials you’ll obtain. To put it into perspective, I had all my characters’ attack stat at level 100 by floor 35.

The other reason is gear is simply better at a higher level. Even if you take two identical weapons, the difference between a Floor 1 and Floor 90+ Mirage equipment drop is insane.

There is simply no point when the later weapon is over three times more powerful.

Is This Method Worthwhile?

While this method absolutely works, how much benefit you get will vary. Even on the highest difficulty on floor 91 of the post game dungeon you’ll still obtain low ranking gear. These include entry level gear, along with items that have terrible rolls. Often times you’ll destroy the vast majority of gear for one reason or another. That being said, it is still a worthwhile trick for a couple reasons.

On Easy/Normal, the highest perk total I found on an RNG item was six. Since Nightmare boasts a 250 percent rate, that comes out to being 15 like the Sacred Bow pictured above. Unfortunately, a lot of these things will be underwhelming for a variety of reasons, like this bow’ is best used for this specific purpose, over fighting anything. That being said, getting a large number of perks makes it easier to find more beneficial perks.

Finding multiple items with Movement Up level five makes it extremely easy to navigate via battle. Another really useful skill is Eclipse, which gives calories on attacks, Vampire, or things that increase your max Hydration, Calories, and Happiness. Even a level 14 Max Calories increases your total by 70 percent, making it a lot easier to keep everyone well taken care of.

There is also another potentially unintended benefit that adds a lot of value to this tactic.

Easy Enhancer Kits

Higher tier gear can be dismantled into a wide variety of Enhancer Kits.

Often times the only limit is how much Flint you’re able to obtain.

Even if dying on a higher difficulty removes all your materials, which would include all the Ores shown above, Enhancer Kits will persist. Easy access to them also makes removes any disadvantages to leveling lower tier gear.

Are There Tricks to Make it Faster/Easier?

Actually, there are. While working on finding the best possible gear for your team, you should also keep an eye out perks that help grinding. Assuming you want to do this long term.

One of the most useful is Faster Foraging. Every level gains 5 percent, so if you have something like my Sacred Bow with level 20, you’ll reach the cap of 100 percent speed increase.

Unfortunately, I can’t confirm or deny scavenge based skills working on chests. With a higher Clectmor’s Boon I noticed chests occasionally gave additional loot, but it’s hard to say if this is a function of that perk, random chance, or progression. Likewise, I noticed no noticeable increase in rarity from Treasure Map. I can also confirm I never once gained the ability to pilfer a chest a second time, so I don’t think Extra Shovel does anything. The same is true for Looter’s Gain, though that also applies to corses specifically. That said, these are party wide skills and worth increasing since there isn’t anything else worth investing in for these runs.