As players progress through Wild Hearts, they'll slowly unlock more and more of their weapon upgrade tree. With each new Kemono hunted, another node (or a couple of nodes) will be revealed, but there are also large jumps when players progress between later Chapters.
And, a lot of the late-to-endgame weapons (as well as some armor sets) use Giant Kemono Gems. While this sounds like a Crystal of some sort or even a Mineral, it's not found wandering through caves as one might expect. So, let's go over exactly where to find Giant Kemono Gems in Wild Hearts and the best method for farming them.
Giant Kemono Gem Location In Wild Hearts
Funnily enough, despite the fact that this resource is used primarily for late-game gear, the primary source of Giant Kemono Gems is from the penultimate Kemono of Chapter 1, the Earthbreaker. Sadly, this does mean players who want to use multiplayer to grind this rather easy Kemono quickly will have to put up with those cutscenes every time. That said, because the Earthbreaker rarely, if at all, drops materials from breaking its hands, players can just use the Hunter Gates to quickly jump into battles against it, which sometimes lets them skip the cutscene (though it's not at all consistent).
Other than the Earthbreaker, the only other real source for Giant Kemono Gems is the Mighty Variant of the Goldshard Kemono or Koganebari. This giant crystalline porcupine is assuredly one of the more tedious Kemono to fight, especially when it runs to that large field of flowers in the center of the Akikure Canyon map. During th fight, the combination of flowers constantly moving and the Goldshard firing its crystal spines tends to drop the FPS heavily for just about everyone. And, unlike the Earthbreaker, it isn't a guaranteed drop from the Goldshard. Frankly, it's technically not even on its list of possible drops overall. So, unless hunters are unbearably tired of fighting the Earthbreaker, the Goldshardisn't exactly the best route for farming these.
Best Methods For Farming Giant Kemono Gems From Earthbreaker & Goldshard
Now sadly, while farming the Earthbreaker, players are going to have to either watch the cutscenes but skip the tedious first phase of the fight or do it solo (where it's possible to skip cutscenes) and have to deal with the Hand Cannon, Flying Vine Dragon Karakuri, and just general running around leading up to the actual one-on-one fight against the Earthbreaker. So, to make this process as quick as possible, here are a few tips:
- The Hand Cannon at the first phase of the fight doesn't at all scale with the player's equipment, the damage is always the same. Therefore, it's really just about being accurate with each shot. For PC players, switching to Mouse and Keyboard for this part makes it a lot less of a pain.
- Joining through Hunter Gates, which usually cut the empty time after a kill (at the risk of losing out on carving broken Kemono parts), still doesn't avoid having to sit through the cutscene after the Earthbreaker the majority of the time.
- The Pounder Fusion Karakuri is actually amazing for the section of the fight where players need to break the multiple glowing nodes on the Earthbreaker's back. Putting a Pounder down means that it only needs another shot or two to break each one, reducing the time this section takes by quite a bit.
- For players who are at around endgame Karakuri progression, the Celestial Thread Anchor Basic Karakuri and the Celestial Cannon Fusion Karakuri can make this fight last all of 10 seconds, if that.
- Whatever Dragon Karakuri was in the host's world before this quest is still around during this fight, so make sure to keep the auto-generated Flying Vine path clear or even make an easier path using Flying Vines or the Roller Karakuri before starting up the fight again.
And that's about everything players need to know about farming Giant Kemono Gems. Thankfully they won't need a ton of them to craft everything that uses it, but it'll still take a fair amount of time, especially if players want to build the armor and weapons of the Celestial Dragon.
Wild Hearts is out now on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X, and Xbox Series S