Meet the Monster Hunter Rise player who spent 6 months crafting origami axes in the name of ducks

Monster Hunter enthusiast Ceph0rend has completed his six-month grind to craft and upgrade 1,000 origami switch axes in Monster Hunter Rise. 

Here's a quick refresher for those of you who missed the start of this herculean saga. Back in April, Ceph0rend took on the challenge of crafting 1,000 of these weapons to test the in-game lore that doing so would grant one wish. As he told us when he started this grind, his wish was to bring back the duck companions last seen in Monster hunter Frontier. After several hundred hours of gathering and hunting, he finished making 1,000 origami switch axes in May, and then quickly decided to upgrade all of them using higher-rank monster materials. 

He finished that grind yesterday, October 21, roughly six months after this all began. 

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"I'll be honest here, it burnt me out a lot after I finished the first one thousand," he tells us today. "It was to the point I had to take a couple days or so completely off from screens. I was still aiming for [Hunter Rank] 999 before [Monster Hunter Stories 2], but couldn't make it in time because of that burnout too. So I took a vacation to other games, got all caught up on [Final Fantasy 14], worked on my backlog as well."

Ceph0rend put in some heavy hours on the first stage of this grind, but spaced out the 1,000 upgrades over a longer, less intense period. He kicked things up a notch back in September, but even then he wasn't planning to be finished just yet. Fortunately, he caught one hell of a second wind with the recent release of a special Wind Serpent Ibushi hunt which awards Kamura Tickets. These are extremely time-consuming to gather normally, requiring Ceph0rend to repeatedly reset beginner quests to spam village clears, so having tickets on tap drastically shortened the grind. 

"I saw the quest dropped Kamura Tickets, and the first thing I said to myself was 'This is gonna be done in a week,'" he says. 

To finish this grind, Ceph0rend hunted 442 Wind Serpent Ibushi, a total of 2,600 Aknosom (counting low and high rank hunts), and nearly 1,100 Rathalos. And that's on top of the hundreds, if not thousands of combined Volvidon and Almudron hunts it took to get to this point. 

We asked Ceph0rend if he has any tips for players who are considering their own massive gaming grinds, whether they're for Monster Hunter or other games, for charity or for ducks.

"If there's anything I could say, big grinds like these are like a hiking trip," he explains. "Sure, the end goal is the top, but if you only focus on the peak you're just gonna get tired. There's sights to see during the hike, pictures to take, packed lunch to eat, flowers to smell. You spend hours or days even to get to the top, but once you're there you're only there for an hour of photographs before heading back down. 

"If you don't enjoy your hike, you're not gonna have a good time," he adds. "Even if you reach the top."

For his own wellbeing, Ceph0rend's taking a well-deserved break from the origami grind. However, in our interview, he hints that he may well resume this grind when Monster Hunter Rise comes to PC next year, or if Capcom doesn't answer his wish for ducks. Of course, even if Capcom won't, you can bet that players will. If there's any justice in this world, one of the first Monster Hunter Rise PC mods to be released will add Ceph0rend's beloved ducks into the game as companion outfits. 

"In the end, I managed to do a couple things," he concludes. "I made a chunk of the western [Monster Hunter] playerbase know of the ducks, and I made two completely unrelated Monster Hunter things related, though I do wish I spaced out the grind better!" 

Sadly, Capcom says cross-play between Switch and PC is impossible for Monster Hunter Rise, so Ceph0rend can't take his switch axes with him across platforms.