“Your item pouch is full” is a warning you’ll get (often) in Monster Hunter Wilds. In short, it means you’ve picked up too many things. Until you understand what it’s really saying, though, it can be confusing because it doesn’t pop up for everything you grab.
Also, the warning covers the entire screen, requires several button presses to clear, and is just really annoying.
Our Monster Hunter Wilds guide will tell you all about the “your item pouch is full” warning, managing your item pouch, and how to avoid getting the alert in the first place.
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What does it mean when your pouch is full in Monster Hunter Wilds?
Your item pouch is where all the stuff you pick up — like herbs and bugs — goes. It is also where all of your consumables — like potions and well-done steaks — are stored. As you grab new things, they either get added to the stacks already in your pouch, or get registered to a new slot.
These slots correspond to the item bar in the lower right of your screen. You access it by holding down L1/LB and then scrolling left and right with square/X and circle/B. This is how you equip the item you use when you hit square/X.
The item pouch has 25 slots in it. Nine of them are always taken up by your Essential Items — the portable BBQ grill, fishing rod, binoculars, capture net, throwing knife, paint pod, and ghillie mantle — and you can’t remove them. Everything else you carry like potions, rations, and each kind of mushroom and herb get their own slots when you pick them up.
Once all 25 slots are full, you’ll get the “your item pouch is full” warning whenever you pick up new things (items that don’t get added to existing stacks). It just means there are no more slots available for new items.
How to free up space in your pouch in Monster Hunter Wilds
Chances are, when you see that “your item pouch is full” warning, it’ll be at an inconvenient time and you won’t really want to deal with full screens of menus.
And easy way to just automatically send whatever you picked up to your field pouch (the one your Seikret carries) is to hit X/A > Circle/B > X/A. This dismisses the warning, dumps the item in your field pouch, and confirms that that’s really what you want to do.
It’s not perfect, but it’s quick enough once you learn the process.
You can also take the time to find something in your item pouch to drop into your field pouch, and slot in the new item.
A much more proactive way to deal with it is to make sure you’ve always got plenty of extra space in your item pouch.
You set up what’s in there inside your tent with the Items Menu > Transfer Items > Item Pouch option. On that screen, you’ll see your item pouch at the top and your item box at the bottom. The Essential Items — the ones you have infinity of that you can’t remove — will be stacked on the left and right ends.
Here you can add things from the item box and rearrange where they show up in your item pouch (and, in turn, the item bar at the lower right of your screen). More importantly, it’s also where you can pare down the contents of your item pouch.
What stays and goes depends on your style of play and what kind of monsters you’re tackling. At a minimum, you should keep some potions, nulberries, rations or well-done steaks, and any traps or slinger ammo you tend to use. Keeping it limited to that will leave you extra room for all the stuff you collect on a hunt.
You’ll just have to remember to clean out your item pouch periodically as you pick up new stuff.
How to avoid filling your pouch in Monster Hunter Wilds
The really short (and sarcastic) answer here is: stop picking stuff up. But that doesn’t really help.
Instead, it’s better to only pick up what you need. You’ll have to dig into the crafting list to figure out a lot of it, but it’ll save you a ton of headache. If you never use ammo, for example, you never need to collect things like blastnuts, bomberries, slashberries, flowferns, red herbs, or snow herbs. If you’ve ended up with 500 potions in your item box like we did, it’s probably time to stop grabbing herbs and honey. If you never use pitfall traps, you can skip over all of the spider webs and ivy you see.
Items that are already slinger ammo when you pick them up — like thorngrass pods, rockburst, or sparkflint — are different. These aren’t craftable and you can only use them as you find them (they’ll have the slinger ammo icon when you pick them up), so they don’t get counted in your item pouch.
To also help you understand Monster Hunter Wilds, we explain how to change weapons, provide some Seikret tips, and cover how fishing, cooking, and layered armor work.
