Occasionally, after fighting certain enemies, my character will start emitting a puff of green smoke about once a second. After quite a while, it will finally stop. I have to assume this is some kind of detrimental status effect, but there is no obvious consequence of the smoke. What is it?
This green puffing smoke
monster-hunter-3-ultimate
Related Solutions
Slots are used for storing Jewels, and is done through the blacksmith, via the decorations menu. All Jewels give you an increase to at least one of your armor skills, and some will even decrease a skill.
Jewels are crafted through the same interface as weapons and armour, and require various monster parts or other miscellaneous items, plus a base jewel. You can get the base jewels from mining nodes (Aquaglow, Sunspire, and other Jewels), which then have to be crafted and attached via the blacksmithing interface. The blacksmith is also able to remove jewels from an item, which is non-destructive (you can swap jewels between armour sets).
While mining, and occasionally from quest rewards, you may receive a Mystery Charm. At the end of the quest you're on, you will be given a second menu after dealing with normal monster loot - the Appraise menu. It will reveal what your Mystery Charms actually provide, and allow you to select one or more charms and send them back to your equipment box. Charms are equipped in a sixth slot, independent of regular armour, and can sometimes carry +10 in a single skill, allowing you to quickly tack extra skills onto your equipment set.
To answer this question, we need to look into the way MH3U appraises your charms. Your charms are pulled off of what is known as a "charm table", a collection of different charms with different specific stats. This system was present in Monster Hunter Tri as well, though less potentially game-breaking (for certain values of "game-breaking").
Unlike in Tri, where a charm table was assigned when you started the game, your charm table is assigned to you at character creation. Once you create a character, that character can only receive charms from the roughly 20,0000 charms present on their specific charm table. Unless, of course, they are assigned a "cursed" charm table.
"Cursed" charm tables possess only ~800 possible charms, dramatically fewer than the 20,000 in a normal charm table. While this may acceptable, or even preferable, if those charm tables had one or more "god-tier" charms, most cursed charm tables have a horrible selection of charms. One table is even devoid of 3-slot charms.
Now, how do you avoid getting a cursed charm table? Luckily, most games are absolute rubbish at approximating randomness, relying an easily manipulated psuedo-random number generator. The specifics are not necessary, but what you want to know is this: What charm table you get can be determined by the time at which you created your character.
Forcing a specfic charm table is acheivable in a few easy steps and only requires a few items.
Items: Your 3DS and MH3U (obviously) and a stopwatch (although this is only strongly recommended unless you have an absolute impeccable sense of time)
- Turn off any wireless connection for your 3DS.
- Set the date to 21/01/2012 and the stopwatch to the appropriate time interval for your chosen charm table.
- As soon as you confirm your date/time change, start your stopwatch.
- Open MH3U and hover over "New Game" (Do not click).
- As soon as the stopwatch confirms the proper time for you, press "New Game".
- ??? (Algorithm magic!)
- You now have a character with the appropriate charm table.
If you already have a character, you can determine your charm table by following this link and the instructions within.
The times for the charm tables are as follows:
Good Tables:
Table 1 00:14:11~13
Table 2 02:14:39~42
Table 3 00:11:28~30
Table 4 00:05:47~49
Table 5 00:56:43~45
Table 6 00:42:17~20
Table 7 01:43:58~01
Table 8 09:25:48~51
Table 9 07:09:58~01
Table 10 00:14:43~45
Table 13 00:07:46~48
Table 14 00:17:02~05
Cursed Tables:
Table 11 00:02:43
Table 12 00:06:41
Table 15 00:08:09
Table 16 00:13:22
Table 17 00:20:03
Best Answer
You'll notice that you have a little tiny icon next to your sharpness level. This is the area for buffs and debuffs. This particular one is a debuff, and it lowers your defense, as indicated by the black shield with a down arrow on it. Most likely one of those tiny insects gave it to you; they like to do that.
To clear it out, a Nulberry should do the trick. Or, you can wait until it goes away on it's own.