One of the new (and coolest) things in Monster Hunter 4 is something called 探索, which Ill translate as expeditions. In these expeditions you venture into an area called the Unknown Woods (未知の樹海
, which is procedurally-generated and is full of monsters and stuff to gather. You can do your usual gathering of bugs, minerals and whatnot here, but whats awesome about this place is that you can also excavate equipment! They call this 発掘装備 in Japanese so excavated equipment would be the most literal translation. Before you set off on an expedition, like in MH3′s Moga Woods you can see what kind of monsters may show up, if there are treasure areas with special goodies to gather, and the kind of weapon/armor you may find. These range from original series equipment to equipment that is found in Monster Hunter 2 or 3.
The areas found in the Unknown Woods are pretty rad too. Sometimes theyll be flat marshlands, and sometimes youll find open areas with multi-tiered vines to climb on
and sometimes theyll resemble a platformer with tons of pillars to jump around.
Once you have recovered the excavated equipment, you have to take it to Naguri village to get it polished and appraised, but it seems to be quite time-consuming to do this. Youre given some materials to use to appraise it at first, but after that you have to find your own. Or you can take your unwanted excavated equipment and convert them to materials, including the one you need to examine equipment. Visually the armor looks a little bit different from the regular ones, and the stats are different too. They can either be better or worse than the regular armor you can forge yourself. Some of them even come with gems permanently equipped! The Hunter Mail below has a base defense of 20, which is the same as the low rank Rathian armor!
This single player mode is definitely going to eat up a lot of time, especially now that theyve basically added random loot drops. I read on the official site that you can register your expeditions to your Guild Quest list but it doesnt seem so straightforward. It looks like you have to fulfill certain conditions to be allowed to register them. I guess they did this to avoid having people exploit certain quests with the monsters they want.