As stated previously in the combining thread, the MFDS2 Complete Guide has a section on maxing out monsters. And by example, no less.

I've scanned the pages for everyone's perusal. You won't get much out of them unless you can read and comprehend Japanese, but nonetheless, here they are:

Page 1

Page 2

Page 3

Page 4

Feel free to post explanations for the non-JP speaking crowd if you can understand what's going on.

Or you can hoard it all for yourself.

Jackass.

Well, I can give you the gist of what's being said here.

Step 1 - Get a LOT of money by finding silver, gold, and platinum chunks on expeditions (that's how I have acquired my large bank roll too..)

Step 2 - Get your self a monster with good potential by raising a few monsters and combining them.

Step 3 - Use items frequently to manage your monster's stress and fatigue. also, acquire all the farm items to help that.

Step 4 - Train the monster. (this is the part we want to get the full version of) The chart on page 153 gives you a good guide on where your monster should be and how much money it will cost you to get there. A key factor in that is getting your monster a Silver peach and a Golden peach. The chart shows a gold peach in year 2 and a silver in year 3. The idea there is to prolong their prime.

The chart for totals is a sample of a that particular Gali, but it is a fair guide. It shows the total cost in food (307000) and total for management items (270000).

The last page shows the four types of monster stat patterns and how they fare against each other.

Well, that's a bit more obvious than you'd expect, innit? I'll play around with the items and see which ones are equivalent to the mint leaves and nuts oils of olde. It should be very easy to tell the difference now that you can see your monster's condition at any time.

Would you mind explaining those stat patterns, please? I see they mention the CPU sometimes, too.

Crap, I posted a long response to this last night. I must have screwed it up since it's not here..

At any rate, the pages refers to a sample tourney among four monsters, each representing the 4 general archetypes.

1) Str/Int type - (Golem, Orange) Raise the damage stat the highest.
2) Speed type - (Abyss, green)High speed, moderately high skill.
3) Defense type - (Baku, Blue) High defense and life.
4) SKill type - (Suezo, Red) High skill and moderately high int/str.

The right side shows the tourney results which looks to me like the Abyss won. (It has three red marks and a Crown)

There was a similar section in the MFDS1 perfect guide, but no sample tourney.

I regards to your finding the equivalent of Nuts and Mint, Page 3 of your scans above has a complete item list for that sample monster and how many of each they used over the lifetime of the monster.

The general items in MFDS2 are identical to MFDS1. The items they used are really the ones you want -

Fatigue relief - Mitsudake mushroom (sample monster used 155 of them)
Stress relief - Onikuniore (the devil mouse doll, the sample monsters used 145 of them)

There's a Chiffon Chop in there (Lamb Chop meat) for Leniency management and a couple of other items for weight management. (The Onikuniore lowers leniency even though it's the best for lowering stress)

If you want images to help you see whihch items they are exactly, you can look in the MFDS FAQ item list. I have linked images to these items.

It's fine, I've got them here in my guide. They're available at the shop in 1004 and 1005, respectively, just like MFDS2. The only difference is that the Mitsudake costs twice as much now (1000 G).

By the way, what do the stat apples do again?

+1 to that stat. I don't think they have any negative effects (off the top of my head).

I don't see any 1's in the MFDS2 stat apple descriptions. But there are plenty of 2's. I'll scan the item page sometime today.

Either way, that's a sure-fire maxxing method right there, albeit an insanely slow one.

In MFDS1, they do the following for each appropriate stat-

STR Fruit - STR +1, Weight Down 1, Loyalty Up 1

I want to take the opportunity to give a better analysis of what the totals chart in page 3 is showing (guide page 153)

Top row - Year by year standings of all 6 parameters. Going down the side is starts at birth, then 1 year, 2 years, 3 years, then big growth during year 3, and finally at 4y 5m is gets maxed out at 999.

Below the top row, there are 3 columns of lists.

Column 1 - Entirely made up of the monster's final battle record and everything else found on the monster data screens

Column 2 - Complete training totals. The first part shows how many times each of the farm drills were performed. The second part shows how many success, fail, cheat, excellent results occurred.

Column 3 - Cost analysis. Part 1 is list of the items used and how many of each. Part 2 is a total of the cost of all items. The third part shows monthly Food and how many times it was fed. Part 4 shows the total cost of food. Part 5 is the cost of items and food combined (total cost to raise the monster.) The last value is The age at which it was maxed out.

Of note, it looks like in the year-by-year list that this monster was potentially given 3 golden peaches. It was given at least 2.

Something else I want to make note of is on scan page 2 (guide page 150) there is a complete list of fatigue and stress levels and the messages you get about them. They are ranked 0-10 from bottom to top. The first column of text shows the condition message for Fatigue and the second column is for stress. (For stress levels 0-3, there is no comment made)