Bloody Branch parties: raising Mini MR
Minis are the one part of Monster Research you cannot grind on a map. They spawn rarely, and a normal farming route will never take one to level 10. The answer is a branch party — often called a mini raid or bb raid in-game: forty people in one place, summoning Minis on demand. By a wide margin it is the best MR per hour in the game.
Only one of the three branches counts
The game has three summoning branches and they are not interchangeable for research purposes.
Bloody Branch summons Mini Monsters, and lets you choose the level bracket (1–35, 36–50, 51–60, 61–80). These are real Minis and they do count toward Monster Research. It requires Level 30 and can only be used in Western Morroc.
Aesir Branch and Epoch Branch both summon MVP-like bosses at Level 99 — Furious Invaders and Invaders respectively. Neither counts for research at all. What they summon is an Invader, which is a different entity from the MVP of the same name: the summoned monsters carry prefixes like "Furious" or "Invading", and the game itself states that killing an Invader does not advance Bestiary progress.
This catches people out constantly, and it is worth being blunt about it: burning an Aesir or Epoch Branch expecting MR is a wasted branch. Their rewards are elsewhere.
Where the branches come from
You can buy 35 branches a week with Zeny in the weekly shop. That alone is the backbone of the whole thing.
On top of that, branches drop from daily activities. Here is the habit worth building: when you do your 5 daily Minis, hunt them in the wild rather than spending a branch on them. Wild Minis refresh roughly every 30 minutes and give up to 5 rewards a day, so hunting costs you time but no branch — and every branch you do not spend is one you bring to the next party, where it is worth far more.
How a branch party works
Everyone gathers in Western Morroc and releases their accumulated branches together. The raid is 8 teams of 5 players, 40 people in total. With that many branches going off at once, Minis die faster than they can be counted and the whole group's research climbs at a rate no solo route comes close to.
One thing that confuses newcomers: on screen you only see the 5 players of your own team summoning. The other seven teams are summoning too — you simply cannot see them. Do not judge the pace by what is in front of you; watch the counter in your Bestiary instead.
Why it is worth this much effort
Every Mini you kill raises both your individual research and the account-wide progress. Beyond the MR itself there are two milestones people specifically chase:
Level 8 unlocks the Mini's portrait. Level 10 unlocks its specific outfit. Those are cosmetic, but they are also visible proof of progress — and the research levels underneath them feed your permanent bonuses either way.
Etiquette — how not to ruin the party
These rules come from guilds that run branch parties regularly. They exist because each one has already gone wrong for somebody.
Do not release MVP branches during the event. They break the rhythm and get people killed. Save them for another time.
Resurrect your dead teammates. It keeps the party running, and it also improves your Yggdrasil Leaf usage score and can unlock achievements — so you are not doing it purely out of kindness.
Bring your own branches. Turning up to farm off everyone else's summons is the fastest way to not get invited again.
Invite people and keep the group talking. The longer a party stays alive, the more everyone gets out of it — morale is a real resource here.
When the leader wants to stop, find a substitute — and prefer whoever joined last. This is the subtle one. Without it, branch parties turn into a pyramid where only the earliest arrivals ever benefit, and the people who joined at the end walk away with nothing. Handing the lead down keeps it fair and keeps people coming back.
What this means for your planner
If a Mini is the bottleneck of one of your lines, no map recommendation will fix it — that is not a farming route problem. Keep the Avoid mini filter on for your normal AFK sessions, and raise those Minis at branch parties instead. The two do not compete; they are separate activities that feed the same lines.