Assassin’s Creed Shadows is a massive game with various grindy mechanics like the requirement of farming resources to upgrade your gear or unlocking various parts of the map. Thankfully, you get a chance to make this grind a lot easier through the hideout, which is one of the most important places in the game.
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While these games do offer a whole world for you to explore, it’s best if you follow the set path.
When you get to your hideout, you can create various buildings that can impact different aspects of your gameplay. You can also upgrade these buildings to get increased benefits while also increasing the level of your hideout.
How To Unlock The Hideout
Given that the hideout is one of the most integral parts of Assassin’s Creed Shadows, you don’t have to do anything out of the ordinary to unlock it. What you will have to do, however, is go through a long prologue that easily takes the first few hours of your time in this game.
You’ll already meet Tomiko in the middle of this prologue, but you go to her again at the end, and she offers her homestead to be the main hub of your operations as you try to hunt down the Shinbakufu. This is where you’ll unlock the hideout and get introduced to the general mechanics in it.
After you unlock the hideout, it gets added to the map as a fast travel point in the Izumi Settsu province.
It’s highly recommended to come here regularly to catch up on upgrades for both hideout buildings and your gear.
How To Build Every Hideout Building
Once you’re in your hideout, you can start building or upgrading it either by getting to the central hideout area and pressing the “Improve Hideout” buttons at the bottom or going into the Hiroma building and finding a specific desk with a lamp there. When close to this desk, you’ll get the same option on it.
When you first go to the build menu in the hideout, you’ll see that the menu is divided into different types of rooms. There are a total of six main rooms that unlock the basic buffs for your gameplay, and you can also get various themed rooms from different merchants around the world.
You’ll need a certain amount of crops, wood, and minerals to build or upgrade these rooms.
The best way to get these is by raiding hostile zones and marking stockpiles for your scouts (more on this below).
Hiroma and Stables will be the two rooms already built at the start, and you can also make yourself a Kakurega with enough resources. However, if you want to build a Study, Forge, or Dojo, you’ll need to progress the story, get a blacksmith, and recruit an ally respectively.
Here’s what each main and themed room will provide:
|
Room Type |
Name |
Effect |
|---|---|---|
|
Main Rooms |
Stables |
You can see various stockpiles while raiding castles and other hostile areas during your exploration. If you have two scouts, you can mark these stockpiles when you have a stable. Each stockpile will give you a specific type of resource when the season ends, while also refilling your scouts fully, letting you mark more stockpiles. |
|
Kakurega |
Upon making this building, a new type of fast travel will be added all across Japan called Kakurega. These can be identified with the scout icon on them, and they automatically get revealed when you’re close. When you enter the Kakurega area, you can perform various tasks like getting contracts, refilling your ration/tools, or buying more scouts. |
|
|
Study |
This is essentially a building that lets you have more scouts every season. Scouts can be used to mark quest locations and stockpiles, making them quite important, especially if you’re playing without guided mode. |
|
|
Forge |
The forge is the most important building in the hideout as it lets you upgrade the gear of both Naoe and Yasuke if they’re lower than your current account level. This will let you keep up with the enemies. |
|
|
Dojo |
Finally, a Dojo is a hub to manage and upgrade your allies. You can switch between different allies here and upgrade their abilities. |
|
|
Themed Rooms |
Tera |
You’ll gain ten percent more experience from all sources. |
|
Jinja |
Increases the effects you gain from praying at shines and the boon also lasts for 15 minutes. |
|
|
Nando |
You can buy more scouts at a Kakurega for 30 percent less Mon. |
|
|
Zashiki |
Increases the amount of healing you get from Ration. |
|
|
Tea Room |
Other than the main rooms, you can also unlock themed rooms of various sizes that you can decorate as you wish. In the build menu, you can also switch between different tabs where you can see paths, decorations, trees, and pets you’ve unlocked through your journey.
These can be placed inside your hideout to decorate it and make it look a lot more beautiful. You can get various decorative items, plants, and paths from merchants or random exploration. As for pets, you can find dogs, cats, and miscellaneous pets during your exploration, and petting them will let you place them in the hideout.
You can also unlock a dog named Tsuki-maru by doing the Thrown to the Dogs side quest.
Main Room Upgrade Overview And Priority In Hideout
When you first make a main room in your hideout, it’ll be of white rarity. However, except for the Hiroma, you can upgrade all other rooms up to blue rarity (two upgrades each). In some cases, these upgrades unlock a cap, while in others they can give you an entirely new effect related to the building.
However, these upgrades cost a lot more resources than it took to build these rooms, which makes it important to prioritize them well. Here’s the best order to upgrade different rooms in your hideout, with the first one being the highest priority:
|
Upgrade Priority |
Building Name |
Effect |
|---|---|---|
|
1 |
Stables First Upgrade |
You can mark the stockpiles with just one scout, effectively doubling the resources you can get. |
|
2 |
Forge First Upgrade |
Allows you to upgrade your gear to level 40 while also putting non-legendary engravings on them. This upgrade becomes a high priority simply because you’d want engravings on your gear as soon as possible. |
|
3 |
Study First Upgrade |
Gives you an additional scout slot. |
|
4 |
Dojo First Upgrade |
You can have two ally ability slots at all times. |
|
5 |
Forge Second Upgrade |
Lets you upgrade equipment to level 60 and equip legendary engravings on them. |
|
6 |
Stables Second Upgrade |
Whenever you tag a stockpile with your scout, you’ll get 20 percent more resources at the end of the season. |
|
7 |
Study Second Upgrade |
Gives you an additional scout slot while also reducing the search zone for quests by a whopping 60 percent. |
|
8 |
Kakurega First Upgrade |
You can get provincial rumors when you’re inside a Kakurega, and you can also use two scouts to clear the “wanted” effect from your characters. The wanted effect doesn’t occur until fairly late in the game, and even then, it’s easy to avoid, making this a low-priority upgrade. |
|
9 |
Dojo Second Upgrade |
Lets you unlock an additional ability on each of your allies at the cost of some Mon. |
|
10 |
Kakurega Second Upgrade |
Adds more Kakurega locations all around the map and reduces the cost of unlocking them. |
Hideout Level Guide
Other than the various effects you can get from building and upgrading your hideout, you also have the hideout level mechanic. You can find your current hideout level on the top left inside the build menu, and whenever you build a main/themed room or upgrade your main rooms, you get EXP for this level.
Each hideout level increase unlocks another effect for your gameplay, and here are all the effects you can get:
- You start at this level and it doesn’t have any special effects.
- If you have any scouts left when the season resets, they will bring back some Mon. The items brought back by these scouts can be claimed from the legendary chest you can find inside the Stables building. It’s important to check this chest with every season reset.
- You’ll keep the shrine boon for an extra 15 minutes.
- If you have any scouts left when the season resets, they’ll also bring some hideout resources.
- You can engrave your gear at the forge for 20 percent less Mon.
- The leftover scouts when the season ends can now bring crafting resources used to upgrade your gear.
- You can fully refill your health and adrenaline at any Kakeruga.
- The leftover scouts when the season ends can now bring gear.
- You can upgrade your gear for 20 percent less price at the forge.
- Finally, on the last upgrade, your scouts will bring crafting material on season reset when you tag a stockpile with them.
You’ll be quite far in the game by the time you get all these upgrades, but they’ll make the rest of your journey a lot more seamless.
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