In Assassin’s Creed Shadows, scouts are used tactically to succeed. These multi-use agents are an extension of your spy network and help out with anything from finding slippery targets to handling your dirty money. The system has some level of strategic depth, with resource management and forward planning. The art of knowing how to properly use your scouts, to find a hidden foe, steal precious booty undetected, or eliminate suspicion from yourself is the art of surviving in the dangerous terrain of feudal Japan.

How Scouts Work

In Assassin’s Creed Shadows, scouts are useful for tracking objectives and gathering resources, but you only have a limited number each season. Luckily, there are ways to replenish them. You can either wait for the season to change (or manually change it yourself) or visit the Kakurega at your Hideout and pay a small fee to get more scouts. If you want to increase your total number of scouts, upgrade the Study at your Hideout. Each upgrade adds another scout to your League, giving you more to work with.

How Scouts Work in Locating Targets

In Assassin’s Creed Shadows, missions often involve a bit of detective work rather than just following waypoints. When you’re tracking a target or looking for a lead, you’ll be given a few clues to help you figure out where to go.

If you think you’ve narrowed down the right area but want to speed things up, you can send out scouts. Just press Square/X, and an option will pop up to dispatch scouts to the location you’ve chosen. If you guessed correctly, a blue icon will appear on your map, though it’ll only mark a general radius, you’ll still have to do some final searching on your own.

However, if you prefer a more straightforward approach, you can turn on Guided Exploration, which places clear markers on your map, showing exactly where to go next.

How Scouts Work in Smuggling Loot

When you find stockpiles out in the world, you can tag them for your scouts to smuggle back to your Hideout. These resources will be delivered at the change of the season.

To do this, just approach a stockpile making sure no enemies have spotted you and that you’re not in combat then select the option to “smuggle resources” when prompted. While your scouts can handle multiple stockpiles at once, each one requires at least two scouts to move, so be mindful. If you send too many scouts on smuggling missions early in the season, you might run out when you need them for other tasks.

How Scouts Work in Removing Wanted Level

If you get caught sneaking into a castle and an enemy rings the alarm bell, your character will gain a Wanted status. To clear it, you can send out two scouts. Just open the world map, head to where you’re wanted, and press X/A when asked to strip away the status. But first, you must upgrade your hideout’s Kakurega to Rank 2 for this to be an option. Keep in mind that scouts can only clear a Wanted status from one province at a time, so if you’ve been causing trouble in multiple regions, you’ll need to send out more scouts to clean up your mess.