In Assassin’s Creed Shadows, your hideout serves as the heart of your operations, allowing you to upgrade your gear, manage resources, and recruit allies. As you progress, you’ll unlock and enhance different buildings and rooms, each offering valuable perks to improve your gameplay. Let’s see how to unlock and upgrade your hideout, including the different room types, upgrade priorities, and the hideout level system. By understanding these mechanics, you’ll be able to maximize your hideout’s potential and make your journey through Assassin’s Creed Shadows even more rewarding.
How to Unlock All Hideout Base Buildings and Rooms
Unlocking the hideout in Assassin’s Creed Shadows is a natural part of the game’s progression, so you won’t have to go out of your way to find it. However, you will need to complete a lengthy prologue, which takes up the first few hours of gameplay.
During the prologue, you’ll meet Tomiko, and by the end, she offers her homestead as your main base for tracking down the Shinbakufu. This is when you officially unlock the hideout and get introduced to its core mechanics. Once unlocked, the hideout becomes a fast travel point on the map in the Izumi Settsu province. It’s a good idea to visit it regularly to upgrade both the hideout and your gear.
All Hideout Room Types & Their Effects
Main Rooms
- Stables: Reveals stockpiles while raiding castles and hostile areas. Requires at least two scouts to mark stockpiles. Stockpiles provide resources at the end of each season and fully refill scouts.
- Kakurega: Unlocks a new fast travel system across Japan. Identified by scout icons and automatically revealed when nearby. Allows access to contracts, ration/tool refills, and scout purchases.
- Study: Increases the number of scouts available each season. Scouts help mark quest locations and stockpiles. Especially useful for players in non-guided mode.
- Forge: Upgrade gear for Naoe and Yasuke if it’s below the current account level. Ensures characters stay on par with enemies. Considered one of the most important hideout buildings.
- Dojo: Hub for managing and upgrading allies. Allows switching between different allies. Enables ability upgrades for allies.
Themed Rooms
- Tera: Increases experience gained from all sources by 10%.
- Jinja: Enhances shrine prayer effects and extends their duration to 15 minutes.
- Nando: Reduces the cost of purchasing scouts at a Kakurega by 30%.
- Zashiki: Increases the healing effect of rations.
- Tea Room
In addition to the main rooms, you can unlock themed rooms of different sizes and customize them however you like. The build menu also lets you switch between various tabs where you can access paths, decorations, trees, and pets you’ve collected throughout your journey.
You can place these items in your hideout to personalize them and enhance their appearance. Decorative items, plants, and pathways can be obtained from merchants or discovered while exploring the world.
As for pets, you’ll come across dogs, cats, and other small animals during your travels. Petting them will allow you to bring them back to your hideout. You can also unlock a special dog named Tsuki-maru by completing the Thrown to the Dogs side quest.
Upgrade Priority & Effects
When you first build a main room in your hideout, it starts at white rarity. With the exception of the Hiroma, all other rooms can be upgraded twice, reaching blue rarity. Some upgrades simply increase a room’s capacity, while others unlock entirely new effects tied to that building. However, upgrading rooms requires significantly more resources than building them, so it’s important to plan your upgrades wisely. Below is the recommended upgrade order, starting with the highest priority:
- Stables – First Upgrade: Allows you to mark stockpiles with just one scout instead of two. Effectively doubles the resources you can gather.
- Forge – First Upgrade: Enables gear upgrades up to level 40. Allows non-legendary engravings on your equipment. High priority since engravings improve gear significantly.
- Study – First Upgrade: Grants an additional scout slot.
- Dojo – First Upgrade: Unlocks a second ability slot for allies.
- Forge – Second Upgrade: Increases the maximum upgrade level of equipment to 60. Allows legendary engravings on gear.
- Stables – Second Upgrade: Provides 20% more resources from tagged stockpiles at the end of each season.
- Study – Second Upgrade: Adds another scout slot. Reduces the search zone for quests by 60%.
- Kakurega – First Upgrade: Provides provincial rumors while inside a Kakurega. Allows two scouts to clear the “wanted” effect from characters. Low priority since the wanted effect appears late in the game and is easy to avoid.
- Dojo – Second Upgrade: Unlocks an additional ability for each ally, requiring some Mon to activate.
- Kakurega – Second Upgrade: Increases the number of Kakurega locations on the map. Reduces the cost of unlocking them.
How to Build and Upgrade Your Hideout
Once you’re inside your hideout, you can start building or upgrading it in two ways: either by heading to the central hideout area and selecting the “Improve Hideout” option at the bottom of the screen or by visiting the Hiroma building and interacting with a specific desk with a lamp on it. Standing near this desk will also give you the same option.
When you open the build menu for the first time, you’ll notice that it’s divided into different room types. There are six main rooms that provide essential buffs for your gameplay, along with additional themed rooms that can be acquired from various merchants across the world.
To build or upgrade these rooms, you’ll need resources like crops, wood, and minerals. The best way to gather these materials is by raiding enemy zones and marking stockpiles for your scouts.
At the start, the Hiroma and Stables rooms are already built. With enough resources, you can also construct a Kakurega. However, unlocking the Study, Forge, or Dojo requires further progress in the story, you’ll need to find a blacksmith and recruit an ally to build them.
Hideout Level System
Aside from the various benefits of building and upgrading your hideout, there’s also a hideout level system. You can check your current hideout level in the top-left corner of the build menu. Every time you build a main or themed room or upgrade a main room, you earn EXP for this level.
Each time your hideout levels up, you unlock a new gameplay perk. Here’s what you gain at each level:
- Level 1: Default starting level with no special effects.
- Level 2: Any unused scouts at the end of the season will bring back Mon (currency). You can claim these items from the legendary chest inside the Stables—make sure to check it after every season reset.
- Level 3: Shrine boons now last 15 minutes longer.
- Level 4: Unused scouts at the end of the season will also bring back hideout resources.
- Level 5: Engraving gear at the Forge now costs 20% less Mon.
- Level 6: Unused scouts can now bring back crafting resources for gear upgrades.
- Level 7: You can fully refill your health and adrenaline at any Kakurega.
- Level 8: Unused scouts at the end of the season will now bring back gear.
- Level 9: Upgrading gear at the Forge now costs 20% less.
- Level 10: Scouts will now bring back crafting materials whenever they tag a stockpile before a season reset.
By the time you unlock all these perks, you’ll be deep into the game, but they’ll make your progression much smoother.
