How to get more scouts in Assassin's Creed Shadows

One of the major additions in Assassin's Creed Shadows is the scouts system. These guild allies offer a number of useful services to you, from narrowing down quest locations to smuggling resources back to your hideout. But these sneaky little helpers are a rare commodity early on in your trek across feudal Japan.

Scouts are primarily used to speed up clue-based quest steps and claim material caches, though doing so consumes a charge. Scouts pretty much become another resource for you to manage back at your hideout. It's one worth paying attention to, otherwise you'll end up like me, struggling to find Heiji in the Way of the Blacksmith quest.

How to get more scouts in Assassin's Creed Shadows

There are two ways to increase your scout capacity in Assassin's Creed Shadows:

• Recruit new scouts through quests and exploration
• Build and upgrade the study at your hideout

Once you unlock your hideout at the end of the From Spark to Flame quest, you'll have just one scout available to you, which you'll likely have already used to track down your first target.

Luckily, you can immediately increase your number of scouts to three by completing the Finding New Allies sidequest. Calling this a quest seems generous as it's actually just a short conversation. All you need to do is leave the hideout via the western exit into the Katano Foothills and speak to Monta, the man directly ahead of you, and both Monta and his wife Shinobu will join your hideout as scouts. You'll see them wandering around the hideout afterwards, too.

You can also increase your number of scouts by building and upgrading the study. Building the study gives you one extra scout and even reduces the search zone for quests by 25% to save you from wasting a charge. You'll need just 60 wheat, 40 wood, and 10 minerals to build the study, so it shouldn't take you too long. Each further upgrade also gives you a bonus scout.

Unfortunately, your work isn't done yet. Increasing the number of scouts at your disposal only goes so far. Eventually, you'll still run out of scout charges and be unable to use them. This is where intel comes in, among other things.

How to refill scouts in Assassin's Creed Shadows

There are three ways to refill your scouts:

• At Kakurega buildings
• Helping civilians in open-world encounters
• Passively at the end of each season

The Kakurega is the main way you'll recover your scouts, since it's the only on-demand method to recall your helpers. Kakurega buildings are Assassin safehouses that you can set up, typically in each major city, to refill scouts and replenish your stocks of tools and rations. It costs 800 Mon to establish a safehouse, and a further 200 Mon each time you refill a single scout, which adds up fast with all the clue-tracking and smuggling you can do right away.

The good news is that you can build a kakurega at your hideout, which functions in exactly the same way as the ones out in the field.

You can also refill your scouts by helping civilians while you're exploring Japan. These won't be marked on your map and can be hard to find. Basically, you're looking for civilians who need a helping hand, whether they're being harassed by bandits or need you to fix something. You'll typically find these encounters along the side of roads. For example, I helped a merchant fix their broken cart just outside of the western Hideout exit and saved someone else from bandits up in the Senri Hills.

Help them and you'll get to choose a reward, either a 'world rumour' or 'scout intel'. A world rumour basically points you in the direction of side content while scout intel replenishes a scout.

Lastly, your scouts passively recharge at the end of each season. You can track the progress of the current season in the top right corner of the map. This isn't the quickest way to get your scouts back, but it's a nice boost you can plan around, especially since you'll get any smuggled resources at the end of a season too. You can actually change seasons slightly early, which you might want to do if you're desperate for scouts.

It's also a good idea to upgrade the stables at your hideout. Doing so reduces the cost of smuggling a stockpile down to just one scout, rather than the resource-hungry two it demands at the start of the game. In fact, rampaging through a castle and claiming stockpiles is exactly how I ran out of scouts, scrambling to figure out how to get some back to mark the remaining caches.

You should also build the nando at the hideout. This themed room provides your scouts with a restful sleep, reducing the cost of refreshing your scouts at the Kakurega by 30%.