Three major resources are vital to any settlement: you need crops to feed the people, wood to build their homes, and minerals for walls and buildings. These three things are also the main hideout resources in Assassin’s Creed Shadows and you’ll need a lot of all of them if you’re going to turn your small homestead into a thriving community.
What are Hideout Resources used for in Assassin’s Creed Shadows?
Hideout Resources have two main uses in Assassin’s Creed Shadows:
- Building amenities like a Study, Dojo, or Forge at your Hideout
- Upgrading the buildings and amenities you construct, so that they provide bigger bonuses and more benefits
While it’s easy enough to muddle through the game without them, these buildings offer some great benefits which both make Naoe and Yasuke’s mission much easier, but also make them much more formidable opponents in battle as well.
If you want more Scout charges, equipment with more unique abilities, or powerful allies you can call upon whenever the need arises, then you need plenty of crops, wood and minerals to provide the infrastructure necessary to collect these buffs.
Where are the best places to get more crops, wood and minerals?
While you can find small caches in hostile bandit camps and around castles, these tiny additions to your stockpile aren’t going to make a big difference (although you should still pick them up).
There are two main ways to get large amounts of crops, wood and minerals in big enough quantities to fuel all of the different projects at your hideout:
- Tag resource caches in bandit camps and castles for collection at the end of the season by your Scouts
- Visit a port trader and buy more crops, wood and minerals
First up, as you play as both Naoe and Yasuke on your journey through Feudal Japan, when you infiltrate hostile areas marked with a red diamond and various castles throughout the land, you’ll find golden caches marked with a barrel icon.
If you interact with these while anonymous, you can spend two Scout charges to smuggle those resources at the end of a season, adding them to your own stockpile. Each cache is usually worth around 150 crops or wood and about half of that for minerals.
If you need to refill your Scout charges, you can do so at a Kakurega for 200 mon per Scout.
But alternatively, look for traders marked with an anchor on your map. These vendors are usually Portuguese merchants who have large amounts of useful items for sale: including the hideout resources you’re after.
While most of them usually just have two of the three kinds in stock, like all merchants their stock changes and refreshes regularly and there are enough of them to flit between to get what you need.
In the early game, go to the city of Sakai and you’ll find a trader on the western side of town, near the port.
Then in Omi, make your way to the town of Otsu, on the southern shore of Lake Biwa. In the port district, you find another trader with a stock of crops, wood and minerals.
What’s more, the prices are pretty reasonable, allowing you to get up to 750 of each material at a time – which is usually more than enough to finish whatever building or upgrade you’ve got your sights set on at any one time.