Your Hideout at Tomiko’s Homestead is an important part of Assassin’s Creed Shadows. It’s more than just your base of operations — many of the rooms comes with a benefit like increasing the number of scouts in your roster or improving the amount of healing you get from rations.
Our Assassin’s Creed Shadows guide will tell you the best Hideout rooms to build first and the best Hideout upgrades to get first.
Best Hideout rooms to build first in Assassin’s Creed Shadows
When you first unlock the Hideout as part of “From Spark to Flame,” you’ll already have the Hiroma (main room) and the Stables. Your first two tasks will be to build another couple rooms: the Kakurega and the Forge.
After those four rooms, though, the only other rooms that will be unlocked are the Jinja (690 crops, 510 wood, 170 minerals, 1,800 mon) and the Study (60 crops, 40 wood, 10 minerals). Build the Study as soon as you can — it gives you an extra scout immediately.
Image: Ubisoft Quebec/Ubisoft via Polygon
The Jinja is a weird one. It isn’t a shrine itself (you can’t pray there), but it enhances the benefits you get from praying at shrines out in the world. It’s useful to have, but it shouldn’t be a priority.
After that, you’ll have to wait a while to build anything else. Most of the rooms are locked by progression or by meeting people (i.e., starting side quests), though there are some cosmetic ones you can buy from merchants.
Image: Ubisoft Quebec/Ubisoft via Polygon
A while later, after you recruit your first companion, you’ll unlock two more rooms: the Dojo (350 crops, 260 wood, 90 minerals) and the Nando (440 crops, 330 wood, 110 minerals, 1,160 mon).
Which one you build depends on your priorities and play style. The Dojo is good for training and assigning your allies, but the Nando reduces the cost of refilling your scouts at a kakurega. Since scouts are so useful — especially for bringing in more resources that allow you to build even more rooms — we recommend building the Nando as soon as you can.
Down the line, you’ll be able to unlock Zashiki and Tea Room, which improve your ration efficiency, but you’ll need to make your way through a large part of the main story first, so don’t worry about racing to get those built.
Once you have rooms built, you can get even more out of them by upgrading them.
Best Hideout upgrades in Assassin’s Creed Shadows
Image: Ubisoft Quebec/Ubisoft via Polygon
All of your Hideout’s rooms are useful enough on their own, but they become even more useful as you upgrade them. In the Improve Hideout menu, click on a building, and then choose the top option — the two chevrons pointing up — to upgrade that room.
Just of those first six rooms you can build, there are clear winners and losers for upgrading. Prioritize these three upgrades:
- Stable upgrades reduce the number of scouts needed to retrieve a pallet of resources from an enemy camp.
- Study upgrades add a scout with each upgrade.
- Kakurega upgrades reduce the cost of unlocking other kakurega outposts out in the world. Kakuregas are great for fast travel, but also let you refill your scouts without waiting for a season change.
The other room you have at your Hideout, the Forge, will definitely need to be upgraded eventually, but it can wait. At its first level (when you build it), Heiji can upgrade gear up to level 20, and that will probably last you 15 hours or more since you can’t wield anything higher than your current level. With the second upgrade (350 crops, 260 wood, 90 minerals), that jumps to level 40.
The second level does add the ability to add enhancements, though. These are useful buffs and abilities you can add to your gear at the Forge. That said, you’ll be changing gear constantly — especially early on — so you can probably hold off on upgrading the Forge until you’re close to level 20.
To get the most out of your home base in Assassin’s Creed Shadows, here are the best Hideout upgrades, plus explainers on how to unlock the Zashiki and Tea Room.
