How to clear your wanted level in Assassin’s Creed Shadows

When you’re “wanted” in Assassin’s Creed Shadows, you’re going to have a much harder time sneaking around castles to assassinate samurai as Naoe or busting down the door to duel them as Yasuke. Thankfully there are multiple ways to reduce your wanted level in Assassin’s Creed Shadows so you don’t have to worry about the massive guardian enemies that come to hunt you down.

In this Assassin’s Creed Shadows guide, we’ll explain how the wanted system works and show you how to clear your wanted level.

How to end up wanted in Assassin’s Creed Shadows

For starters, according to our testing, the wanted system is locked until you unlock Yasuke at the end of the game’s first act.

Your wanted level doesn’t come from killing a lot of enemies in town or anything like that. Instead, you’ll only become wanted in a province when attacking a castle or enemy base that has an alarm bell and failing to stop an enemy from ringing that bell.

Avoiding an alarm is fairly simple once you have tools or ranged weapons at your disposal, both of which you can use to disable the bell before it’s able to be rung.

You’ll also have plenty of warning before an alarm goes off, as enemies will glow red and need to make a long climb up the ladder on their way to the bell, giving you a chance to knock them down or disable the alarm before they get up there.

What happens when you’re wanted in Assassin’s Creed Shadows

If the alarm is rung, you’ll instantly become wanted. This means two things:

• Powerful guardian enemies will enter the area almost immediately (they all wear animal masks and have a red icon above their health bars). The game refers to these as the hardest enemies in the game, but really they just have a lot of health, making them impossible to assassinate as Naoe at low levels and tedious to fight for Yasuke. But trust us, you can beat them.
• When playing as the character who triggered the alarm, you’ll be attacked on sight by any enemy in the province you’re wanted in. In other words, if you trigger the alarm as Yasuke in Shoryuji Castle, then casually try to stroll down the streets of Kyoto as Yasuke, you’ll get attacked by any enemy who sees you.

Wanted levels are unique to provinces, so attaining a wanted status in Yamashiro will not make you wanted in Izumi Settsu — unless you also raise an alarm there in the same season.

One way to work around the wanted level without clearing it is to swap characters. The character that you were playing when the alarm was rung is wanted, while the other will remain anonymous. Well, unless they’re wanted too — because, yes, both characters can be wanted at the same time.

And even if you do change characters, guardians can still appear in a castle, so this workaround only really applies to guards in town and enemies on the road. So you’re better off just clearing your wanted level.

How to clear wanted level in Assassin’s Creed Shadows

There are two ways to remove your wanted level: change the season or use scouts. Of course, the extent to which those options are available to you depends on how much you’ve invested in your Hideout.

The simplest and most passive way to stop being wanted is to wait it out. Your wanted level resets every time the season changes, so eventually you’ll lose your wanted status and can invade castles to your heart’s content. You can also manually change seasons via the Map menu, but this isn’t always an option.

The quickest and most efficient way to clear the wanted status comes via a Hideout upgrade. Once you upgrade your Kakurega building to level 2 in your Hideout, you’ll be able to spend two scouts to clear any province’s wanted level. This move removes the wanted level from both characters in the region, so you don’t need to spend four scouts if both characters are wanted.

Once you lose your wanted level, everything will return to normal and you won’t see any more guardians — until you set off another alarm, that is!

For more Assassin’s Creed Shadows explainers, here’s how to get more knowledge points, mastery points, rations, scouts, and lists of all companions and romance options. Elsewhere, we have collections of all weapons and all armor to find.