Welcome to the 100% club. Be warned, what is contained within has spoilers. It is a reference guide, so please refer to it only when stuck.
HOW TO USE THIS GUIDE
First off, this is not a walkthrough, so do not expect step by step ‘turn left here, look at giant muffin’-type direction. This is a reference guide. It contains spoilers, so please only refer to it when you are stuck.
Or, you might not mind spoiling things, in which case, feel free to soak yourself in warm bubblebath, put your feet up and read the whole thing as if it were the latest thing Dan Brown farted out his literary bunghole. Your choice.
All missions that have bonus objectives are covered here in detail, which includes main story missions, naval locations, naval missions and privateer missions – the difference between them you will become accustomed to as you play. As for all the other little fiddly bits to get you to 100% synch; there’s a lot to them, but we will take you through these first. These are things you should try to do throughout to save yourself the hassle of getting everything at the end. So let us begin…
SOME ADVICE: BE TIDY!
This is a law that applies to your entire playthrough of the game. When a bunch of new icons appear on the map, get rid of them. Aim to keep clean maps at all times. This will frequently mean stopping the main story while you arse about collecting feathers and trinkets and liberating districts and so on, sometimes for hours at a time. But if you leave all this to the end the boredom will become insurmountable and you most likely won’t finish. Be a bro and clean as you go.
There are four clubs in total and to become a member of each, you just have to do a bit of the thing they are about. For Hunting Society membership, just hunt a bit and you’ll get the invite, for Frontiersman, just explore, for Boston Brawlers try fighting empty-handed from time to time and for the Thief’s Club, pickpocket £200. Once a member you’ll notice that each has discreet mini-missions to take on as well as challenges (kill ten of these, feed ten of those his own musket and so on).
Making yourself aware of the kinds of things it wants you to do is the most important thing here. Try to knock each challenge off the list during normal gameplay. This will save you plenty of heartache during the endgame.
About halfway through the game, these will start appearing all over your city maps. Each of the two cities – Boston and New York – are split into three zones. Completing the liberation tasks in each zone will open up one final mission for that zone, in which you usually have to kill a Templar leader. With that done, the zone is liberated and the resistance leader or leaders recruited into your guild of assassins. It is a REALLY GOOD IDEA to do all of these early on so you can get your assassins sent on missions around America, earning XP and levelling up.
One slightly irritating, but noteworthy aspect of the liberation missions is that not all of them will be marked on your map, even if you do something else we advise: synchronise all viewpoints as soon as you can. Luckily, however, the map itself doesn’t defog until you actually visit a precise location, so if you’re missing a rabid dog, a sick civilian or some bullying tax inspectors, just look in the places within that district that you haven’t visited yet.
Hey presto, they are always there. It’s also worth noting that in some cases, you don’t need to get your liberation score to 100% before the end mission unlocks. It’s a black icon with a white liberation symbol in it as opposed to the others, which are black on white.
For the first five or six sequences, until the game has wholly opened up, the only collectables you should bother with are treasure chests, but do be sure and make a diversion for them no matter how far away they are, as when the game does open up you’ll need a cool £30k or so to purchase all the maps. Maps?
Yes, you can buy maps showing you the locations to every collectable in the game. Once you have them, you can spend a few hours just running about and picking them all up, which is more fun than it sounds, but that being the case, there really is no point in you wasting your time wondering how you’re going to climb that tree and retrieve that feather.
There are eight of these in all and you’ll need to craft them all for 100% synch. Save this until the end. The reason we mention this here is that they are the entire point of collecting the Almanac Pages. Without the Almanac Pages, you can’t craft ’em.
These are a special case. They are collectables, sure, but they unlock naval locations, or to put it another way, they are the beginning of the Kidd’s Treasure hunt. Basically, once you have your boat, you can trade these in with Peg Leg over near your boat in the homestead. For every few, he will give you the location of a missing piece of the treasure map. Get all four pieces – really, really fun levels to get each of these – and there will be one final challenge and one quite superb reward, which we will not spoil for you here.
There are seven of these. For their exact locations, see the completed maps we have added just after this section you’re reading now.
Each of the two cities has a labyrinth beneath it and each labyrinth has ten points of entry. For 100% synch, you will need to find them all. We aren’t going to go into much depth about them here, but see pages 12 and 13 for the completed maps. If you get stuck, the solution will involve climbing, dropping or shooting a keg of gunpowder. Always. Just remember that and you’ll do fine.
Pick these up as you go. For the assassination missions, it’s just a case of killing five easy guys. We did almost all of these just by run- killing them, not even stopping to say boo. The courier missions are a simple case of delivering letters.
These are proper missions and there are 37 of them! The reason why we have not included any of them in the guide here is that they are all so damn simple. And, they have no secondary objectives. It is always a case of ‘go here’, ‘deliver this’, or ‘kill this’, and the target locations are always marked on your map, except for the one where you have to retrieve the hammer for Big Dave, where you buy the parts at the general store. You can handle that, right?
They are pitifully easy. They also unlock gradually as you go, so you won’t be able to do the whole lot until around the end of sequence 11. Bear that in mind and don’t waste time looking for the ones remaining before they even exist.
No nice way to say this: lockpicking is a bitch. But there is a cheaty technique you can use. Balance the controller on the end of your right knee and use your left palm to lock the first stick into place. Hold it there while you use your right hand to find the second tumbler, then slide your left thumb over to lock that into place. You now should have your entire right hand free to hammer the right trigger. There are probably other ways, but most of them won’t make you look as stupid as we did doing this in a busy office and in front of other people.
We cannot stress how important this is. Not only is it a requirement for 100% synch, it is all but impossible to complete some of the secondary objectives at sea without them. Plough all your money into it and get the Aquila fully loaded as soon as possible.
At sequence six you can pick up this side quest. It involves documenting (pointing with LT at) various doctors, craftsmen and artisans around the homestead. When you pick this up, ignore it until your homestead has a full complement of staff. Basically, ignore it until you’ve completed the game. It’s only for an Achievement anyway and who cares about those anymore? Erm… okay, we do. A bit. But only in the same way we care about an elderly cat: it’s endearing and we hope it doesn’t die soon.
Use these to help you find forts and such. Look at them. All complete and stuff. There are only four locations in the game. But that’s a bit like saying the Earth only has five continents; it doesn’t begin to describe the scale of it all.
That’s not all there is. Check out NowGamer’s guides to Assassin’s Creed 3’s naval battles and story missions.
Wolfenstein: The New Order Walkthrough Guide Part 10 - Berlin Catacombs gliding for the gold snake
Dark Souls 2 Resetting Stats
How to chose the best Forces Agents for Dragon Age Inquisition, Agents Recruitment Guide
Call of Duty: Ghosts Walkthrough
Is Wildstar The Next Great MMORPG?