In Assassin’s Creed Shadows, getting caught ringing the alarm bell can turn your stealth mission into a desperate fight for survival as powerful Guardians hunt you down. But fear not-whether you prefer to bide your time for the seasons to change, upgrade your hideout’s Kakurega to deploy Scouts, or switch characters to evade the heat, there are clever ways to clear your wanted status and slip back into the shadows unseen.
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
To end up wanted in Assassin’s Creed Shadows, you typically trigger an alert when enemies, such as guards, sound an alarm bell during your infiltration of castles or enemy bases. This happens if you are detected while causing trouble, like killing enemies or raising alarms. Once wanted, all enemies in that region become highly alert, and powerful enemies called Guardians may spawn to hunt you down, making exploration and combat more difficult. To avoid becoming wanted, it’s best to remain undetected, disable alarm systems from a distance, or eliminate guards quietly before they can raise the alarm.
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
When you’re wanted in Assassin’s Creed Shadows, gameplay becomes significantly more challenging. Guards across the region will be on high alert and attack you on sight, making stealth and exploration difficult. Additionally, powerful elite enemies called Guardians, who wear animal masks and have high health, will spawn to hunt you down, increasing the threat level considerably. This Wanted status is triggered when an alarm bell is rung in enemy strongholds, such as castles, alerting the entire region to your presence. The status affects the whole province, not just the immediate area, and remains active until you clear it by methods such as waiting for a season change or using Scouts to remove the alert.
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
To clear your wanted level in Assassin’s Creed Shadows, you have a few effective options. The simplest method is to wait for the in-game season to change, which automatically resets all wanted statuses across regions; this can take about 70 to 180 minutes of gameplay depending on the season cycle. Alternatively, you can upgrade your Kakurega building in your Hideout to level 2, which requires resources like Crops, Wood, and Minerals. Once upgraded, you can spend two Scouts to instantly clear the wanted status in any region by selecting the area on the map and using the “Clear Regional Alert” option. Another quick workaround is to switch characters if only one is wanted, allowing you to continue playing without alert status until you can clear it by other means. These methods help you avoid constantly being hunted by enemies and make exploration and missions easier.
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!
Want to know the fastest way to clear your wanted level in Shadows
The fastest way to clear your wanted level in Assassin’s Creed Shadows is by upgrading your Kakurega building in your Hideout to level 2. This upgrade allows you to spend two scouts to instantly clear the wanted status in any province, removing the alert for both characters and letting you explore freely again without waiting. While this method requires gathering materials to upgrade the Kakurega, it is much quicker than waiting for the in-game season to change, which can take around 140 to 180 minutes of gameplay. After upgrading, simply open the map, select the region where you are wanted, and use the option to clear the regional alert by spending scouts.
Is upgrading Kakurega the quickest way to clear your wanted level in Shadows
Yes, upgrading the Kakurega to level 2 in your Hideout is the quickest and most efficient way to clear your wanted level in Assassin’s Creed Shadows. This upgrade allows you to spend two scouts to instantly remove the wanted status in any province, affecting both characters if needed, without waiting for the season to change. While waiting for a season change also clears the wanted level, it takes significantly longer (about 140 to 180 minutes of gameplay), making the Kakurega upgrade the fastest method available.
