The Seasons system in Assassin’s Creed Shadows not only changes visually the environment. It is related to obtaining resources, resetting quests and other parts of your gameplay and progression.
What are Seasons
There are four seasons in Assassin’s Creed Shadows, just like in our real lives. The game transforms the environment among several other gameplay-related features from season to season.
If you live in a part of the world where you never see snow or where your Summer is one week sometime in July (if even that long), you would love the visual scenery of each season in this game.
Each season is represented by a different icon in the upper right corner on the map:
 | Winter |
 | Spring |
 | Summer |
 | Autumn |
Around the icon, you can see a tracker showing you progress. There are two large dots, one on the top and one at the bottom. They signify Season Segment change. The top one is for the start of a new season. The bottom one is for the start of the second Season Segment of the same season.
When the bars are filled up to one of the white dots, it’s time for a season change. When you see the “Season Change” cinematic, this means a season segment has passed. You get all of the benefits on a Season part change.
If the season progress tracker on the map is full, this means you are about to change into a brand-new season. If it’s half full, it means you are about to change into the second segment of the same season.
What is affected by Seasons
For every season the world of feudal Japan in Assassin’s Creed Shadows is utterly transformed visually. Duiring spring time everything is blossoming. Autumns are rainy and all kinds of orange, brown and red. Winters are both the most amazing and most annoying – your movement on foot is slowed if you don’t follow the beaten path and decide to take a “short cut” through thick snow.
Every time a season segment changes, you will have your scouts refreshed (returned) and ready for work. Your “Wanted” status will get reset as well. If Naoe or Yasuke have been too bold and aggressive, they may have put a region on Alert. This means that wherever you go, NPCs will recognize and hunt you.
An easy work-around when you are Wanted, while waiting for a season to remove this state, is to switch to the other protagonist. The Wanted system is “per character”. Alternatively, you can unlock the ability to use scouts to remove this status. You unlock this feature by upgrading the Kakurega at the Hideout to Tier 2.
On season change, vendors will refresh their stock. There are three general types of vendors: Gear Vendor, Port Vendor and Ornament Vendor.
The change of seasons is not directly related to the game’s storyline. If you try to count seasons changing between certain missions, this does not equal to actual time passing and accounted for by the characters.
Seasons also affect the availability of some of the most elusive and rare sumi-e, the Legendary Sumi-e locations. Some of the legendary animals only show up during a specific time of day during a specific season.
How to change Seasons
At the start of each season segment , you see an animation. You can actually skip it. After the first dozen times, it gets boring.
Seasons change when a certain amount of time has passed. They change when you fast travel or after any kind of a loading screen.
You may be confused by the button on the map, below the compass, being always inactive. You can manually force a season change only after the certain time has passed in-game and the game is actually ready for a season change.
If the game is ready to change a season, this button will become available. If you don’t use it, it will automatically change to the next season the next time you fast travel.
The change of a season via the button on the map, is one of the keybinds you cannot customize for Assassin’s Creed Shadows. The Controls customization is great in this title, especially for keyboard and mouse on PC.
When a season changes, you will receive some notifications. On the left, you will see your scouts returning notification. On the right, you will see if you have new resources that have arrived.
How to best use the Seasons System
Farming resources for the Hideout or for upgrading your gear is expensive. The best sources of materials are Stockpiles in Castles and Forts and Contracts.
You can only order a limited number of Stockpiles to be smuggled per season depending on how many scouts you have available. You can pick up contracts from the Kakurega. They also reset each season.
A good workaround to these limitations, is to structure your activities accordingly. I you don’t use scouts to discover your next mission objective (use our Quest Walkthroughs to help with that), you will have more scouts available to smuggle for you.
A good and diverse activity plan per gaming session would help aid your progression on all fronts. Clear a castle, complete a contract, check what is your next target on the board of objectives, visit a “red marker activity” such as a shrine or kuji-kiri, explore a Kofun or complete a Hidden Trail.
When you are clearing castles orguarded camps, always pay attention to the wealth of the area. If it’s rich, you will have more resources to pick up after you (solo) raid the location.
The amount of content is so impressive that if you do a little of everything, you will achieve two things at the same time – be less bored of doing the same thing all the time and progress naturally on several fronts.
Remember at every season change to visit the Hideout and grab the resources your scouts have delivered there. They are in the Salvage stash at the stables. That stash can get full, which will prevent you from adding more resources to it.
