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Connor's half of Assassin's Creed 3 hands you a piece of land before it hands you much else, and what you do with that land decides how comfortable the rest of the game is. The estate at Davenport is where people settle, where the workbenches are, where the trade routes start and where the board games are set up. Around it sit a campaign that grades its memories on more than whether you reached the end of them, a ship that needs kit, and a handful of collections that only appear once other things are finished. This page is the map of our coverage, arranged the way you actually meet it.
Settling the estate, and why the calendar matters
The settlement is optional, and it is also the one optional system that decides how easily the rest of the game goes. It arrived in place of the property buying that the Ezio games used, which means gold alone will not grow it: people do. Achilles opens the door in Sequence 5, and from there the manor icons on the map are invitations to bring somebody home or to teach somebody already living there a new skill. Our Homestead guide is the overview of how that settlement behaves, and our artisans levelling guide is the sequence by sequence plan, running from that first meeting up to Sequence 11.
Two things in that plan catch people out, and both are worth knowing before you start rather than after. Winter closes a lot of these missions, so the clear months are when the settlement grows fastest. And the Encyclopedia of the Common Man, which Achilles Davenport offers in Sequence 6, has to be left unfinished while you work through Sequence 7, because that sequence's promotions depend on it still being open. Leaving too many of these missions behind does not simply delay a tradesman, it can leave them stuck at the level they arrived at.
Turning the settlement into a business
Most of what the ledger will let you build depends on who is living on the estate and how practised they are. The recipe book is kept in the study of the manor, though you can open it from almost any general store instead of riding back, and it carries 131 recipes across eleven categories, from ale and soup to artillery and Washington's Battle Sword. Recipes themselves are scattered around the world as pickups or discovered by experiment, and a failed experiment consumes the ingredients, which is a real cost early on. Our crafting recipes guide lists all of them with the tradesman and level each one needs, and the crafting and Homestead guide sets out the whole production line: which settlers gate recipes, which only sell you raw material, and where the finished goods end up.
The end of that line is a convoy. Load one with what your workshops have made, send it to a port far enough away to pay well, and the return trip funds the next batch. Convoys are not safe, though, and one that gets jumped can be emptied unless you or your recruits ride to meet it.
Keeping Connor in coin
Weapons, consumables and the Aquila's fittings all cost money, and trade is the dependable source rather than the only one. Our money making guide ranks the alternatives honestly: errands and contracts for citizens pay quickly and get repetitive, pickpockets and convoy raids pay but raise the alarm, and treasure chests are a bonus rather than an income, since they need a key or a lockpick first. Hunting is the standout, because a clean kill leaves a pelt in perfect condition and the big animals return to the same ground, so one good clearing keeps paying. If a chest or a locked door is what stands between you and the cash, the stick and trigger routine is on our lockpicking guide, and it runs to three steps.
Playing the story for a perfect score
Across the sequences we have written up, most main memories carry a second set of conditions on top of their objectives, and meeting them is what full synchronisation means. The demands vary wildly in character: a cap on the damage you take, a stopwatch, a ban on killing with a weapon or on being seen at all, or an instruction to do something flashy such as throwing redcoats into the harbour. Our 100 percent sync guide sorts them by that character, and the individual walkthroughs behind it cover Sequence 5, which is where Achilles, the estate and the ship all arrive at once, plus Sequence 3 with Haytham in the Frontier and Sequence 6, which opens on a skyscraper as Desmond and ends with William Johnson. Those three are written up in detail; the rest of the twelve are not, so treat this as depth on selected memories rather than a complete campaign index.
Out on the water
The Aquila comes with the same double scoring. Bonus objectives hang off the naval battles attached to the story and to side work, and they tend to be about restraint: keep your own damage under a share of the hull, waste no more than two shots, bring down a mast with a single well aligned broadside. Our naval missions guide works through The Chase, The Rescue, French Involvement and Biddle's Hideout in that order, and it is worth reading beside the crafting list, because masts, sails and several of the ship's weapons are built by your own settlers. Note that these are the battles rather than the naval locations, privateer missions and contracts, which our page is careful to keep separate.
The games in the corner of the estate
Once most of the settlement's own missions are behind you, three board games open up as a break from the killing, and one of them doubles as a small income. Our mini games guide teaches Bowls, Morris and Fanorona, with the rules first and then the habits that beat the computer, including the detail that the Bowls pitch on the ship does not count towards the award while the one by the Inn does. Fanorona is the difficult one, a Madagascan game on a nine by five board where captures are compulsory and the machine plays a long defensive game. If you are there for the wagers rather than the trophy, our 12 Men's Morris page is the short version: take the opening turn, build two threats at once, and raise your stake only once you have the hang of the board.
What you get for finishing things
Connor's wardrobe is a receipt for work done elsewhere in the game. Sequences six and seven each hand over a batch of outfits, most of them named after cities, for nothing more than reaching the end of them, the Frontier's feathers pay out in Kanien'keha:ka dress, Achilles' own coat comes with the last settlement mission, and Altair's robes are reserved for a campaign in which no optional objective was ever missed. Our unlockables guide puts all fourteen in one table with the condition on each, alongside the Animus pivots, which do not exist until the credits have rolled. That epilogue hunt is an online triangulation puzzle, it pays out in ten cheats such as invincibility and endless ammunition, and only the three that alter the sky can be left running on a save you still want to write to.
Whichever of those you are chasing, the settlement is the thing that makes the others cheaper, so if you are early in the game and undecided, go and find a manor icon.