Items

Almost nothing in this part of Assassin's Creed 3 is bought. Both of the collections we cover are handed over for reaching a particular state in your save, so the useful question is not where an item is but what the game wants finished before it appears. Our outfits guide lists fourteen wardrobe unlocks and the condition attached to each, and our pivot points guide covers a collectible that does not exist at all until the credits have rolled.

The wardrobe, sorted by what it is waiting on

Six of the fourteen outfits have their own condition, eight arrive in two batches for closing out a sequence, and exactly one is a purchase rather than a reward.

Read down that column and the wardrobe turns into a progress bar for three completely different pursuits. The feathers make you comb the Frontier early, while sequences four and five are still running. Achilles' coat is the reward for finishing the settlement's own mission chain, which is the same chain that staffs the workshops in our crafting and Homestead guide. Altair's robes are the expensive one, because a single fumbled optional objective anywhere in the campaign locks them until you replay that memory, and the mission by mission conditions are laid out in our 100 percent sync guide. The eight batch unlocks are the generous ones, six of them named after cities plus the Captain of the Aquila Costume and the Colonial Assassin, since they turn up simply for reaching the end of sequence six and sequence seven.

Pivots: the collection that begins after the story ends

The Animus pivots are the only thing here that is gated on the campaign being over. Finish the game once and an epilogue side mission opens, and finding pivots in it unlocks the Animus hacks, which are cheats you switch on from the options menu. There is a second gate underneath the first, because the pivots are placed by other players and can only be picked up while you are online. The tutorial that shows you three basic pivots works offline, and that is as far as an offline save gets.

Hunting them is geometry rather than exploration. Two pivots you have planted cut the map into a green band that has to contain a third, and adding another narrows that band to a triangle with the target near the middle of it, marked with a square on the mini map. Pivots can only be planted where Connor is standing, so building a useful triangle means walking its corners, although picking them back up is just a matter of hovering over one. Spawns refresh every fifteen minutes, and because your own markers are visible to other players hunting the same thing, a pivot can shift position once somebody else reaches it. Our pivot points page singles out Rho and Zeta as the pair that leads a player to the rest.

The ten hacks and the price of using them

Ten pivots, ten cheats, one for each of the letters below.

There is a catch that matters if you were planning to clean up collectibles with the cheats running: progress cannot be saved while a hack is active. Three of the ten are exempt, and they are the three that only touch the sky: Eta, Sigma and Tau. Day, weather and season can therefore be set to taste on a save you intend to keep, while invincibility, endless ammunition and the rest have to be switched back off before the game will write anything down.

For everything else Connor can carry, earn or wear, start from the Assassin's Creed 3 hub.