Items

Baghdad is small by Assassin's Creed standards, which means its collectibles are worth doing rather than something to grind out at the end. There are two sets of six, and they pay in the currency that actually matters, which is skill points. The wardrobe is the third thing worth chasing, and it pays in perks instead.

What Each Collectible Pays in Assassin's Creed Mirage

The Lost Books are a stealth challenge in disguise

Al-Jahiz sits in the House of Wisdom and wants six books recovered from around the city, and he pays in Scholar tokens, which buy musicians who will pull your pursuers away when the street gets warm. Each book is also a straight skill point, and finding all six puts the Scholar Costume in your wardrobe.

None of the six is simply lying on a table. The Great Mosque copy needs you to blow up a jar in a cellar to open the door behind it. The Nestorian Monastery copy is behind three bookshelves that have to be shoved aside before you can squeeze through. The one near the Observatory is behind another shelf, the Tuesday Market copy sits in a house with half a dozen guards in it and a window above them, and the Harbor Camp copy is deep inside restricted ground with guards on the rooftops. The last one cannot be collected early at all, because the Palace of the Green Dome only opens during the Serpent's Nest mission. Exact locations are on the Lost Books page.

The Tales of Baghdad do not appear on your map

This is the only reason the second set is hard. Six small side stories are scattered around the city and the wilderness, and none of them shows up as a marker until you are almost standing on it, so a player who navigates by icons will finish the game having found one or two by accident. Completing a single tale gives you the Crossing Paths achievement and finishing all six gives you Explorer.

They are short and they vary more than the books do. One is a graveyard argument in Harbiyah that turns into a fight with the guards. One asks you to fetch three pages of a treatise from around the Observatory, including one out on a balcony. One is a child at a viewpoint in Karkh who needs somebody to jump first. One is a dive into the river at Ukbara for a lump of copper ore, and one is a poisoning in an abandoned village that you solve with Eagle Vision and a jar. All six, with what each pays, are on the Tales of Baghdad page.

Outfits are a perk choice, not a fashion choice

There are nine, each carries one perk, and the perk upgrades in three steps. That makes the wardrobe a build decision, and the surprise is that the outfit you start the game in is arguably the best of them. The Initiate of Alamut, handed to you by the opening chapter, carries Silent Blade, and at full upgrade it silences your assassinations completely, which means killing a man standing beside another man and walking away.

The Rostam Outfit is the other top pick and it solves the opposite problem, silencing your movement instead of your kills, so a fully upgraded version lets you sprint through restricted ground without being heard. Below those, Milad's Outfit throws a lightning jolt after every air assassination and arrives fully upgraded, though it costs five Mysterious Shards to unlock the door it sits behind. Zanj Uprising blunts the consequences of getting caught, and the Hidden One returns focus after every stealth kill, which is only useful once Assassin's Focus is unlocked. The full tier list with locations and perks is on the best outfits page.

Since skill points are the real prize here, it is worth clearing both sets of six before the later investigations rather than after them. Which investigations those are is the subject of our walkthrough guide, the Mysterious Shards that gate Milad's Outfit turn up again in the mechanics guide, and the Assassin's Creed Mirage guide hub covers everything else.