Assassin's Creed Rogue Guide: Every Layer Of The Map And What It Hides

Shay spends this game on the wrong side of the fight, hunted by the order he used to belong to, and the world is built to remind him. The Assassins pick the time and the place, Eagle Vision gets pointed at them instead of at a target, and the armour you earn for surviving their ambushes exists to help you spot the next one. Sorting Rogue by where you happen to be standing works better than sorting it by mission type, because the game keeps five separate places going at once and each of them holds a different kind of trouble.

Where you are	What it is holding	The catch
Abstergo's office, outside the Animus	Twenty broken machines and the files they hold	A closing door, since the office locks after the story
New York	Six Templar maps and two burial sites	Maps that point at a hole in another region
The River Valley	Four totem shrines, nine more Templar maps, wolves and elk	Animals that force a struggle at close range
The North Atlantic	Whales, warships, three shrines, four legendary fleets	Ice, killer whales and heavier broadsides
The fleet screen	Thirty three ports and their rewards	A timer you cannot hurry

Start in the office, because it shuts

The present day layer is the easiest one to leave until last and the only one you cannot go back to. Out of the Animus you play somebody else entirely, wandering Abstergo's corporate office and repairing twenty machines that the map obligingly highlights for you. Each repair is a light puzzle across a sphere, and most go quickly until the beams start passing through gates that bend or split them. Some are compulsory for the plot and the rest are not, and the catch is that most of them sit behind doors the story unlocks in stages, while the office itself becomes unreachable once the campaign is finished. Our broken computers guide lists all twenty with the file each one unlocks, and the writing is genuinely worth the detour if you like the series' background material.

On foot: the ambushes and the shrines

Back in the eighteenth century, the activity that defines Rogue is the one where the hunt reverses. An Assassin Interception starts with a messenger pigeon rather than a target, and catching the bird quietly is what tells you which target is about to be attacked. At the scene, the ambushers are the ones in yellow who were not on your mini-map a moment ago, and the clock decides how many of them you thin out before the attack begins. It is also a lesson in reading rooftops, since the target dies fast and climbing after the shooters wastes the seconds you need.

The quieter job on foot is a set of seven native artifacts, each guarded by a shrine in a cave or up a cliff face somewhere in the River Valley or on the North Atlantic coast. They come loose after a short puzzle, there is other treasure hidden near them, and the whole set goes to a village near Orenda. Our totem shrines guide has the coordinates for all seven so you can pin a waypoint instead of searching cliff faces by eye.

The wilderness: eighteen animals and what they become

Hunting is not a side hobby in this game, it is the supply line. Thirteen land species and five in the water are catalogued in our hunting guide, along with the spots each of them is found in and the honest answer to whether you should shoot, sneak or simply walk up to them. Bears, elk, lynx and the arctic wolves turn a careless approach into a button prompt; the black wolf is worth a note of its own, since it lives at a single location and its parts price accordingly at the shops.

What those pelts and bones buy is the other half of the story. Bones become darts and grenades, pelts become deeper pouches, a bigger health bar and four coats that only come off the crafting list. The recipe list, including which upgrades quietly demand whale skin or a narwhal tusk, sits in our crafting guide, and the decision it forces early is whether you are playing a sneak, who wants capacity, or a brawler, who wants health and grenades. Both of those systems and the naval ones sit together in the systems and side activities guide.

The North Atlantic: shipping lanes, whales and legends

Most of the sea is other people's business, and joining in is how you pay for everything else. Enemy hulls run from gunboats that the Morrigan swats aside up to Man-o'-Wars with dozens of guns a side, and each class carries its own cargo, which means you pick your victim by the resource you are short of. Around them sit the recurring events: prisoner convoys worth boarding rather than sinking, burning wrecks that pay out if you reach them before they go under, naval clashes where you side with the defenders, and convoys whose escorts guard a treasure transport and whose destruction spikes your wanted level. Our ship locations guide names the usual spots for each of them, royal convoys included.

The set pieces out here are the four legendary battles, and our legendary ships guide takes them one at a time. Pirates of a Lost Age opens in the north west against the Cauldron and the Pilgrim together, and the trick is keeping them both alive and hurt rather than finishing one early. The Battle of Labrador against the Couronne is the gentle one. Quiberon Bay wants you to stay off the Formidable's broadside and work it with mortars. The Storm Fortress is the wall: flanks you cannot crack, burning mortar fire on the water, and the Argonaut and the Sceptre arriving once it is nearly done. Clear all four and the Templar Master outfit is what you walk away with.

The deck itself

None of the above happens without work on the ship. Performance upgrades come before anything bought for the look of it, because armour, damage and ammunition capacity are what let the Morrigan stand in a fight long enough to matter, while the harpoon upgrades and the rowboat's armour are what keep a whale hunt from ending badly. Our Morrigan upgrades guide goes weapon by weapon, from when heavy shot loads itself to why the puckle gun is the thing to fire at an exposed weak point, and why the ram is as much an escape as an attack.

The ports you never steer to

One map in Rogue is played entirely through a menu. From Sequence 03 onwards the Captain's Cabin lets you push captured ships out to thirty three destinations that stretch from Louisiana to Manila, each with a travel time, a risk level and a prize waiting at the end. Small ships turn around fast, big ones survive the ugly routes, and the offer list is shuffled every single time you open the screen, which is the loophole the patient player uses. Our fleet missions guide walks the whole route list with the reward attached to each, and it is the only reason some weapons and one outfit ever reach your inventory.

What everything pays out

Twenty four Templar relics, dug up from coordinates on maps that are half the time filed a region away from the hole, are catalogued with both sets of coordinates in our Templar relics guide. Twenty eight weapons, split between shop stock and rewards you have to work for, are in the weapons unlock guide. Twenty outfits, the handful that actually change how Shay plays included, are in the outfits guide, and you swap between them in the Captain's Quarters. If you would rather see every collectible set laid out by the map it hides on and the counter that redeems it, that is the collectibles and gear guide.

A sensible order, if you want one: clear the office before the story runs out from under it, take the interceptions as they appear because the armour they pay helps with every later one, hunt for whatever the next upgrade is asking for rather than hunting for its own sake, and leave the legendary fleets until the Morrigan has both armour and ammunition to spare.