Walkthrough

Three strands of optional work run alongside the campaign in Paris, and the tidiest way to separate them is by what each one hands over at the end. One buys Arno a roof and an income that keeps arriving. One pays a single blade per case, fourteen times over. The third pays armour, three pieces at a time, and it is the only strand whose rewards climb all the way to the top of the equipment ladder.

Five errands that buy Arno a roof

The quiet strand sits on Ile Saint-Louis and opens up during Sequence 3. Our Cafe Theatre jobs walkthrough runs its five errands, Auto-da-fé, Colette, Damsel in Seamstress, The Queen's Necklace and Foxy Renard, and the advice it opens on is to wait rather than to rush in: two of the five finish with a theft from a target buried inside a bodyguard detail, so having Phantom Blades and Berserker Blades in your pocket first makes the set far less painful than starting the moment it unlocks.

What the set pays is not loot. Closing all five gives Arno the hideout that everything else in the city keeps pointing back towards, along with a property that carries on depositing money long after the last errand is done. Where that income goes next, and how it compares with the other taps, is laid out in our systems and money guide.

Fourteen cases, and fourteen blades

Detective work is the second strand and the most involved thing written up on this side of the game. Vidocq hands the cases out in the Palais de Justice district, a magnifying glass marks each one on the map, and the loop never changes: sweep the neighbourhood with Eagle Vision for physical clues, take statements from eyewitnesses, and watch the evidence pile up under Case Files in the database menu. Naming the culprit correctly at the first attempt pays better than arriving there on a retry, and the reward itself is handed over by a nearby Chief of Police once the accusation sticks. Our murder mystery solutions take all fourteen cases clue by clue with the answer spelled out underneath each list, and the set is tied to the Hand of Justice achievement.

Lay those fourteen investigations against the armoury and not one of them comes up empty. Each case is the unlock condition for exactly one weapon, never two, and the split across the classes is almost suspiciously neat: four cases feed each of the three melee classes, with one going to the pistols and one to the rifles.

A fifteenth blade, the Blunderbuss, hangs off a case called Killed by Science that arrives with DLC rather than with the base game, and it is the one entry in the set we have not written up. Prices, shop locations and every other unlock condition across the 110 weapons are in our weapons unlock list.

Eleven operations, thirty-three pieces of armour

The third strand is the co-op board, and our co-op missions walkthrough is deliberately not a script. Its opening argument is that no fixed formula survives a group whose members all play differently, so what it supplies instead is the summary a squad actually needs: where the randomised search areas tend to sit, which target matters at each stage, and the moments that want two people doing separate jobs simultaneously.

Collect every payout into one table, though, and a pattern surfaces that neither page states by itself. Each operation hands over three pieces. Each operation pays two pieces of one grade plus a single piece of the grade above. And not one of them ever pays two pieces for the same body slot.

So the ladder is worth climbing roughly in order. Two operations sit in the Handmade block, three in the Tailored, three in the Improved and three in the Master, which makes the last three the ones holding a Legendary coat, a pair of Legendary bracers and a pair of Legendary breeches. Only five Legendary items in the whole catalogue arrive with no livres figure attached, and three of the five are exactly those; the other two are locked behind story memories in Sequences 9 and 10. None of the thirty-three escapes the upgrade charge that lands afterwards, which our gear and unlocks guide prices out grade by grade.

Getting through an operation with the payout intact

Two habits carry across the whole board. Berserker Blades come up again and again as the way to unstick a fight, with Women's March naming Brutes and the other heavies as the bodies worth spending one on. And when an objective asks for restraint, take it literally: loot the four letters of permission at the start of The Tournament without killing a single guard and the building you return to later is not treated as restricted ground, so the open window above the main entrance can be used without the whole area turning hostile around you.

The objectives that genuinely want extra hands are the ones running two clocks at once: the guard reaching for the alarm bell while Mericourt is being escorted through The Food Chain, the split in Les Enragés between the pair retrieving the patient ledger and the pair clearing the cell block, and the chamber under Moving Mirabeau where three symbols have to be located while threats keep arriving. Plenty of the rest is flexible. The flag run in The Tournament is written as working the same way alone or with a full party, and its battle arena as one assassin holding the enemies' attention while the others fill the objective meter.

Money is the last reason to bring people. Our fast money advice sends readers into the co-op board specifically for heist payouts and the sizeable bonus for finishing one without being spotted. The rest of the city's threads, from the riddle chains to the modern-day layer, are indexed on our Assassin's Creed Unity hub.