Make Sure You Stop & Pet The Puppies (& All Animals) In Assassin's Creed Shadows

The most adorable feature of Assassin’s Creed Shadows is the ability to pet animals and make them your best friends for the rest of the game. While you’ve been able to interact with animals in the past to varying degrees, it hasn’t always been very friendly. In Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, for example, you had to kill quite a few wild animals as part of certain side quests – though, to be fair, they were usually rabid and violent. However, you can get decorative options in the form of pets once you improve your hideout.

This is a neat little quirk in the new installment in the Assassin’s Creed franchise, and it comes as part of the base-building mechanics that have evolved with each new game. There are animals found all over the place as you explore Assassin’s Creed Shadows, and you can stop to pet many of them, making them available to add as pets at your hideout in Assassin’s Creed Shadows. Animal friends can also be purchased at various merchants, not just cats and dogs, as there are many animals, from monkeys to rabbits and everything in between.

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Stop & Give Those Furry Friends A Good Pet

As you complete the many side quests and main campaign in Assassin’s Creed Shadows, you’ll come across quite a few furry friends, and they aren’t only there to distract you from seeking revenge and butchering assassination targets. Certain animals you come across will have a Pet option above their heads, and if you haven’t encountered that animal type before, it is automatically added to your list of decorative choices in the hideout menu.

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As you advance through the story, you’ll unlock more hideout buildings and upgrade options for Naoe and Yasuke’s base of operations, and pets and other decorations become available very early on. After interacting with an animal or purchasing one at a vendor, go to the “Improve Hideout” menu and select “Build” to pull up all the available animals. Dogs, cats, and all other wildlife you interact with can then be placed around your hideout to liven up the place and bring you smiles every time you pass them by.

As you collect more pets, you can continue to edit your hideout layout and place new animals wherever you want them, move others around.

As you collect more pets, you can continue to edit your hideout layout and place new animals wherever you want them, move others around, or delete them entirely at no extra cost to the player. You will also find various merchants around that sell different pets, which usually cost a reasonable amount of mon and will be available next time you go to the Pet menu.

Pets In AC Shadows Are A Nice Touch, Even If They’re Only Cosmetic

It’s A Simple Feature But Goes A Long Way

While the base-building features in Assassin’s Creed have long been a point of contention and are certainly not everyone’s favorite part of the experience, many players enjoy the customizability you get from building and improving your bases across the various games. Assassin’s Creed Shadows finds a nice balance with its base-building features, and there are benefits to constructing certain buildings alongside purely cosmetic decorations with no additional benefits other than to make things look nice, such as trees, portraits, artwork, and, of course, pets.

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Having pets as pick-up options, you gain during exploration is a crafty way to mix things up and incentivizes you to watch for wildlife, similar to the Sumi-e paintings. They don’t give you any advantages or buffs to have around your hideout, but they lighten up the atmosphere – plus, it’s good fun to have a zoo back home where the animals roam freely and can be petted anytime you want. There is a trophy/achievement that you can unlock for adopting a pet, so you’ll want to have at least one best friend by your side if you’re looking to collect all the trophies.

Overall, being able to pet animals and have them available as decorative additions to your hideout is a really fun feature that will delight many players and give them a sense of reprieve from the constant violence and gore. The range of different animal pets you come across gives you an interesting incentive to pay more attention to the vast open world and its finer details that make Assassin’s Creed Shadows such a beautiful aesthetic experience.

Set during Japan’s Sengoku period, two distinct protagonists—Naoe, a shinobi, and Yasuke, a historical African samurai—must navigate political intrigue and violent clashes between the Assassins and Templars. Players can switch between stealthy, shadow-based gameplay with Naoe and Yasuke’s direct combat approach, exploring the duality of their missions in a beautifully rendered open world.

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